In this report, the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) seeks to fill the gaps in the conversation by providing thoughtful, systemic, and targeted policy solutions to address underlying flaws in the student loan repayment and servicing systems that lead borrowers into financial hardship. The report outlines…

This study used a quantitative survey in the form of an online self-administered questionnaire to explore and describe the views of school leaders on chronic absenteeism in New Jersey public schools. The first of its kind, this statewide survey was designed for the purpose of understanding how school leaders perceive the importance of equity in…

On July 24, 2023, the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) of the U.S. Department of Education (US ED) released a Dear Colleague letter (DCL) and lengthy guidance related to the responsibilities states have to oversee the education of students with disabilities in their schools and to ensure that those students are afforded all of their…

Quality non-degree credentials can lead to good jobs and family-sustaining wages. But not all non-degree credentials lead to good outcomes -- and when they don't, they entrench economic inequalities that impact people of color and women. National Skills Coalition's new report "The Non-Degree Credential Quality Imperative" encourages…

Purpose: This study examined the conceptions of assessment and its relationship to self-regulation and self-confidence among pre-service teachers. Design/methodology/approach: Participants were 278 pre-service students attending a teacher's college in Bahrain. This study employed the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach to investigate the…

Examiners' judgements play a critical role in competency-based assessments such as objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs). The standardised nature of OSCEs and their alignment with regulatory accountability assure their wide use as high-stakes assessment in medical education. Research into examiner behaviours has predominantly explored…

A critical aspect of Mathematics Teacher Leaders' (MTLs) multi-faceted work is facilitating collective disciplinary discussions relevant and accessible for teachers. While research has identified goals for teacher learning, how MTLs learn to support these goals in content-specific ways is still under investigation. In this study, we lift the…

As the field of education, and especially gifted education, gradually moves toward open science, our research community increasingly values transparency and openness brought by open science practices. Yet, individual researchers may be reluctant to adopt open science practices due to low incentives, barriers of extra workload, or lack of support…

This research examined how stakeholders (n = 40) from one school district experienced "accountability" within a context where responsibility for student learning was being distributed across the system. Using a case study design, we examined: what conditions supported stakeholders in multiple roles to exercise responsibility for student…

Educating for LGBTQ+ inclusivity continues to be both challenging and controversial for many teachers and often falls on the shoulders of sexual minority teachers or motivated individuals rather than taking a school wide approach. Deeper understanding is needed of how school communities can better support one another to develop knowledge, practice…

Statewide assessments in reading and math are required every year under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, at an annual expense of billions of taxpayer dollars. Analyzing 10 years of school-level results from public schools in two states-- Nebraska and Texas--we found that year-to-year correlations of schools' test scores were…

Through-year assessment is enjoying a surge of attention. A through-year assessment program is: (1) Administered in multiple distinct sessions during a school year; and (2) Intended to support (a) the production and use of a summative determination, and (b) one additional aim. More than a dozen states are designing, piloting, or implementing…

For this case study (Yin, 2018) dissertation, I used mixed methods (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017; Guetterman & Fetters, 2018) to investigate how an elementary school special education teacher, who used a direct instruction (di) reading curriculum, incorporated culturally informed practices (CIP) in her small group reading instruction. In…

Accountability in education was implemented to improve poor learning outcomes by documenting and monitoring learning achievement results. In this process, external standardized achievement tests have played a central role, being the mechanism most frequently used to measure learning outcomes. However, several decades after its initial…

How can we understand the uncertainties in high-stake measures such as PISA in relation to the claims that different authorities make from them? In this paper, we use a rather remarkable case from Sweden involving conflicting interpretations of the PISA 2018 results at a national political level and a fight over statistics between two national…