School buildings ideally would have few exterior access points, no isolated hallways, and sunlit classrooms. A safety checklist recommends locating offices near main doors, monitoring hallway traffic, enhancing communications, updating crisis-management plans, teaching coping skills, standardizing dismissal policies, and ensuring legal compliance…

This article describes the Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning-Third Edition, a global screener designed to be administered to children ages 3 through 6.11 years. The instrument assesses motor skills, conceptual knowledge, language skills, self-help skills, and social behaviors. Its administration, standardization, reliability,…

Critiquing Nina and Sol Horowitz's article advocating high-stakes tests, the author deplores deleterious effects of too-rigorous standards on poor students and recent immigrants. Without large-scale initiatives to affect their lives out of school, urban youngsters' prospects are dim. A National Research Council report offers testing guidelines.…

To examine how performance-based assessment changed mathematics teaching under conditions of moderate and low-stake assessment, middle school teachers were studied in five districts in Maryland and Maine, with interviews of 82 teachers and administrators. Findings suggest that effects of state testing on teaching may be overrated by both advocates…

Discusses the need to provide specific adaptations in instruction and assessments to students who are deaf or hard of hearing in general education classrooms. It provides a list of adaptations used in general education classrooms and includes adaptations for the environment, input, output, social, behavioral, evaluation, and grading. (CR)

A study of senior education majors in the United Kingdom investigated the realism of student expectations of a required independent research project. Student self-assessments and teacher assessments showed little correlation, and students' evaluation criteria emphasized lower-order skills (style and presentation) and ignored higher-order processes…

Elementary school students (n=11) were pretested and then given daily formal instruction for 2 weeks in use of past tense and plural noun forms and then posttested. A significant difference was found between these students and control group in detection and correction of noun plural forms, but not in similar test of past tense forms. (49…

A study examined general education student assessment efforts at 130 colleges and universities. Based on self-study reports and on-site evaluation reports of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools during the accreditation process, the study looked at implementation, explicit objectives, and use of quantitative and qualitative…

A 3-year case study of a Houston (Texas) high school demonstrates that high stakes testing is an alienating feature of schooling. The need to pass the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills to graduate discourages many Mexican American and immigrant Mexican students from completing high school or considering college. The English-only nature of the…

Since 5-year-olds are in the "preoperational" stage of development, they think differently from older children and adults. This means teachers should be encouraged to interact differently with younger kids. The importance of creating developmentally appropriate programs stressing playing and talking is discussed. (MLH)

Studied the amount of measurement error in a state's performance-based writing task as it relates to high-stakes decision reproducibility. Using 175 eighth-grade writing samples, the study finds moderate correlations between the two raters' scores, with significant differences for the rates for the handwritten, but not the typed, essays.(SLD)

Examined the foreign-language-learning abilities of 14- to 15-year olds in Britain, Germany, and Greece. Comparison of results from tests of students' foreign vocabulary knowledge indicated that British students had only one-third to one-half of the foreign language vocabulary knowledge of Greek and German students. They also spent less time…

Influenced by worldwide globalization forces new structures of control have emerged in Mexico at the school level, and career ladders reward teachers' compliance with testing and training schemes; nevertheless the long-standing institutions of initial teacher education continue to show a strong resistance to change. Increased accountability is…

Policy makers in states across the country are taking a hard look at prospective teachers and the colleges that train them. Anyone who seeks permanent certification to teach in elementary or secondary schools in most states is now required to achieve a qualifying score on a set of tests administered by the State Teacher Certification Examination…

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common childhood disorder, yet relatively little research has assessed teachers' knowledge of this disorder or how teacher characteristics affect such knowledge. There also is a dearth of research comparing in-service and preservice teachers' knowledge about ADHD. The aims of this study were (a)…