This article reports on "Beyond the OPI: Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) Design Project," a three-year (1997-2000) research initiative sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education International Research and Studies Program. The primary goal of the project was to develop an integrated skills assessment prototype that would measure…

When new students arrive at either Cranston High School East or Cranston High School West in Cranston, Rhode Island, they quickly learn that they must meet a set of clear expectations to graduate. This system allows everyone--including students, parents, teachers, and administrators--to assess progress and meet individual and schoolwide goals. For…

The purpose of Study 1a was to determine the criteria that differentiate students who perform well and those who perform poorly on a standardized test of university-level writing. Discriminant function analysis revealed that measures of structure, sentencing, paragraphing, and grammar play the most important role in separating these two groups.…

Many educational psychologists now conduct assessments of children's phonological skills. In the context of an outline of some of the issues relating to memory and phonological awareness, this paper explores an assumption underlying a method of assessing phonological awareness. It was assumed by Maclean, Bryant and Bradley (1987) that the presence…

Purpose: In 2 experiments, the assumption that continual orienting to tinnitus uses cognitive resources was investigated. It was hypothesized that differences in performance of tinnitus and control groups would manifest during demanding or unfamiliar tasks that required strategic, controlled processing and that reduced performance was not related…

In three studies, the effects of visual and phonological distinctness on the visual-verbal paired associate learning of dyslexic and normal readers at the age of 10-12 were examined. We hypothesized that both groups would be equally affected by the visual distinctness of the pictures, whereas the learning performance of the dyslexic children would…

The international competitiveness of national higher education systems is an important political issue in many countries. These politics drive some governments to reform their systems by borrowing elements from societies with systems thought to be superior. These authors argue that a simple transfer of isolated elements from one higher education…

Metacognition has been accorded a role in both mathematical problem solving and in the learning of mathematics. There has been consistent advocacy of the need for the promotion of metacognitive activity in both domains. Such advocacy can only be effective if the advocated process is well understood. In this paper we have four goals: to describe a…

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Teacher Performance Rate and Accuracy Scale (TPRA) which is a method of direct teacher observation used in the teacher evaluation and training component of the Comprehensive Application of Behavior Analysis to Schooling (CABAS [R]) model of schooling. The TPRA builds on the concept of academic engaged…

Student performance in an introductory soils class, Principles and Practices of Soils, at Texas Tech University was evaluated for 15 semesters as a function of several high school and college variables on course success. The variables evaluated were SAT score, percentile rank in high school class, high school chemistry background, major, gender,…

White and group used a two question, open-ended tests to separately evaluate students' learning of specific biochemical concepts in the general biology lecture and laboratory, in the first performance assessment of molecular visualization in teaching biochemistry. Two studies were devoted to protein structure using globins followed by one…

A sequential-touching task was used to investigate whether 14-month-old infants can rapidly change how they categorize a set of objects, recognizing new groupings of objects they had previously categorized in a different way. When presented with a collection of objects that could be categorized by shape (balls vs. blocks) or material (soft vs.…

The authors conducted a systematic review of studies examining correlations between assessments of function not obtained using self-report and those obtained using performance-based measures for community-dwelling older adults. Methods: Articles for this review were identified using electronic searching in MEDLINE, CINHAL, and AGELINE and…

The authors describe how a university research center partners with intermediary organizations and high schools to use research methods to support particular goals. These researcher-practitioner partnerships establish goals, articulate effective strategies, and co-construct new approaches to address the challenges of school reform. The article…

This paper discusses the online Personal Learning Planner (PLP) project underway at the National Institute of Community Innovations (NICI), one of the partners in the Teacher Education Network (TEN), a 2000 PT3 Catalyst grantee. The Web-based PLP provides a standards-linked "portfolio space" for both works in progress and demonstration collections…