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…

With the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), graduation rate accountability has become the educational law of the land, a small part of it at least. Some uncertainty continues to persist around key issues like exactly how to calculate graduation rates and how much weight should be placed on graduation versus test scores when attaching…

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…

Using data from Achieving the Dream: Community College Count, this issue of "Data Notes" is the first of a two-part series investigating the characteristics of late stop-outs--students who accumulate at least 30 credits within the first two years, only to stop out without completing credentials or transferring. Seventy-five percent of…

This paper presents the Superintendent's 20th Annual Report, a comprehensive overview of Hawaii's public schools for school year 2008-09. This report contains essential progress indicators and measures, as well as highlights and comparisons of core educational data presented in a concise and user-friendly format. Appended are: (1) Glossary; (2)…

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,…

The purpose of this annotated bibliography is to identify and summarize research on the scope, characteristics and impact of academic and social support services for students. Several reports on academic rigor have also been included to establish a context for the importance of social and academic support. The bibliography is divided into five…

In the summer of 2008, the Commonwealth of Virginia was awarded a $1.1 million grant from the U. S. Department of Education. The College Access Challenge Grant Program (CACGP) is coordinated through the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV). The focus of the grant is to increase student access to postsecondary education,…

This publication reproduces the keynote address delivered by the author at the annual conference of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) in March 2009, in San Antonio, Texas. In her essay, the author discusses the significance of the growing Hispanic presence through the lens of education. To frame the challenges--and…

The Southern Regional Education Board-State Data Exchange is a one-of-a-kind regional program with 23 statewide higher education governing and coordinating board partners. The Data Exchange annually collects, compiles and publishes: (1) the most current and detailed comparative statistics on postsecondary education in the 16 SREB states; (2)…

The "Core Indicators of Effectiveness Report" delineates the performance of Wyoming's community colleges as measured by the 14 indicators set forth by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and adopted by the seven Wyoming community colleges and the Wyoming Community College Commission. These indicators, while providing…

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) was assigned the task of compiling, analyzing and summarizing the data for Indicator 2--Dropout--from the FY2007 (2007-08 school year) Annual Performance Reports (APRs) and the revised State Performance Plans (SPPs), which were submitted to Office of Special Education…