This article reflects on some of the findings of a research project which investigated the practice of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) within a major national teacher upgrading project in South Africa--the National Professional Diploma in Education (NPDE). The article analyses the ways in which a range of contextual factors have positioned RPL…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of flexible learning options at a university serving multiple geographic areas (including remote and rural areas) and age groups by teaching an introduction to special education course to three large groups of pre-teacher education majors using three modes of instruction. The university offered sections as…

About 15 percent of the American workforce of 3.5 million teachers either moves or leaves the profession each year. The size of the teaching force coupled with the high annual turnover rates seriously compromises the nation's capacity to ensure that all students have access to skilled teaching. If the dominant teacher workforce policies and…

Get an in-depth understanding of how to create fun, engaging, and challenging performance assessments that require students to elaborate on content and demonstrate mastery of skills. This update of an ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) classic includes new scoring methods, reading assessments, and insights on navigating…

This study examines the impact of high-stakes, large-scale, standardized literacy testing on youth who have failed the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test. Interviews with youth indicate that the unintended impact of high-stakes testing is more problematic than policy makers and educators may realize. In contrast to literacy policy's aims to…

In this article I report on the ways that an educational philosophies course in a performance-based program enables teacher candidates to identify, reflect upon, and evaluate a wide range of educational purposes. The context for the report is an accelerated graduate program in childhood education at a small urban college where intensive fieldwork…

In order to better understand how to design hands-on child-computer interaction, we explore how different styles of interaction facilitate children's thinking while they use their hands to manipulate objects. We present an exploratory study of children solving a spatial puzzle task. We investigate how the affordances of physical, graphical…

According to national standards for foreign language (L2) teacher education programs established by the ACTFL and the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), L2 student teachers must be supervised by university faculty who are qualified L2 educators. An exploratory study was conducted to better understand the impact of…

This study examined Kirkpatrick's training evaluation model (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006) by assessing a sales training program conducted at an organization in the hospitality industry. The study assessed the employees' training outcomes of knowledge and skills, job performance, and the impact of the training upon the organization. By…

Many colleges face the challenge of recruiting examinees for institutional assessment programs. Unfortunately, students recognize these programs as low-stakes, and therefore may not have high performance motivation. This study examined the interrelationships between students' preferred incentives for taking the test, their performance motivation,…

This paper addresses likely error rates for measuring teacher and school performance in the upper elementary grades using value-added models applied to student test score gain data. Using realistic performance measurement system schemes based on hypothesis testing, we develop error rate formulas based on OLS and Empirical Bayes estimators.…

Rural schools do not usually make people think of innovation or experimentation. In fact, many people view rural areas as being too traditional or complacent to blaze educational trails. But this author is fortunate to be principal of one rural school, Federal Hocking Middle and High School, that is not afraid to innovate. Federal Hocking is also…

The New York Performance Standards Consortium includes urban public high schools that have successfully used a performance-based assessment option. Instead of exit exams, student assessments are based on specific performance-based assessment tasks. These schools have shown that it is possible to use qualitative data to make substantive decisions…

This article discusses a relatively new trend in assessment in American history education which offers interesting opportunities to inject the arts into mainstream education in ways that could provide a catalyst for engagement with social justice issues. Document-based questions (DBQs) on statewide social studies assessments afford art and social…

Introduction: Little is known about the overall appropriateness and value of the various programs available internationally for assessment and remediation for individual physicians whose performance in their clinical practice has been identified as giving cause for concern. Method: A questionnaire was e-mailed to members of the International…