The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) is an authentic tool for evaluating prospective teachers by examining their abilities to plan, teach, assess, and reflect on instruction in actual classroom practice. The PACT seeks both to measure and develop teacher effectiveness, and this study of its predictive and consequential…

Early childhood is a critical period for introducing girls to traditionally masculine fields of science and technology before more extreme gender stereotypes surface in later years. This study looks at the TangibleK Robotics Program in order to determine whether kindergarten boys and girls were equally successful in a series of building and…

The use of assessments in public schools in the United States to link student test scores to school performance has arguably transformed assessments into accountability tools. Dennis S. Rosemartin, a former elementary classroom teacher, is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona. His area of specialization is teacher preparation and…

Time capacity is defined here as the individual teacher's perceived time for professional development (e.g., the capacity to develop and renew oneself as a teacher). The pressure of paperwork on the individual teacher should not be so demanding that it goes beyond the teacher's time for professional development. The purpose of this paper is to…

When comparing overall FCAT performance of the District to the State, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools District comes up a little short in Reading and barely higher in Math. However, when the comparisons to the State are confined within the typical subgroup categories, the District meets or exceeds the State's performance in all subgroups.…

In today's economy, employers' demand for an educated workforce is steadily rising. Policymakers, education leaders, and communities across the country recognize the need to improve college attendance and success, but are constrained by the current budgetary environment. Meanwhile students themselves face mounting college costs, and financial aid…

As newly graduated associate degree nurses (ADN) and baccalaureate degree nurses (BSN) enter into the workforce, they must be equipped to care for a complex patient population; therefore, the purpose of this study was to address the practice expectations and clinical competency of new nurses as perceived by nurse preceptors and nurse managers.…

A valid screening system requires a screener that accurately predicts whether or not students are at risk given their current performance. To understand a screening measure's accuracy, predicted student performance data (i.e., screening data) must be compared with actual performance data. When these sets of data are compared in a setting where…

While there has been a proliferation of research on assessment for learning (AFL) over the past two decades, L2 writing assessment has tended to focus much more on assessment of learning (AOL) than AFL. This study seeks to investigate the implementation of AFL for EFL writing within an examination-driven AOL system in Hong Kong, its possible…

Performance assessments rely on the expert judgment of raters for the measurement of the quality of responses, and raters unavoidably introduce error in the scoring process. Defined as the tendency of a rater to assign higher or lower ratings, on average, than those assigned by other raters, even after accounting for differences in examinee…

To understand that National Board Certification is not a passing trend, it is important to take a look at its history. National Board Certified teachers are highly accomplished educators who have met rigorous standards. By achieving National Board Certification, media specialists provide evidence that they are impacting students' learning. The…

Even though rater-based judgements of clinical competence are widely used, they are context sensitive and vary between individuals and institutions. To deal adequately with rater-judgement unreliability, evaluating the reliability of workplace rater-based assessments in the local context is essential. Using such an approach, the primary intention…

Previous research (i.e., Wilder, Rost, & McMahon, 2007) has suggested that managers perform poorly when predicting items and activities which their employees state that they might like to earn as part of performance improvement programs. The purpose of the current study was to replicate the earlier study conducted by Wilder et al. (2007) with a…

Assessing student learning in ways that offer students, institutions and systems with sound information is a considerable challenge for higher education. Despite demonstrable progress, a disconnect remains between methods used for assessing learning, improvement and accountability. This muddled situation is illustrated through a review of…

To raise the bar for teacher preparation and evaluation, assessments should be based on how well teachers perform in the classroom, not how they are rated during principal-led classroom observations or on written licensure tests, a new report argues. "Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness," by education policy expert and Stanford professor Linda…