The Educational Sign Skills Evaluation (ESSE) was developed to provide a means of identifying the dominant signing style of an individual and to provide feedback on areas of strength and areas in need of improvement. It provides an overall expressive skills rating as well as information on the type, level, and degree of understanding demonstrated…

This handbook has been prepared to address one specific problem: How can the techniques of program evaluation be effectively applied to produce useful information about the operations and impact of moral education programs in secondary schools? The handbook is divided into five chapters. The introductory chapter describes the background and…

This paper highlights measurement issues faced when attempting to assess and interpret results of a school improvement project. Based on the assumption that to measure effectiveness, one must measure a wide variety of school factors, the paper presents a broad perspective on measurement problems and dilemmas in analyzing norm-referenced test data…

A study of the effectiveness of a language proficiency testing method using partial dictation is reported. The study used 60 undergraduate students at a Mexican university studying English as a second language under a traditional four-skills approach. The partial dictation exam was a combination of dictation and cloze procedure. The entire text is…

The Job Training Partnership Act of 1982 continues a long-standing federal commitment to help disadvantaged persons prepare to obtain employment. The legislation works primarily through a locally based program delivery system to provide remedial education, training, and employment assistance to low-income and long-term unemployed youth and adults.…

This self-instructional module, the fourteenth in a series of 16 on techniques for coordinating work experience programs, deals with vocational assessment. Addressed in the module are the purposes of vocational assessment, the types of information that are gathered in the vocational assessment process, and available vocational assessment…

Much concern has been voiced about the quality of teachers newly entering the profession, the teachers of tomorrow. This concern has focused either on teachers' low aptitude and achievement scores or on their low grade point averages. However, numerous other personal and professional characteristics have been shown to be important to successful…

This paper discusses the breadth and direction of large-scale evaluative research and its implications for academics, their professional associations, and universities in general. The paper asks a number of questions, such as: What are the differing perceptions of evaluation at the international level? Is there a symbiosis between educational…

Papers by teacher education practitioners, on the topic of evaluation of teacher education programs, with responses by evaluation experts, are presented: (1) "Teacher Education's Evaluation of Graduates: Where Are We Going and How Do We Know When We Get There?" (J. T. Sandefur); (2) "Requirements of a Data Base for Effective Program Evaluation"…

This article aims to reshape the prevailing negative perception of assessment into one of a positive and powerful tool to guide learning, teaching and advocacy. Emphasis is placed on the importance of becoming assessment-literate, developing a balanced assessment system, using assessment results to motivate learners and mold instruction, and…

The author describes a Technologically Enhanced Language Learning program in Venezuela and how it helped improve high school EFL instruction. The author presents six challenges of teaching EFL and describes the context for the program. The author then provides a rationale for using multimedia in language teaching, based on theoretical frameworks.…

To determine normative story recall behavior for 5-year-old prekindergarten children, and to compare their recall of stories with recall of comparable chronological/descriptive passages, a study tested 30 nonhandicapped prekindergarten children. Each subject was read a 95-word, second-grade level story and immediately asked to "tell me what I…

A study examined how pragmatic form influences evaluation of student essays in university placement testing. Specifically, the study documented how patterns in students' use of information (assumed to be either old, inferable, or new for readers) affected the holistic scores for quality given to the essays. Subjects, 99 randomly selected entering…

A study examined how college professors reacted to non-native English-speaking students' academic writing. It looked specifically at (1) their rating on a 10-point scale of content versus language of an essay written by non-native-speaking students; (2) their rank ordering of comprehensibility, acceptability, and irritation for errors; (3) how…

This package contains articles in three general areas: items covering measurement topics; brief and practical guides on measurement techniques; and professional reading on broader assessment issues. The purpose of these publications by "Set" is to provide research information to teachers. The initial article, "Overview of Issues in…