States are moving to close the gap between high school preparation and college and workforce readiness, but momentum is far greater in some policy areas than in others, a 50-state survey shows. At the National Education Summit on High Schools, state governors agreed to a broad set of actions needed to address the gap. Those include raising…

This paper presents a novel concept--a Web search environment as an interactive learning environment for graduation projects. The paper addresses the question of an appropriate learning environment for writing graduation projects in universities: Can it be defined? What should it be? How should it look? How and when should it be used? The premise…

In today's world where great value is placed on global understanding, the acquisition of languages is essential. Academics would agree that the study of other languages provides students access to the cultural and intellectual heritage of cultures other than their own. Additionally, such study gives new and different perspectives on the structure…

Argues that state accountability systems that require students to pass high-stakes tests or face retention, mandatory remediation, or denial of diploma fail to provide students with adequate opportunities to learn. Provides hypothetical examples of flawed logic of test-driven student learning opportunities. Discusses test-taking problems for…

Advanced Placement allows a student to apply credits he has acquired in high school to waive basic academic college requirements. It has broad appeal, and by 2003 a million American students were participating. William Casement argues that, despite its popularity, the decreasing selectivity of the program, the immaturity of the high school…

Selected subtests from the Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) were administered to three groups of university students. The groups included students with learning disabilities who received course substitutions for the institution's foreign language requirement, students with learning disabilities who…

Objective: Universally, clerkship grading is diverse and not standardized. The authors' faculty was troubled by the inability to provide meaningful evaluations, as more than 60% of students received the highest grade. Although a psychiatry clerkship mandate of a faculty-observed student clinical interview existed for several years, the majority of…

Oral proficiency ratings, based on the ACTFL Guidelines and derived from live or simulated oral proficiency interviews (SOPIs), enjoy widespread use in the United States. In particular, college foreign language departments have increasingly adopted oral proficiency ratings as a way of establishing standards for language or graduation requirements.…

This paper explores the implications for assessment of embedding qualifications from the vocational education and training (VET) sector within university qualifications. As VET qualifications are now all competency based, assessment in the two sectors is quite different, since universities have generally eschewed competency-based training and…

To give states the information they need to sustain hard-fought education reform effectively, Achieve conducted research on state education reforms that have been sustained successfully for over a decade or more. Funded by the GE Foundation, Achieve hopes this work will help other state leaders, wherever they may be on their road to reform,…

This generation of young people is on track to be less-educated than their parents--for the first time in American history. This, at the same time the world and workplace are changing dramatically and rapidly--when students, more than ever, need high levels of skill in order to compete. Advance Illinois has developed this report "We Can Do…

This 2007-2008 manual, "Handbook of Procedures for the Graduation Program," has been approved by the British Columbia Minister of Education on July 18, 2007 for the purpose of setting out graduation requirements. The handbook outlines procedures for efficiently sharing student data between schools and the Ministry of Education, and…

This 2008 Annual Joint Report of the State Board of Education and the Tennessee Higher Education Commission identifies four joint priorities and nine associated goals addressing areas of need in both student learning and educator development for the advancement of education in Tennessee. The joint priorities and initiatives focus on points of…

Evaluation is an important component of measuring educational effectiveness. The purpose of this survey is to analyze the attainment of "graduate standards," a school district's list of ten statements of adult roles, skills, and education all students need in order to be successful after high-school graduation. These standards encompass areas such…

This paper reports on a study conducted to assess number of credits completed nationally for a degree in Teaching English as a Second Language, what portion were required courses, and what courses were actually required. Data were gathered by a survey mailed to 159 institutions in November 1994; 94 responses were usable that covered 39 U.S.…