In the United States, tests are held to high standards of quality. In developing countries such as Malawi, psychometricians must deal with these same high standards as well as several additional pressures such as widespread cheating, test administration difficulties due to challenging landscapes and poor resources, difficulties in reliably scoring…

In many countries, an athlete's performance at sporting competitions is often used as part of the selection criteria for entry into college. These criteria could be biased depending upon the procedures utilized by the authorities in a particular country. The purpose of this study was to calibrate, by using the Rasch rating scale model, the…

Research suggests that quality interventions, ambitious goals, and formative progress monitoring positively impact student achievement. This study evaluated 32 reading intervention cases, generated from problem-solving service delivery, for the inclusion of quality indices, goal ambitiousness, and student growth over time. Intervention quality was…

Introduction: While "teaching self-efficacy" has been supported as an important construct related to teacher competence (eg. Goddard, Hoy & Hoy, 2000), little is known about how in-service teachers think about themselves as writers, or writing self-efficacy, particularly as it relates to writing performance. The present study is a preliminary…

The Predictive Reading Profile (PRP) is an individual or group-administered instrument designed to examine precursors to reading difficulties by identifying children at risk for reading failure in later grades and special instructional needs for children in late kindergarten and first grade. The purpose of the PRP "is to develop a profile of a…

Introduction of new teaching strategies often expands the expectations for student learning, creating a parallel need to redefine how teachers collect the evidence that assures both them and their students that these expectations are in fact being met. The default assessment strategy of the typical large, introductory, college-level science…

The calculation of composite indicators and the derivation of respective rankings is a common method used to benchmark countries or regions. However, although the statistical robustness of these rankings is often criticised, they often still spark off heated political debate. Here, we assess the sensitivity of the province ranking published by the…

This study used "The Competent Speaker", a rubric developed by the National Communication Association (S. P. Morreale, M. R. Moore, K. P. Taylor, D. Surges-Tatum, & R. Hulbert-Johnson, 1993), to evaluate student performance in general education public speaking courses as a case study of student skills and programmatic assessment. Results indicate…

Sometimes bad news can be exactly what organizations or individuals need to point them in a healthier direction. That was the case at Thompson Middle School (Southfield, Michigan) in 2002, when the staff learned that the state had temporarily identified the school as needing "corrective action" after students failed to make Adequate…

This action-research paper focuses on the eorts of faculty to introduce a standards-based electronic portfolio (e-folio) requirement to aspiring educational administrators at a private university in New York over a 24 month period. The e-folio initiative was established for multiple reasons, including illustration of students' progress throughout…

There are usually many testing activities going on in a school, with different tests serving different purposes, thus organization and planning are key in creating an efficient system in assessing the most important educational objectives. In the ideal case, an assessment system will be able to inform on student learning, instruction and…

The purpose of this study was to find critical features of engineering design that can be incorporated within technology education learning activities, and develop a rubric for assessing these features. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with three professors actively involved in engineering education. Supporting documents such…

Research on teacher learning consistently documents the disjuncture between the practices beginning teachers encounter in university teacher preparation courses and those they reencounter in the K-12 classrooms in which they learn to teach. As preservice teachers enter teaching, they gravitate toward conventional K-12 practices, dismissing those…

This document is designed to provide assessment materials for specific Grade 4 outcomes in the Cree Language and Culture Nine-year Program, Grades 4-5-6. The assessment materials are designed for the beginner level in the context of teaching for communicative competence. Grade 4 learning outcomes from the Cree Language and Culture Nine-year…

Secondary career-technical education programs in Mississippi are faced with many challenges resulting from sweeping educational reforms at the national and state levels. Schools and teachers are increasingly being held accountable for providing true learning activities to every student in the classroom. This accountability is measured through…