It is as a longtime client, softball teammate, colleague, traveling companion, and friend that the author writes this article to honor Gary Nash. He has known him in varied guises in five different decades, and on five continents, with Africa coming in 2009. In this article, the author recalls some of his memories of Gary over five decades.

Accreditation under the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) has contributed to the professional decline of social work. The lack of scholarship of the Board of Directors of CSWE compromises its decision making. The quality of the professional literature suffers from the weak scholarship of editors and referees. The caliber of deans and…

The Angoff method is a widely used procedure for setting pass scores in vocational examinations, in which the awarders estimate the performance of minimally competent candidates (MCCs) on each test item. Within the context of some UK vocational examinations, the procedure consists of two stages: after making the first round of estimates, awarders…

Background: To establish credible, defensible and acceptable passing scores for written tests is a challenge for health profession educators. Angoff procedures are often used to establish pass/fail decisions for written and performance tests. In an Angoff procedure judges' expertise and professional skills are assumed to influence their ratings of…

Teaching for social justice in a standards-driven social studies classroom can be challenging. However, the authors believe that there does not have to be a choice between meeting standards versus meeting the needs of students. Through semistructured interviews with four current social studies practitioners, the authors found similarities in the…

The Arizona English Language Learners Assessment (AZELLA) is used by the Arizona Department of Education to determine which children should receive English support services. AZELLA results are used to determine if children are either proficient in English or have English language skills in one of four pre-proficient categories (pre-emergent,…

Over the past twenty years in performance testing a specific item type with distinguishing characteristics has arisen time and time again. It's been invented independently by dozens of test development teams. And yet this item type is not recognized in the research literature. This article is an invitation to investigate the item type, evaluate…

As economic globalization sweeps across the world, cross-border higher education cooperation has witnessed remarkable achievements. Quality improvements, however, have not stepped up accordingly due to reasons including imperfect and distorted policies, incomplete governance structures, and the absence of an effective internal quality assessment…

The need for a flexible and versatile workforce that is constantly learning and upgrading its skills has led to a continual demand for courses in which employees are re-trained and updated on a lifelong basis. Students and workers now have to be prepared for a labour market in which they can be expected to change jobs many times, and they need to…

This study aims to develop a scale, the Educational Technology Standards Scale (ETSS), to determine how effectively and appropriately preservice teachers use educational technologies. For the development of the scale, the internationally approved NETS[middle dot]T standards from 2000 were used. These NETS[middle dot]T standards were used for…

In the UK fully qualified status in professional occupations is normally awarded by a professional association or registration body. Both the requirements and the routes for qualifying vary between professions, although the majority include an academic component combined with or followed by a period of assessed practice. In recent years there have…

Scores are the most visible and widely used products of a testing program. The choice of score scale has implications for test specifications, equating, and test reliability and validity, as well as for test interpretation. At the same time, the score scale should be viewed as infrastructure likely to require repair at some point. In this report…

In response to concerns over the need for a scientifically literate workforce, increasing the STEM pipeline, and aging science standards documents, the scientific and science education communities are embarking on the development of a new conceptual framework for science, led by the National Research Council (NRC), and aligned next generation…

While externally moderated standards-based assessment has been practised in Queensland senior schooling for more than three decades, there has been no such practice in the middle years. With the introduction of standards at state and national levels in these years, teacher judgement as developed in moderation practices is now vital. This paper…

The purpose of this policy and process document is to provide advice to public and private institutions intending to enter into articulation agreements regarding: (1) Appropriate steps to be taken by each partner to the agreement; (2) Recommended processes for recording and monitoring the agreement; and (3) Circumstances under which agreements…