In recent years, there has been a movement in the USA towards performance-based evaluation of teachers. As a result, many schools, colleges, and departments of education have moved towards integrating performance-based approaches into their programs. This has involved many promising practices, but none have caught on more than the use of teaching…

This study introduces a portable direct assessment of young children's self-regulation--the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment (PSRA). The PSRA was designed to assess self-regulation in emotional, attentional, and behavioral domains by using a brief, structured battery of tasks in conjunction with a global report of children's behavior. Factor…

The authors examine how a public school culture that has resisted a number of promising reform initiatives could be transformed by a Millennium School model based on four basic principles: a multi-tiered career path for teachers; teaching in teams; performance-based accountability; and ongoing professional development.

Standardized tests are increasingly used to determine students' growth in reading comprehension. In some U.S. school districts, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has led to a focus on multiple-choice questions to better prepare students for these types of tests. Even though such questions can provide some important information, they do not…

The authors examined the accuracy of information elicited from seventy-nine 5- to 7-year-old children about a staged event that included physical contact-touching. Four to six weeks later, children's recall for the event was assessed using an interview protocol analogous to those used in forensic investigations with children. Following the…

This paper describes the redesign of the goals and objectives of a secondary teacher education program employing authentic assessment. A sophomore level field experience course was identified to run a pilot study of an assessment process that employed video portfolios for evaluation of students' teaching behaviors. The videotapes set the basis…

The Center for Gifted and Talented Native Hawaiian Children has been developing identification methods congruent with Hawaiian values and traditional talent areas and has increased the number of native Hawaiian students identified and provided with enrichment services. This report describes efforts to combine self-report data and performance-based…

The following study interprets the results of a research carried out in 2008 in Romania, on a smaller sample. The aim of the study is the analysis of the text comprehension skills of 14 year old pupils, and the presentation of the connections with the social background, learning styles and school performance. The gathering of the data was…

This study presents an investigation of information literacy as defined by the ETS iSkills™ assessment and by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) Information Literacy Scale (ILS). As two related but distinct measures, both iSkills and the ILS were used with undergraduate students at NJIT during the spring 2006 semester. Undergraduate…

This chapter considers the design of incentive pay systems for teachers and principals and the challenges facing policy makers who seek to design them. The author argues that policy makers must direct the efforts of teachers and principals toward schools' mission--the acquisition of skills and knowledge among children--and must find ways to link…

Measures that Matter was a joint effort by Achieve and The Education Trust to provide strategic and technical assistance to states in creating college- and career-ready assessment and accountability systems that ensure that all students graduate from high school ready to succeed. States face lots of questions and choices--and, frankly,…

Semantic incompatibility, an error in constructing measuring instruments for rating oneself, others, or objects, refers to the extent to which item wordings are incongruent with, and hence inappropriate for, scale labels and vice versa. This study examines the effects of semantic incompatibility on rating responses. Using a 2 x 2 factorial design…

Judge-mediated examinations are defined as those for which expert evaluation (using rubrics) is required to determine correctness, completeness, and reasonability of test-taker responses. The use of multifaceted Rasch modeling has led to improvements in the reliability of scoring such examinations. The establishment of criterion-referenced…

Achievement-based unit grading in secondary physical education is not commonly practiced due to resistance to grading students based on learning, performance, or achievement. Traditional grading practices based on managerial factors, such as attendance and good behavior, and on "pseudo-accountability" do little to make students accountable for…

Needs assessment plays an important role in training and human performance improvement efforts, but the literature contains little research on this topic. This study extended previous research on the Performance Analysis for Training (PAT) model of needs assessment by examining its implementation to determine environmental and occupational health…