No Child Left Behind's mandate to close the achievement gap for students with disabilities and the emergence of response to intervention (RTI) as a means to address students' learning needs have led many schools to use more preventive academic supports within the general education classroom. The use of a diagnostic, intervention-based approach to…

Despite three decades of advances in information and communications technology (ICT) and a generation of research on cognition and new pedagogical strategies, the field of assessment has not progressed much beyond paper-and-pencil item-based tests. Research has shown these instruments are not valid measures of sophisticated intellectual…

This paper reports on a three-year study conducted in Western Australia, which commenced in January 2008, and was completed by December 2010. It concerns the potential to use digital technologies to represent the output from assessment tasks in two senior secondary courses: Engineering Studies and Physical Education Studies. The general aim of…

The main purpose of this study was to examine the effects of the Reading Apprenticeship professional development program on several teacher and student outcomes, including effects on student learning. A key part of the study was the use of an enhanced performance assessment program, the Integrated Learning Assessment (ILA), to measure student…

This document summarizes a study that examines the relationship between performance on Utah's English proficiency assessment and English language arts and mathematics content assessments by English language learner students and compares the performance of English language learner and non-English language learner students on the content…

To address the need for reform in undergraduate science education a new instructional model called "Argument-Driven Inquiry" (ADI) was developed and then implemented in a undergraduate chemistry course at a community college in the southeastern United States (Sampson, Walker, & Grooms, 2009; Walker, Sampson, & Zimmerman, in press). The ADI…

This is an Instructional Module for a course entitled Assessment and Instruction for Educational Leaders addresses classroom assessment and the evaluation of instruction. The goal of this course is to help aspiring educational leaders to develop teacher observation and evaluation skills, better understand the construction of teacher generated…

The authors detail their summer long pointed discussion with the Obama Administration--via an exchange of letters and telephone conversations--over initiatives in New York and other states that tie the evaluations of teachers and principals to student performance on standardized tests. The authors assert such initiatives should await further…

Objective: The study evaluated the effectiveness of an online first aid course by comparing it with the traditional instructor-led course. An effective online course increases course accessibility and mitigates the major deterrent to widespread layperson training. Design: A comparison group design evaluated performances among 25 laypersons…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether performance in MI could predict the performance in reading competency. The other objectives were to identify the components of MI which are correlated with the reading test scores, and to determine the relationship between the multiple intelligences and reading proficiency. A descriptive and ex post…

Many federal programs--within the Departments of Education, Labor, and Veterans Affairs; the Social Security Administration; and other agencies--help people with disabilities overcome barriers to employment. Section 21 of Pub. L. No. 111-139 requires GAO to identify and report annually on programs, agencies, offices, and initiatives that have…

The expense of attending college is one factor that may explain why low-income students often drop out of school. In California, despite generous state aid and relatively low fees at community colleges, many low-income students still have substantial college-related costs that they cannot cover. To compound matters, federal support for students…

Significant momentum exists for next-generation assessments to increasingly utilize technology to develop and deliver performance-based assessments. Many traditional challenges with this assessment approach still apply, including psychometric concerns related to performance-based tasks (PBTs), which include low reliability, efficiency of…

Collaborative testing has been shown to improve performance but not always content retention. In this study, we investigated whether collaborative testing could improve both performance and content retention in a large, introductory biology course. Students were semirandomly divided into two groups based on their performances on exam 1. Each group…

The educational performance of Aboriginal Australians lags behind non-Indigenous Australians with the gap increasing the longer students remain at school. The Australian government has released its Closing the Gap policy with the specific intent to redress gaps in health, education and housing, as these are seen as key indicators to life success.…