Discusses the impact of the 1999 North Carolina General Assembly House Bill 168, which mandated the implementation of performance-based funding for the state's 58 community colleges. States that a college's performance on six of the 12 measures determines its eligibility for supplemental allocation. Questions whether the new standards will affect…

Describes mathematics and science instruction in the Czech Republic and results from the performance assessment of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Czech performance on the written test was excellent, but performance assessment results show the low priority given hands-on tasks and performance assessment in the Czech…

Discusses the fairness of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) internationally and considers the results for Australia in more detail, focusing on samples of 516 and 583 students. For Australian students, there is some evidence that the TIMSS performance assessment is less prone to equity problems than the main assessment.…

This study uses Partial Credit Rasch analysis to study a complex data set of student responses to survey items relating to chance and data. The items were administered in the classroom and collected from 1993 to 2003 in the Australian state of Tasmania. Data were collected from a total of 5514 individual students across Grades 3 to 11 over the…

Teacher judgments have been identified as a primary source of information regarding student academic achievement. Research examining the accuracy of teachers' judgments in assessing students' academic abilities has shown relatively high accuracy. However, previous studies have relied primarily on norm-referenced measures to obtain estimates of…

Although multivariate generalizability theory was developed more than 30 years ago, little published research utilizing this framework exists and most of what does exist examines tests built from tables of specifications. In this context, it is assumed that the universe scores from levels of the fixed multivariate facet will be correlated, but the…

The Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach enables the student to construct knowledge in his/her own way. Piaget, the founder of constructivism, saw the development of intelligence as a process involving the relationship between brain maturity and individual experience. The technology PBL (TPBL) approach confronts the student with a personal…

Path analysis was used to test theoretical models of relations among variables known to predict differences in children's memory--strategies, capacity, and metamemory. Children in kindergarten to fourth grade (chronological ages 5 to 11) performed different memory tasks. Several strategies (i.e., sorting, clustering, rehearsal, and self-testing)…

Although an extensive literature exists on creativity and music, there is a lack of published research investigating possible links between musical creativity and Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow or optimal experience. This article examines a group composition task to study the relationships between creativity, flow and the quality of the…

This paper argues that in the information age the closed book, invigilated final examination has become an anachronism. Most significantly, it is an assessment instrument that does not assess deep conceptual understanding and process skills. Indeed, the anecdotal evidence one often hears from students is that "cramming" the night before…

This paper reports two studies that investigate differences in comprehension monitoring skills between good and poor comprehenders. Two groups of 9- to 10-year-olds, who were matched for reading vocabulary and word recognition skills but who differed in comprehension skill, were selected. In the first study, in which the children were required to…

Assessing students' knowledge has always been a difficult task, especially in today's climate of standards driven curriculum. Challenges to educators include meeting content standards, assessing students' progress and focusing on diverse learning styles, as well as preparing students for work and life beyond schools. To meet these challenges,…

I discuss the contributions of Harvey Siegel, Francis Schrag and Randall Curren to this volume. Their articles cast in bold relief the relation of High Stakes Testing to the goals of education, the nature of mind and the demands of justice. I argue that the connections are deep, but that the considerations these authors raise do not show that High…

There is widespread understanding of the need to evaluate teacher education programs. Unfortunately, the history of teacher education program evaluations is spotty, evolutionary, and limited in scope. Probably the most fundamental reason that program evaluations are limited is that there has not been a clear, consistent, and shared framework for…

In this study we investigated relationships between convergent and divergent thinking with an emphasis on fluency, originality, flexibility and elaboration in the mathematical domain. A related purpose was to examine relationships between problem types in mathematical tasks. The math section of a performance-based assessment was used to assess 857…