The construction and validation of a tutor evaluation questionnaire are described. The importance of the tutor in problem-based learning requires assessment of staff conducting this role. After a pilot study in 1990-91 with 100 students and 150 tutors who identified important tutor skills, a questionnaire was prepared. This questionnaire was…

At one of a series of hearings on H.R. 6, the Elementary and Secondary Education Amendments of 1993, several experts discussed issues related to national assessment, assessment in Chapter 1, and state efforts to develop new forms of assessment. Eleanor Chelimsky, Assistant Comptroller General for Program Evaluation and Methodology of the General…

This paper makes a case for the development of several indirect indicators of national progress in reaching the collegiate attainment objective of the National Education Goals of 1990. These indicators would be developed concurrently with a proposed performance-based assessment to be administered to a national sample of graduating college seniors.…

College-level assessment efforts in New Jersey are described. For more than a dozen years, students in public colleges and universities in New Jersey have been assessed using a common statewide instrument, the New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Test. This test assesses reading, writing, and mathematics skills of entering college students as…

These training standards for fuel and electrical systems mechanics are intended to be used by apprentice/trainees, instructors, and companies in Ontario, Canada, as a blueprint for training or as a prerequisite for prerequisite for accreditation/certification. The training standards identify skills required for this occupation and its related…

The research evidence supporting current beliefs in testing is summarized, and critical qualities that good assessment should exemplify and the current state of the research knowledge on how to produce good assessment are reviewed. Research has demonstrated the difficulties of achieving meaningful improvement in schools and the shortcomings of…

This study examined the relationship of ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), age, and self-perceived academic achievement to students' academic motivational orientations. Groups of 333 American students in Wisconsin and 375 Chinese students in Hong Kong in grades 8, 10, and 12 completed questionnaires that gathered demographic…

Results from the 1993 administration of the Wisconsin Third Grade Reading Test are presented in a 43-page table that lists the results for each school district and school in Wisconsin. Statewide, over 52,000 students from over 300 districts took this test. The following categories for each 4-digit district code and each 8-digit school code…

The model of feedback processing proposed by R. W. Kulhavy and W. A. Stock (1989) was studied in a traditional classroom setting in which methods of assessing students' response confidence as predictors of postfeedback performance were also examined. The relationship between confidence ratings at the time of the test and confidence assessed prior…

The National Academy of Education (NAE) Panel has drawn two major conclusions in its evaluation of the National Assessment Governing Board's (NAGB) efforts to set achievement levels for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). They are that the Angoff procedure is fundamentally flawed for the setting of achievement levels, and that…

The Kentucky Education Reform Act legislated by the 1990 General Assembly created a high-stakes school performance accountability system to monitor the progress of implementation. One major component of the accountability system is a schedule of consequences designed to reward those schools making sufficient progress in improving student…

In this non-experimental study, a model was developed for portfolio assessment based on definitions and applications in the assessment literature. This model describes portfolio components, scores to be computed, and uses to be made of the scores. The literature was then reviewed to find examples of actual applications that would provide realistic…

The effectiveness of providing a specific kind of motivational feedback was investigated in a computer-based instruction (CBI) environment for different kinds of students and different levels of instructional control. Feedback was intended to affect students' temporal perceptions of the causes of learning successes and failures, their attributions…

Portfolio evaluation process promotes thinking while it minimizes multiple-choice mentality. Some educators find that reviewing with the students what they learned, with consideration for the structure of knowledge, provides self-confidence for the pupils' next try. They need self-confidence to critique each other's work, before the teacher…

Rising competition in world and domestic markets for the past 2 decades has necessitated that U.S. companies undergo significant transformations to improve their performance with respect to a wide array of efficiency and quality indicators. Research on the transformations recently undertaken by some U.S. companies to boost performance revealed two…