A study of assessment practices focused on vocational schools, especially those concerned with developing generic workplace skills, as well as comprehensive secondary schools that are developing closer relations with the workplace. The major reasons for educational testing in secondary schools are managing student learning, monitoring educational…

A 10-week program to increase assignment completion was implemented with 10 sixth graders who rarely completed assignments. This behavior modification program entailed the use of an assignment completion contract for the students. The criteria for meeting this contract increased each week. When students met the weekly criteria, they were given a…

Student learning is the bottom line for nearly all efforts to establish a national test system. Major efforts in this area are summarized in this paper. The various efforts seem to move ahead independently, but some common ideas include: (1) creating a national assessment system rather than a single test; (2) developing more than multiple-choice…

This curriculum guide for an electricity/electronics course was developed for high schools in Connecticut to demonstrate that technical courses can be used as part of the science requirement for an integrated academic and vocational curriculum. The guide provides a course description, course goals, recommended text and additional materials, 33…

According to the education and training requirements of the Family Support Act of 1988, the Connecticut Department of Income Maintenance (DIM) is required to approve criteria or standards for determining the satisfactory progress of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)/Job Connection clients enrolled in education and skill training…

Questions about alternative forms of assessment were discussed by two elementary school and two high school teachers who are members of the National Education Association/International Business Machines (IBM) School Renewal Network. Their correspondence on that computer network was also analyzed. The following questions were considered: how have…

A new professional licensure system for teachers developed by the Minnesota Board of Teaching in conjunction with the Educational Testing Service is described. Initial work with the Rand Corporation in 1987 provided a plan for a new licensure system. The state's expectations for a performance assessment system to measure the skills of first-year…

The possibility of using portfolios as a placement tool for freshman English at the University of Nevada (Reno) was studied. Three university instructors who, among them, taught all 3 levels of freshman English, from remedial (English 001) to accelerated (English 102), read portfolios assembled for 58 students in 3 college-bound high school senior…

State law requires that all certified professional personnel employed in Georgia school systems have their performance evaluated annually by trained evaluators. The Georgia School Counselor Evaluation Program (GSCEP) was designed to be used across all systems and schools for annual formative and summative evaluation purposes. The process used to…

Instruction based on learning styles has received little attention in the recent reform efforts in mathematics education. The purpose of this book is to address the improvement of mathematics instruction through sensitivity to learning styles. The introduction discusses the scope and rationale of the book. Chapter 2 documents the need for…

One potential approach to the authentic assessment of what students know and can do in science is concept mapping. A concept map is a graph consisting of nodes representing concepts and labeled lines denoting the relation between a pair of nodes (concepts). The external concept map constructed by the student is interpreted as representing…

A survey of 312 teachers and families of students with severe disabilities in California, Colorado, Kentucky, Utah, and Virginia was designed to measure the extent of implementation of 12 educational "best practices" and the level of demonstration of 7 student outcome variables. The educational practices included: integration into school and…

The United States is moving toward a more national, performance-based view of curriculum policy. The federal government will play a modest role in nationalizing curriculum policy issues, largely by pressuring states and localities through national standards. The chief agents of nationalization will continue to be state and locally based…

An experiment using audiotaped student journals for course evaluation is described. Subjects were 200 native Cantonese-speaking technology students taking credit-bearing courses in English communication skills for building. One of the required tasks in the course was to indicate, in their oral journals, what they liked about an instructional…

Assessment of student performance is emerging as a crucial ingredient in the recipe for ongoing improvement of school science. This digest focuses on assessment in the service of instruction, for helping students, teachers, and parents monitor learning. According to M. Jorgensen, performance-based assessment requires that the student demonstrate,…