Examines assessment policy in Arizona over a decade, using interview, observation, and archival data. Policy shifted from basic skills and standardized testing to progressive reform by performance testing to high-stakes standardized testing using state standards. The Arizona Student Assessment Program is described, discussing the Academic Summit…

During the first 10 years of reforms, New Zealand schools had two kinds of inspections: assurance (compliance) audits and effectiveness reviews to measure academic performance and contributing factors. In 1998, accountability reviews were introduced to judge whether schools were satisfying their charter (contract) objectives. The program is…

Three experiments investigated whether theory-of-mind deficits and weak central coherence might be functionally related. Found that theory-of-mind performance was inversely related to a measure of central coherence bias in the general population. Poor theory-of-mind performance was linked to weak central coherence among children with typical…

High-stakes tests can set a clear, challenging hurdle for students and schools, while increasing the numbers of failing kids. Costs and benefits include increased equity, clear and focused curricula, efficient use of resources, achievement-based school personnel evaluations, limited local decision making, narrow curriculum, and favored course…

What occurs in most schools and colleges is a ritual pretense lacking substance. Test scores and memorized facts mean little. John Dewey felt that education must be a continuous expansion of a web of connections and understanding that continues throughout one's life. Wisdom is education's true goal. (MLH)

A study assessed effectiveness of instruction designed to train internal-medical-clerkship students in productive use of feedback from residents and attending physicians (APs) to improve performance. The workshop focused on writing goals in a learning contract, defining characteristics of effective feedback, and practicing use of feedback in…

Authors discuss seven findings from a number of studies of local, state, and federal performance-based accountability systems conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Harvard University. (PKP)

Addresses the notion of defining and measuring student achievement in ways that go hand in hand with educational reform efforts. Focuses on performance-based assessment, portfolios, and rubrics. (DDR)

Data from three studies investigating factors supporting literacy development of children from low-income families indicate: early levels of achievement are strongly linked to later success; kindergarten vocabulary is strongly reflective of the use of varied vocabulary during meal times; and teacher training in literacy is beneficial to classroom…

To serve their campuses well, senior level student affairs administrators need to be involved as full partners in institutional decision-making. To do that effectively requires a variety of skills, including an understanding of higher education finance. The role of student affairs personnel in institutional financial decision-making has not been…

This paper will discuss the author's experiences with converting a traditional classroom-based course to a hybrid class, using a mix of traditional class time and web-support. The course which was converted is a lower-level human relations class, which has been offered in both the traditional classroom-based setting and as an asynchronous online…

The debate on the unidimensionality versus multidimensionality of students' ratings of teaching performance, and the relationship of this dilemma to summative and formative uses of these instruments is reviewed, with special attention to the implications of their development and application in the Spanish university system. A comprehensive…

In this article, the author assesses Mayor Michael Bloomberg's model of educational reform through dictatorial mayoral control. Many people give credit to Bloomberg's education policy, but it's anyone's guess why the 4th-grade scores rose 10% in 2005 at the same time that the 8th-grade reading and social studies scores went from bad to worse (with…

In this paper, the authors use an extensive student-level data set to evaluate the impact of charter schools in North Carolina on the math and reading performance of students in grades 4 through 8. They address three main questions: Do students attending charter schools in these grades make larger or smaller gains in achievement than they would…

This research investigated the relation of course, instructor, and student characteristics to student ratings of teaching effectiveness, both overall and within the dimensions of pedagogical skill, rapport with students, difficulty appropriateness, and course value/learning. Interest in the course content, expected grades, satisfaction with the…