The perspectives of graduates offer a valuable source of understanding for educators and policy-makers on how to ensure high quality educational pathways that prepare all students for work and college. Based on in-depth interviews with graduates from three Boston Public Schools with well-established performance-based assessment systems, the study…

This article details two ways in which web-based practice activities were used to support instruction and enhance preservice teachers' learning in a course on teaching reading to students with learning disabilities. First, we describe two performance-based assessments used to evaluate the integration of preservice teachers' knowledge and skills…

The recent "Nationwide academic achievement and study situation survey" was clearly influenced by the idea of "authentic assessment", an educational assessment perspective focused on "quality" and "engagement". However, when "performance assessment", the assessment method corresponding to this…

Curriculum integration, focusing on multidisciplinary tasks/projects relevant to the real-world, lends itself to authentic assessment practices. However, attempting to incorporate assessment "of", "for", and "as" learning can be challenging. Using data from two mixed method case studies (n=52, n=27) which tracked middle school student learning…

Courses preparing early childhood professionals through institutes of technical and further education utilise competency standards to guide the assessment of students during professional experience. Some universities offering early childhood teacher education courses use the term "competencies" in practicum assessment forms and draw on…

Teachers make a difference. Everyone--students, parents, teachers, principals and even casual observers--have always known this. But how much of a difference teachers make has only recently been estimated. Teachers are arguably the most important school factor affecting student achievement but, especially important for the purposes of this paper,…

The international thrust of neoliberal liberal policies on higher education systems has generally been to reduce governmental control over the operations of universities in de facto exchange for these institutions assuming increased responsibility for generating a larger share of their revenues and for providing quantitative evidence of…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often exhibit well-documented difficulties maintaining skills after they learn them. Acquired skills often disappear from their repertoires. Frequency-building procedures used with other populations have been touted as having special potential relevance for this population, and one of the reported…

Examining how preservice teachers (PTs) perceive and implement assessment may provide clues as to how we can refocus the way future teachers use assessment. A conceptual framework addressing PT beliefs and how they change was applied in this study to examine PTs' (N = 17) beliefs and understanding of the role of assessment and evaluation on…

In this keynote address presented at the 2008 National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science and Technology (NCSSSMST) Professional Conference, Stephanie Marshall describes what is needed to transform STEM education in today's world. While such an endeavor will take multiple systemic actions, here Marshall focuses on…

The second edition of NAESP's "Leading Learning Communities: What Principals Should Know and Be Able To Do" features new strategies to help principals structure and support learning communities to develop the whole child, prepare students for a changing global economy and society, rethink the learning day by bridging school and community, and make…

One can not help but notice that the education community's professional fear-mongers focus heavily on PISA (Program of International Student Assessment) and rarely mention TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) or PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Study) in their discussion of the state of education in the United…

The rapid increase in demand for American Sign Language (ASL) instruction between 1998 and 2002 created pervasive challenges in effectively assessing and documenting ASL learner performance. To address these challenges, we designed and developed the "Avenue ASL" e-assessment environment: an integrated, network-based software system to capture,…

This paper considers the development of school students' ability to define three terms that are fundamental to statistical literacy: sample, random, and variation. A total of 738 students in grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 were asked in a survey to define and give an example for the word "sample." Of these, 379 students in grades 7 and 9 were also asked…

In vocational education and training (VET) in the Netherlands, learning and working are integrated from the start. Authentic assessments are used during competence-based VET curricula to achieve correspondence between learning and working. The premise behind this study is that authenticity is subjective and that perceptions of assessment…