Background: Much is still unknown or unclear about how and where validity issues arise in high stakes testing situations in education, and ways by which we can rectify validity problems in practice and policy contexts. Purpose: This paper is the Foreword to the Special Section in the "Teachers College Record," titled, "When…

This study investigated ways to improve the quality of music performance evaluation in an effort to address the accountability imperative in tertiary music education. An enhanced scientific methodology was employed incorporating ecological validity and using recognized qualitative methods involving grounded theory and quantitative methods…

The concept of teacher accountability assumes teachers will use data-driven decision making to plan and deliver appropriate and effective instruction to their students. In order to do so, teachers must be able to accurately interpret the data that is given to them, and that requires the knowledge of some basic concepts of assessment and…

Assessing treatment integrity is vital to ensure an intervention is implemented as planned and to appropriately evaluate student outcomes. Performance feedback, an empirically supported method to increase low treatment integrity levels, has been evaluated primarily with school personnel. Homework is a widely used and effective school practice,…

This qualitative interpretivist research study focused on understanding perceived superintendent self-efficacy and instructional leadership in school districts that have persistently failed to serve students of color and that also may have contributed to persistent student achievement inequities and achievement gaps. This study yielded three…

Policies increasing the amount of time allocated to reading instruction are popular initiatives to meet the demands of accountability testing. Research suggests that time on instruction and children's approaches to learning (ATL), which generally includes measures of attention, persistence, motivation, and flexibility, are positively associated…

Indiana English learners (ELs) constitute a rapidly growing portion of the state's school-aged population, and those classified as limited English proficient are low performers on the state test. The purpose of this embedded mixed methods study was to understand how school personnel respond to accountability mandates, interpret test scores, and…

In higher education's environment of accountability, the development and assessment of student learning outcomes (SLOs) are driven by both external stakeholder requirements for accreditation and internal institutional pressures to demonstrate student learning as the core function of universities and colleges. This paper presents a framework to…

This historical critique of high-stakes testing in reading focuses on selected events from three historical movements: 1) the history of standardized testing, 2) the history of standardized reading tests, and 3) the history of high-stakes testing. These three interrelated histories have produced the high-stakes, standardized reading tests used in…

In the United States, policies in forty states and D.C. incorporate student growth measures--estimates of student progress attributed to educators--into educator evaluation. The federal government positions such policies as levers for ensuring that more students are taught by effective teachers and that effective educators are more equitably…

Trans* men have not, as yet, received specific research attention in higher education. Based on intensive interviews with 25 trans* men enrolled in colleges or universities in New England, I explore their experiences in higher education. I analyze participants' descriptions of supports and challenges in their collegiate environments, as well as…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how principals and school supervisory authorities understand and use feedback from mandatory proficiency tests (VERA) in the low-stakes context of Germany. For the analysis, the authors refer to a theoretical model of schools that differentiates between Autonomous and Managed Professional…

A review of the literature on corporate universities finds that the peak for research and publishing on the topic occurred between 1998 and 2002 and fell away considerably after 2005. Given the apparent lack of research during the past decade, the purpose of this paper is to present an insight into what has been happening to corporate…

In the 2012-2013 school year, Chicago Public Schools unveiled its new teacher evaluation system in all of its almost 600 schools. This study draws on 32 interviews from a random sample of teachers and 2 years of survey data from more than 12,000 teachers per year to measure their perceptions of the clarity, practicality, and cost of the new…

By 2015, 96% of the entire student body in the Danish public school system must receive his or her education within the regular classrooms, and referrals to segregated special education must be reduced radically. This is the consequence of the so-called "Inclusion Law" passed in the Danish parliament in April 2012. The law contains a…