The last decade produced numerous studies that show that students learn more from high-quality teachers than they do from lower quality teachers. If instruction is to improve through the use of more rigorous teacher evaluation systems, the implementation of these systems must provide consistent and interpretable information about which aspects of…

The New York State Board of Regents has committed to the transformation of the preparation, support and evaluation of all teachers and school leaders in New York State, and the New York State Legislature has enacted historic legislation (Education Law §3012-c) that fundamentally changes the way teachers and principals are evaluated. Under the new…

Twenty-five monolingual (L1) children with specific language impairment (SLI), 32 sequential bilingual (L2) children, and 29 L1 controls completed the Test of Active & Passive Sentences-Revised (van der Lely 1996) and the Self-Paced Listening Task with Picture Verification for actives and passives (Marinis 2007). These revealed important…

The geographic skills, as outlined in "Geography for Life", provide an avenue for assessing students' work in geography. If used across the scope and sequence of the curriculum, a common scoring guide based on these skills offers opportunities for students to demonstrate their ability to use inquiry approaches to study geography and to…

In times of diminishing resources to support community programs, it is critical that Extension make every effort to show impact as collectively as possible for the variety of programs being delivered in individual counties and communities. The pilot study reported here (funded by CYFAR, NIFA, USDA award #2008-41520-04810), focused on outcomes in…

The study attempted to determine whether the use of a series of reading and response assignments decreased students' perceptions of chemistry difficulty and enhanced students' perceptions of the relevance of chemistry in their everyday lives. Informed consent volunteer students enrolled in General Chemistry II at a community college in the…

Proponents of the recent and widely adopted Common Core State Standards argue that high quality curricular standards are critical to students' educational success. Little clear evidence exists, however, linking the quality of such standards to student achievement. I remedy this by connecting data on state-level student achievement from 1994-2011…

The "Delinquency Reduction Outcome Profile" ("DROP") is a novel situational-judgment test (SJT) designed to measure social decision making in delinquent youth. The DROP includes both a typical SJT scoring method, which captures the deviation of an individual response from an "ideal" expert-based response pattern, as well as a novel…

The validity and reliability of three instruments, the "Counselor Rubric for Gauging Student Understanding of Academic Planning," micro-analytic questions, and the "Student Survey for Understanding Academic Planning," all based on social cognitive theory, were tested as means to assess self-efficacy and self-regulated learning in college academic…

The 12 Favorite Assignments featured in this article were presented at the 2011 Annual Convention of the Association for Business Communication (ABC), Montreal, Canada. A variety of learning objectives are featured: delivering bad news, handling difficult people, persuasion, reporting financial analysis, electronic media, face-to-face…

This review departs from current practice in reviewing tests in that it employs an "argument-based approach" to test validation to guide the review (e.g. Bachman, 2005; Kane, 2006; Mislevy, Steinberg, & Almond, 2002). Specifically, it follows an approach to test development and use that Bachman and Palmer (2010) call the process of "assessment…

Purpose: Students with language-learning disabilities (LLD) demonstrate difficulties with written language, especially in the areas of productivity, complexity, and grammar. It is not clear how these deficits affect their performance on high-stakes tests, such as those required by the No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2002).…

In this article, we utilize the concepts of conceptual metaphors, cultural models, and master myths to discuss the ways by which three new immigrant children, native speakers of Spanish, were developing conceptions of English language, literacy, and learner's identities. Our findings point to 3 main metaphors that were often implicit in the school…

The New York State's School Library Media Program Evaluation (SLMPE) rubric provides a window of opportunity for a librarian to talk with his/her administrators about library program elements that may be out of the librarian's control. There are three areas of focus on the SLMPE Rubric: (1) Teaching and Learning; (2) Building and Learning…

Objective: This study evaluated the potential impact of proposed "DSM-5" diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method: The study focused on a sample of 933 participants evaluated during the "DSM-IV" field trial; 657 carried a clinical diagnosis of an ASD, and 276 were diagnosed with a non-autistic disorder. Sensitivity and…