This study investigated the Individual Learning Plans of eighty-eight students who were deaf and hard of hearing attending facilities and schools for the deaf in Victoria Australia. The students' assessment and planning portfolios were scrutinised for evidence of formal and informal assessment used to generate goals for the Individual Learning…

Child assessment practices in English and Korean preschools were compared by analysing data from interviews with educators, examples of child assessment, and official documents from each country. Child assessment in England was systematically implemented and characterised by several methodological and procedural strengths, whereas assessment in…

Little research has been done into how the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) affect national educational reform and policy-making. This paper examines the normative impact of PISA by investigating how, and the extent to which , national policy actors use PISA in policies and practices, to evaluate and improve…

States are making progress in supporting effective data use, but the hardest work remains. Although states collect quality data and have enacted policy changes, they have not yet focused on meeting people's needs. This report includes the following: (1) Changing the Culture of Education Data Takes Systems, Policies, and People; (2) Data for Action…

In their opening comments to this special issue on data use, Coburn and Turner point to "one of the most central questions in social theory: the interrelationship between macro-social structure and micro-level action." Questions about data use--which entail social phenomena that range from federal policy to moment-to-moment interactions…

As publication pressure has increased in the world of higher education, more journals, books, and other publication outlets have emerged. Thus it is critical to develop clear criteria for effectively evaluating the quality of publication outlets. Without such criteria funding agencies and promotion committees are forced to guess at how to evaluate…

Surveys and benchmarks continue to grow in importance for community colleges in response to several factors. One is the press for accountability, that is, for colleges to report the outcomes of their programs and services to demonstrate their quality and prudent use of resources, primarily to external constituents and governing boards at the state…

The United States education system depends on legislation and funding at the federal, state and local levels. Public understanding of assessment therefore is important to educational reform in the USA. Educational reformers often invoke assessment information as a reason for reform, typically by citing unacceptable achievement on some measure or…

Grounded in Hallidayan perspectives on academic language, we report on our development of an educative science assessment as one component of the language-rich inquiry science for English-language learners teacher professional learning project for middle school science teachers. The project emphasizes the role of content-area writing to support…

Written in a refreshing conversational style, this text thoroughly prepares students, program administrators, and new evaluators to conduct evaluations or to use them in their work. The book's question-driven focus and clear discussions about the importance of fostering evaluation use by building collaborative relationships with stakeholders set…

Background: While much has been written in the evaluation literature on the theory of evaluations and on specific cases, there is still no comprehensive and easy to use indicator that can be used to hold organizations to the principles of effective evaluation, to score their quality in several areas, and to offer an immediate diagnostic for…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine whether reappraisal, which is a strategy where the personal meaning of an event is reevaluated, would influence participants' emotional reactions to social exclusion feedback. It was expected that reappraising this event would reduce the emotional distress that accompanies social exclusion, but…

This study addresses the central question "How do evaluators' background characteristics relate to their evaluation design choices?" Evaluators were provided with a fictitious description of a school-based program and asked to design an evaluation of that program. Relevant background characteristics such as level of experience,…

This study reports on a large-scale implementation of Assessment for Learning (AfL) in a Swedish municipality. The implementation was founded on two principles: (1) teaching should be informed by educational research; (2) to be successful teachers' professional development needs to be based in everyday classroom practice. From these principles,…

The importance of higher education has never been clearer. Educational attainment--the number of years a person spends in school--strongly predicts adult earnings, as well as health and civic engagement. Yet relative to other developed nations, educational attainment in the United States is lagging, with young Americans who heretofore led the…