Participation in school sports can benefit children but also carries a risk of injury, including concussion. Concussion is a brain injury that can affect memory, speech, and muscle coordination and can cause permanent disability or death. Concussion can be especially serious for children, who are more likely than adults both to sustain a…

The Guam Department of Education (DOE) is a single unified school district consisting of grades Kindergarten through 12. Its 27 elementary schools, 8 middle schools, 5 high schools, and an alternative school serve over 30,700 students. DOE is managed by the Guam Education Policy Board. Its policies are established by a combination of elected and…

Standardized achievement tests that are used for assessment and accountability purposes may not provide reliable and valid outcomes for English language learners (ELLs) because extraneous sources may confound the outcome of assessments for these students. Performance assessments, by contrast, may offer opportunities for these students to present a…

Background: Workplace-based learning is a critical component of professional preparation in speech pathology. A validated assessment of this learning is seen to be "the gold standard", but it is difficult to develop because of design and validation issues. These issues include the role and nature of judgement in assessment, challenges in…

Through a grant received from the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), Health Libraries Australia (HLA) is conducting a twelve-month research project with the goal of developing a system-wide approach to education for the future health librarianship workforce. The research has two main aims: to determine the future skills,…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the effects of rater training in an L2 performance assessment and to examine the eligibility of L2 users of English as raters in L2 performance assessment. Rater training was conducted in order for raters to clearly understand the criteria, the evaluation items, and the evaluation procedure. In this…

With most school districts all over the country scrambling to cover educational funding shortfalls and increasing class sizes, at least one state governor is publicly questioning why all school districts don't contract custodial services. School district administrators are facing the increasing budget cuts pressure to consider (or reconsider)…

Assessing a high school's effectiveness is not straightforward. Comparing a school's standardized test scores to those of other schools is one approach to measuring effectiveness, but a major objection to this method is that students' test scores tend to be related to students' "socioeconomic" status--family household income, for…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of governance and managerial characteristics of schools. More specifically, the aim is to individuate the factors that are associated to higher schools' performances, as measured through student achievement. Design/methodology/approach: The research is conducted by means of a survey in…

As part of a cross-cultural collaboration, a teacher performance assessment (TPA) was implemented during 2009 in three Malaysian institutes of teacher education. This paper reports on the TPA for graduating primary teachers in Malaysia. The investigation focused on the pre-service teachers' perceptions about whether the TPA provided them with an…

Extant research, though limited in quantity, increasingly demonstrates the critical connection between quality preparation experience, candidates' leadership capacity, and their subsequent instructional and transformation leadership practices. Using mixed methods, this study builds on the current knowledge base and aims to further verify the link…

To renew America's status as the world's leader in college attainment, the federal government needs to transform America's community colleges and equip them for the 21st century. This long-overdue investment should establish national goals and a related performance measurement system; provide resources to drive college performance toward those…

The ASCA National Model[R] School Counselor Performance Standards were used to compare the types of activities conducted by professional school counselors and their perceptions of the activities conducted by their supervisees. School counselors who supervised trainees were asked to rate the frequency in which they conducted activities within these…

As employers, parents, and policy makers demand more accountability from higher education, transferring student learning to health services management practice is more important than ever. If educators want to give these stakeholders the evidence-based performance results they expect, assessment of student learning outcomes, as well as aggregate…

We investigate the conceptual and procedural knowledge in integration of a group of students who has successfully completed a one-year calculus course. The participants are asked five questions and their responses are analysed in detail. We observed that the students do not have satisfactory conceptual understanding of integration. Moreover, it is…