The expense of attending college is one factor that may explain why low-income students often drop out of school. In California, despite generous state aid and relatively low fees at community colleges, many low-income students still have substantial college-related costs that they cannot cover. To compound matters, federal support for students…

Significant momentum exists for next-generation assessments to increasingly utilize technology to develop and deliver performance-based assessments. Many traditional challenges with this assessment approach still apply, including psychometric concerns related to performance-based tasks (PBTs), which include low reliability, efficiency of…

Collaborative testing has been shown to improve performance but not always content retention. In this study, we investigated whether collaborative testing could improve both performance and content retention in a large, introductory biology course. Students were semirandomly divided into two groups based on their performances on exam 1. Each group…

The educational performance of Aboriginal Australians lags behind non-Indigenous Australians with the gap increasing the longer students remain at school. The Australian government has released its Closing the Gap policy with the specific intent to redress gaps in health, education and housing, as these are seen as key indicators to life success.…

In this article I describe the context within which we developed project e-scape and the early work that laid the foundations of the project. E-scape (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments) is centred on two innovations. The first concerns a web-based approach to portfolio building; allowing learners to build their…

Competency-based assessment and an emphasis on obtaining higher-level outcomes that reflect physicians' ability to demonstrate their skills has created a need for more advanced assessment practices. Simulation-based assessments provide medical education planners with tools to better evaluate the 6 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical…

This article reflects on some of the findings of a research project which investigated the practice of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) within a major national teacher upgrading project in South Africa--the National Professional Diploma in Education (NPDE). The article analyses the ways in which a range of contextual factors have positioned RPL…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of flexible learning options at a university serving multiple geographic areas (including remote and rural areas) and age groups by teaching an introduction to special education course to three large groups of pre-teacher education majors using three modes of instruction. The university offered sections as…

About 15 percent of the American workforce of 3.5 million teachers either moves or leaves the profession each year. The size of the teaching force coupled with the high annual turnover rates seriously compromises the nation's capacity to ensure that all students have access to skilled teaching. If the dominant teacher workforce policies and…

Get an in-depth understanding of how to create fun, engaging, and challenging performance assessments that require students to elaborate on content and demonstrate mastery of skills. This update of an ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) classic includes new scoring methods, reading assessments, and insights on navigating…

This study examines the impact of high-stakes, large-scale, standardized literacy testing on youth who have failed the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test. Interviews with youth indicate that the unintended impact of high-stakes testing is more problematic than policy makers and educators may realize. In contrast to literacy policy's aims to…

In this article I report on the ways that an educational philosophies course in a performance-based program enables teacher candidates to identify, reflect upon, and evaluate a wide range of educational purposes. The context for the report is an accelerated graduate program in childhood education at a small urban college where intensive fieldwork…

This study examined Kirkpatrick's training evaluation model (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006) by assessing a sales training program conducted at an organization in the hospitality industry. The study assessed the employees' training outcomes of knowledge and skills, job performance, and the impact of the training upon the organization. By…

Many colleges face the challenge of recruiting examinees for institutional assessment programs. Unfortunately, students recognize these programs as low-stakes, and therefore may not have high performance motivation. This study examined the interrelationships between students' preferred incentives for taking the test, their performance motivation,…

This paper addresses likely error rates for measuring teacher and school performance in the upper elementary grades using value-added models applied to student test score gain data. Using realistic performance measurement system schemes based on hypothesis testing, we develop error rate formulas based on OLS and Empirical Bayes estimators.…