The Secretary of Education (Secretary) establishes requirements, definitions, and approval criteria for the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (Stabilization or SFSF) program. The Secretary may use one or more of these requirements, definitions, and approval criteria in awarding funds under this program in fiscal year (FY) 2010. These requirements,…

The works reported in this book represent a second phase to a 2-day summer conference that focused on assessment in mathematics and science classrooms. This book presents research and findings of a subset of the conference participants who investigated a self-selected aspect of assessment in their educational environments. Action research was the…

The annotated bibliography contains citations of nine references on alternative student assessment methods in second language programs, particularly at the secondary school level. The references include a critique of conventional reading comprehension assessment, a discussion of performance assessment, a proposal for a multi-trait, multi-method…

Focusing on better assessing the thinking, or meaning-making, aspects of reading that are emphasized in current views of the reading process, this book presents the Informal Reading-Thinking Inventory (IR-TI) which offers options to enhance assessment beyond assessing students' listening level, oral reading of words, and basic comprehension. The…

The portfolio approach to teaching writing brings the writing process into the classroom and enables the new teacher--and all teachers--to see writing from a new perspective, to truly be collaborators and coaches with their students. A college writing teacher uses portfolios and plays the role of evaluator as well as the responder in three courses…

Alternative forms of evaluating student progress are changing testing or assessment in U.S. schools. From the teacher-made to the standardized test, the familiar over-emphasis on multiple-choice items is giving way to expanded generative formats in which students are called upon to demonstrate mastery through applications in which they use complex…

To assess the written and verbal communication skills of the approximately 100 deaf and hard-of-hearing students attending the College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a real challenge. The only way for most of these students to satisfy the College of Business' general writing competency requirement was to take the…

This Toolkit is a guide to assessing student achievement and making students partners in the educational enterprise by clearly defining expectations for performance and letting students in on them. It is essentially about performance-based instruction and the role of student assessment in guiding and invigorating practice. This volume, Volume I,…

A descriptive study was conducted to examine the current assessment practices of teachers in Ohio. The specific aim of the study was to gain an understanding of the extent to which teachers use traditional versus alternative forms of assessment techniques in their classrooms. Participants were 625 teachers from kindergarten through grade 12. The…

This paper provides an overview for a communication curriculum that has begun to include cultural diversity as part of its overall assessment process. First, the paper introduces the topic of assessment as it relates to cultural diversity and the student at-risk. Then the paper reviews the literature related to students at-risk and…

This handbook addresses the complex and expanding vocabulary of performance assessment and measurement by providing a glossary of related terms and lists of resources for the student, practitioner, and policymaker. Performance assessment includes all forms of such assessment from multiple choice and paper-and-pencil tests to alternative…

This paper reviews research literature and research projects of the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development, on the topics of the utility of dynamic assessment for predicting learning ability, its utility for generating educationally relevant prescriptions, and factors associated with the implementation of dynamic…

Based on the assumption that the kind of instruction provided during testing is important when examining children's zones of proximal development, two methods of dynamic assessment, "graduated prompt" and "mediation," were compared to each other and to static assessment. In dynamic assessment, the examiner sets up a learning…

This article is devoted to explaining the use and misuse of standardized tests in adult literacy programs. Among the topics covered on that subject are why the tests are of such interest among adult educators: because the authority vested in these tests can determine the way programs are developed, what is taught, the climate of teaching and…

This report explains how students with significant disabilities who submit portfolios for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) Alternate Assessments are evaluated to meet state requirements for a "competency determination" needed to receive a regular high school diploma. The reasoning behind the Massachusetts approach and the…