This report offers an insider's perspective into the world-leading Shanghai education system. After more than 40 years of reconstruction and reform, education in Shanghai has achieved remarkable results. In the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) 2009 and 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA),…

College attendance is a risky investment. But students may not recognize when they are at risk for failure, and financial aid introduces the possibility for moral hazard. Academic performance standards can serve three roles in this context: signaling expectations for success, providing incentives for increased student effort, and limiting…

Guam Department of Education (GDOE) is a single unified school district consisting of Kindergarten thru 12 grade. Its 26 Elementary Schools, 8 Middle Schools, 6 High Schools, and 1 alternative school serves nearly 31,000 students, and is managed by the Superintendent who is the Executive Secretary of a 12-member Guam Education Board (GEB). This…

Contemporary perspectives of higher education endorse a work integrated learning (WIL) approach to curriculum content, delivery and assessment. It is agreed that authenticity in learning relates to real-world experience, however, differentiating and strategically linking WIL provision and facilitation to assessment tasks and collation of authentic…

Mathematics and proof are two closely related concepts. Mathematics not only shows what is right or wrong, but it also teaches that it is not enough to know the latest formulas and results should be explained with causality. In this context, students learn the underlying meaning behind what mathematicians do by way of proofs. Accordingly, this…

As one of the first students in my TESOL teacher education program to complete my edTPA submission, I recently shared my experience with a class where the majority of the students were at the beginning of their program. Afterwards, one of my classmates expressed that while my presentation was informative, it was also very depressing. My student…

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2009) underscored the need for better assessments of the pedagogical skills of new teachers when he identified the efforts of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and its 800 colleges and universities to improve student learning through developing a national assessment of…

This article first reviews the objectives/ends of research quality assessment in several countries to draw lessons for the UK Research Excellence Framework and similar exercises. It then reviews work on performance management as a framework for reviewing the views of participants on the means to the ends--the management of their experience in…

French is the ninth most widely used language globally, but French-learning environments in Taiwan have been insufficient. Language acquisition is easier in a natural setting, and so such a setting should be available to language learners wherever possible. This study aimed to (1) create an authentic environment for learning French in Second Life…

As Baby Boomers reach 65 years of age and methods of studying older populations are becoming increasingly varied (e.g., including mixed methods designs, on-line surveys, and video-based environments), there is renewed interest in evaluating methodologies used to collect data with older persons. The goal of this article is to examine…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of teaching functional digital literacy skills to three high school students with intellectual disability. Functional digital literacy skills included sending and receiving email messages, organizing social bookmarking to save, share, and access career websites, and accessing cloud storage to…

In this investigation, we examined the extent to which instructional expenditures were related to student academic achievement for students enrolled in Texas public schools for the 2005-2006 through the 2009-2010 school years. Student performance on the state-mandated assessments for all school districts in Texas for these five school years was…

This paper describes a project to use mobile devices and video conferencing technology in the assessment of student English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher performance on teaching practice in Ecuador. With the increasing availability of mobile devices with video recording facilities, it has become easier for trainers to capture teacher…

These days, a growing chorus of parents, educators, and policymakers is voicing frustration and anger with top-down accountability and high-stakes testing. As members of two not-for-profit education organizations--one focused on assessment and the other on research and instructional practices--the authors find nothing wrong with testing itself;…

This study examined the predictive validity and classification accuracy of individual- and group-administered screening measures relative to student performance on a year-end state reading assessment in two states. A sample of 321 students was assessed in the areas of word-level and text fluency, as well as reading comprehension in the fall of…