Through offering insight into different approaches to quality assurance, with input from those who provide leadership in post-secondary education in British Columbia and Canada, this project's goal is to recommend whether Canadian jurisdictions should consider a new quality assurance regime, and to provide potential new models to consider in that…

In spring 2000, the Southern Regional Education Board, through its Middle Grades Assessment, gathered information from 5,000 eighth-graders and 1,800 middle-grades teachers in 60 schools in 14 states. This brief report describes what that information revealed: a significant difference between the achievement scores of the highest performing 25…

The history and current state of evaluation of vocational education and training (VET) in Australia was examined. The study's main conclusion was that, despite its important potential, evaluation has thus far been little used for the improvement of VET in Australia. Other conclusions of the study were as follows: (1) little development of…

A meeting of child care researchers, federal and state child care administrators, and participants in the studies of child outcomes in the context of state welfare waiver evaluations was convened on February 7, 1997. The purpose of the meeting was to ask for input as to the most important aspects of child care to cover in the state welfare waiver…

Analyzes 60 sociology doctoral programs from 1975 through 1980. Measures per capita and gross productivity of each department. Shows that conventional assessment measures contain deficiencies. Documents a tendency for conflict between productivity and graduate education. Includes recommendations for future assessments that would measure not only…

The article presents the cultural background, methodological design, theory, and results of a comprehensive research project where the doxa and textual norms of the judges at the national writing exam in Norway were studied. The background of the study is the quite comprehensive reforms in Norway of the way writing is taught in the upper secondary…

The importance of feedback as an aid to self-assessment is widely acknowledged. A common form of feedback that is used widely in e-learning is the use of model answers. However, model answers are deficient in many respects. In particular, the notion of a "model" answer implies the existence of a single correct answer applicable across multiple…

This document reports on the third year of the assessment component of the California New Teacher Project (CNTP). In the first 2 years, research focused on pilot testing innovative forms of new teacher assessment. Part of the third year study was a careful review of the state of assessment practices in California. The study was designed to yield…

This evaluation design report presents a general framework for assessing the effects of school health interventions on students' school performance in order to guide efforts to develop strong empirical evidence. The report begins with an overview of eight general types of school health interventions: school health education, health services,…

There has been very little previous evaluation research that examines the effects of interventions on persistence.

In an effort to determine the methods used to assess and document student achievement at two-year colleges within the Mid-Plains Technical Community College Area (MPTCCA) in Nebraska and to develop an effective assessment model for use within the MPTCCA, surveys were sent to 79 chief executive officers representing all public, two-year, technical…

The Toyota Families in Schools (TFS) Program is a new family literacy initiative that was developed by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) with support from the Toyota Motor Corporation. TFS is based on a previous NCFL model calling for providing literacy activities to preschoolers and parents from low-income families. NCFL wanted to…

This final report describes results of a planning grant for the "Flashlight" project, an effort to develop, test, and disseminate evaluation procedures that a postsecondary institution or department could use to periodically assess its evolving educational strategies, in particular strategies supported by use of computing, video, and…

A cut score validity analysis for a pretest writing prompt and the SAT Verbal and Math assessments was performed for academic writing course placement. This study was carried out as part of a broader program of assessment aimed at understanding the impact of the writing course and eventually set the baseline for assessing the impact of 'writing…

A persistent problem in U.S. educational research has been how to explain the continuing low performance on standardized tests by certain racial and ethnic minority-group students, such as Chicanos. This chapter identifies abusive practices stemming from standardized testing that help to shape school failure among Chicano students, and discusses…