The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Child Care, requires states to use information about the provider cost of child care to inform the setting of payment rates under the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) program. This requirement is consistent with the growing recognition that…

This publication was prepared as part of the Cedefop project The shift to learning outcomes: rhetoric or reality. The purpose of this research is to analyse the conceptual, structural and political factors influencing the transformation of intended learning outcomes into achieved learning outcomes. It is considered as a first step in a long-term…

The study by Sanchez (2024a & 2024b) reveals evidence of grade inflation in high school GPA (HSGPA) from 2018 to 2022 despite stable or slightly decreased ACT scores. This study demonstrated that the predicted cumulative first-year hours earned at 2- and 4-year colleges decreased when the predictions were based on HSGPA alone, but predicted…

The National Academy of Education (NAEd) undertook this consensus report on the evaluation and improvement of teacher preparation programs (TPPs). Specifically, this consensus report aims to (1) identify and disseminate best practices for evaluating and improving TPPs to promote teacher effectiveness and student achievement; (2) provide…

The proposed session sought to engage participants in a discussion about building assessment practices with students, as opposed to for students. Critical pedagogy may provide one way to redefine this previously uni-directional practice (Keesing-Styles, 2003). This approach concentrates student experience at the center of assessment, causing a…

Network meta-analysis (NMA) uses both direct and indirect evidence to compare the efficacy and harm between several treatments. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a statistical method that investigates relations among observed and latent variables. Previous studies have shown that the contrast-based Lu-Ades model for NMA can be implemented in…

Group work, where students work on projects to overcome challenges together, has numerous advantages, including learning of important transferable skills, better learning experience and increased motivation. However, in many academic systems the advantages of group projects clash with the need to assign individualised marks to students. A number…

Balancing excellence and diversity effectively in the higher education sector is one of the most challenging tasks for national governments. While a number of countries around the world have initiated university excellence schemes, it is more difficult to identify policy initiatives that also take into account how institutional diversity is to be…

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) ranks among the top five most critical skills necessary for college graduates to meet workforce demands (Hart Research Associates, 2015). It is also deemed a critical skill for educational success (Beaver, 2013). It thus deserves more prominence in the suite of courses and subjects assessed in K-16. Such…

The study sought to establish learner perceptions about assessment strategies in higher education. This was against the backdrop of an emerging trend in the field of assessment that has resulted in different perceptions of learners with respect of their effectiveness in higher education learning. The study in particular endeavored to determine the…

Educational assessment has profound effects on the nature and depth of learning that students engage in. Typically there are two core types discussed within the pertinent literature; criterion and norm referenced assessment. However another form, ipsative assessment, refers to the comparison between current and previous performance within a course…

Elected officials, an audience essential to the relevance and funding of Extension, may lack knowledge of Extension's capacity to engage with them in solving local problems, building consensus, and improving strategic planning or governance. They may not consider that by collaborating with locally knowledgeable Extension professionals, they also…

Context: In this paper, we review and discuss the piloting in Norway of a German methodology for competence diagnostics in vocational education and training: the Competence Development and Assessment in TVET (COMET) project. Our overarching theme is determining to what extent such large-scale assessment systems are valid for international…

This article presents a novel experimental methodology in which groups of students were offered the option to choose between two equivalent scoring rules to assess a multiple-choice test. The effect of choosing the scoring rule on marks is tested. Two major contributions arise from this research. First, it contributes to the literature on the…

Value-added (VA) modeling can be used to quantify teacher and school effectiveness by estimating the effect of pedagogical actions on students' achievement. It is gaining increasing importance in educational evaluation, teacher accountability, and high-stakes decisions. We analyzed 370 empirical studies on VA modeling, focusing on modeling and…