Professional assessment organizations almost universally endorse the use of multiple measures for making education decisions. In practice, however, the concept of multiple measures is defined and applied in many different ways, depending on how we answer two questions--What counts as a "measure"? and How are the multiple measures…

The authors write about evaluation, testing, and research and their relation to policy, planning, and program in the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) in Louisville, Kentucky. The authors focus on evaluation and testing for accountability and on managing the unit for this purpose. In detail they show the many evaluation demands from both…

Background and purpose: The paper reports a study of the perceptions of teachers in secondary schools in the Gucha district of Kenya of their own effectiveness, the structure of their self-perceptions, variations in self-perceived effectiveness and the relationship between self-perceptions of effectiveness and the examination performance of their…

On February 24, 2009, President Obama outlined his fiscal plan for the 2010 budget to a joint session of Congress. Stressing the importance of backing education, Obama vowed to "expand our commitment to charter schools" and "invest in innovation." Obama's plan for more effective charters includes increasing federal aid and…

Van Houtte (2005) called for clarification of the terms "school culture" and "school climate" and the role of each in school effectiveness research. This article presents a theoretical framework for school culture that asserts that it is a context-specific branch of organizational culture comprised of 4 dimensions and 3 levels. This…

This article examines school leadership in the context of Taiwanese educational reform since the mid-1990s. The goal of the inquiry is twofold: to explore the conflicts that school administrators have confronted in facilitating school reform and to analyze the strategic and innovative leadership practices that have facilitated improvements in…

The present paper aims to provide an account of the genesis and development of a collection of scientific work that has received strong international recognition--the paradigm of school effectiveness. It shows how this theory, based on the design of measurement tools, has gradually influenced educational management and policies in promoting the…

This article reports the findings of a study examining independent variables that contributed to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) achievement of students with reading difficulties who participated in a technology-enhanced astronomy curriculum. The curriculum incorporated key elements of the Universal Design for Learning…

Perceptions of faculty development practices and structures were compared between 13 high performing schools identified in the DEEP study (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt, 2005) to clarify the relationship between faculty development variables and effective teaching. A phenomenological design was employed to triangulate quantitative and qualitative data…

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) focuses on young people's ability to use their knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. This orientation reflects a change in the goals and objectives of curricula themselves, which are increasingly concerned with what…

Using data drawn from the National School Effectiveness Study, this paper reveals that by Grade 4 35% of South African learners are overage. The study confirms what every other testing programme tells us about the poor state of learning which characterizes the system: the seeds of low pass rates at Grade 12 level, and of low participation and…

Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) researchers visited 38 public high schools around the United States in 2007 and 2008 with the goal of validating and operationalizing a definition of college readiness. Schools in the sample were selected because they were demonstrating success at enabling more students from underrepresented groups to…

Online education is the fastest growing form of course delivery of higher education in the United States. It has revolutionized how students and instructors interact in the educational process. Yet students in online courses continue to experience higher attrition rates than their counterparts in traditional face-to-face classes despite the…

The Education Trust research report "Stuck Schools" suggests a framework for identifying chronically low-performing schools in need of turnaround. The study uses Maryland and Indiana to show that some low-performing schools make progress while others remain stagnant. The report has four serious problems of reliability and validity,…

[Slides] presented at the annual conference of the National Council of Supervisors of Math.