On May 8, 2006, Georgia state educational and policy leaders participated in the Georgia Education Forum to discuss ways to improve student transition from high school to postsecondary education and careers. The forum was sponsored by the League for Innovation in the Community College and the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and supported…

This position paper has been produced in order to inform some of the current debates on National Curriculum Assessment in England. The Education and Skills Committee of the House of Commons has announced an inquiry into Testing and Assessment. In part this will examine testing and assessment in primary and secondary education as a key issue.…

What can teachers do in their classrooms to help students prepare for a high-stakes, standardized, multiple-choice reading test without sacrificing what they know to be best practice? Decreasing class sizes or other solutions that require substantial changes in school finance are not usually realistic options. This article outlines five…

The Open University (OU) is the UK's largest university, with over 200,000 people studying, part time and at a distance, a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses and packs. Research and development carried out at the OU's Centre for Outcomes-Based Education (COBE), has provided a new way of enabling students to be accredited at higher…

Purpose: This paper reports on the adaptation of an existing interpretive and critical research methods course in nursing for postgraduate student health professionals in a School of Population Health and Clinical Practice. Methods: A cyclical approach of inquiry, reflection and planning was undertaken by the teaching team to make changes to the…

Formative evaluation consists of assessing educational programs or other kinds of educational products while they are being developed to help shape them into their final forms. This publication is intended for those whose job it is to develop new programs and products or to evaluate them during development. Topics discussed include: (1) the nature…

The self-examination process used by Sinclair Community College (SCC), in Dayton, Ohio, is designed to improve student learning and the processes that contributes to effective and efficient learning. In 1988, SCC created a college-wide Assessment Steering Committee (ASC) charged with reviewing the status of assessment practices at SCC and making…

In July 1993, the Pennsylvania Department of Education revised the regulations guiding state assessment of school districts, educational curriculum, graduation requirements, student assessment, and the planning process that districts use to guide educational delivery. This document describes a year-long, collaborative project, in which the Western…

"Teen SMART" is the working title of the high school age component of Operation SMART, a larger curriculum development project initiated by Girls Clubs of America, Inc. (GCA) to promote the participation of girls and young women in science, mathematics, and technology. Operation SMART seeks not only to attract and involve those girls who…

An introductory course was developed for the Dutch Open University. Because the course was intended for adult distance learners, it was designed to be suitable for self-instruction in 200 hours or less. No suitable Dutch-language psychology text could be found; consequently, the course was based on the translation of a recent American book,…

This document is the third in a series of collection of papers from workshops sponsored by the Faculty of Education at the Western Australian Institute of Technology. It contains three papers from a seminar on educational evaluation held early in 1984. The papers present ideas involving the need for the evaluation of instruction within school…

This report presents Iowa's performance indicators of program quality in adult basic education (ABE) programs and describes the process by which they were developed. The performance indicators fulfill the mandate of the National Literacy Act of 1991 to serve as indicators of program quality. They were developed through a comprehensive process that…

To research the implications of portfolio assessment for student learning and teacher methodology, a teacher examined the interplay of reflection and evaluation in her expository writing class of 12. In a semester-long intermediate-level class, students wrote a draft of a paper each week, with each paper then going through multiple drafts.…

This paper argues that formative evaluation of instruction, which is generally agreed to be critical for instruction in any medium, is even more crucial when the instruction is to be delivered by interactive technologies such as computers, interactive video, hypermedia, or the various forms of interactive multimedia systems. It begins by…

This paper examines Virginia's campus-based assessment process in the areas of curriculum improvement, academic management, accountability, and reporting. While there is considerable variation among institutions, assessment has demonstrated a moderate to substantial impact on most campuses in the area of curriculum improvement. There is evidence…