If students cannot express themselves in the language of the assessor, and if the assessor is not familiar with the cultural constraints within which students operate, it is difficult for the assessor to collect evidence of adequate performance. This article describes the assessment of three digital artefacts where the assessor strove to…

The School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, initially enacted as part of the "No Child Left Behind" amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, underwent a substantial transformation under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Under the new program, states identified 2,172 persistently low-achieving schools…

Best-selling author Marcia L. Tate brings her trademark "dendrite-growing" teaching strategies to this practitioner-friendly collection of brain-compatible methods for engaging K-12 students in social studies. Included are 20 proven strategies and more than 200 grade-leveled activities for applying them. Teachers will find concrete ways to…

Schools that give students access to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) studies are accomplishing several objectives: introducing students to higher-level academic and career studies, expanding project-based learning in the curriculum, enticing students to remain in school until graduation, and preparing students for…

The purpose of these modules is to provide an introduction to the world of probability and statistics to accelerated mathematics students at the high school level. The modules also introduce students to real world math concepts and problems that property and casualty actuaries come across in their work. They are designed to be used by teachers and…

In response to the challenges created by the implementation of a new medical school curriculum at the University of Otago in 2008, we aimed to develop a blended learning course for teaching rheumatology within the existing musculoskeletal course. We developed a multimedia online learning resource structured to support class based problem-based…

In recent years, Problem Based Learning (PBL) has been applied in medical and psychological areas of professional education. The PBL approach requires students to move past traditional choreographic methods toward making dances informed by real-world issues. In PBL, students work cooperatively to solve complex problems. Rather than being presented…

In this article, the authors provide their critique on a set of papers that investigated Mathematics Knowledge for Teachers (MKT) assessment and the underlying theory and characteristics of the validity enterprise. Three types of assumptions and inferences--elemental, structural, and ecological--are discussed in these papers. These assumptions…

In this issue of Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives, Schilling et al. are explicit about the centrality of assessment design and development and psychometric analysis in validation. Schilling and colleagues, Kane (2004, 2006), other contemporary validity theorists and practitioners, and their predecessors typically discuss…

In the context of low fertility and Australia's ageing population, a national longitudinal telephone survey, "Negotiating the Life Course" (NLC), asks women about their childbearing intentions. This paper uses conversation analysis (CA) to examine interaction between an interviewer and respondents on one NLC question about the likelihood…

High levels of disruptive behavior, discipline referrals, and suspensions are among the symptoms of schools which have lost the bonds of respect. Educators face major challenges in transforming these school cultures. This article describes how restorative practices were implemented in certain southeastern Pennsylvania schools. The process of…

Traditional Functional Analytic procedures rely upon the identification of one or two "target" behaviours for examination via observation and analysis. From these data, multiple functions are identified for each target behaviour via antecedent-behaviour-consequence data collection. However, although these methodologies have been shown to…

Dr. Orfield's highly readable guide on vision development presents ground-breaking solutions to common learning problems and is supported by substantial data. This holistic common sense--that most people do not know--is not just about vision but also how vision is interrelated with learning. It teaches how to care for a child's vision as well as…

"The question for me is how can the human mind occur in the physical universe. We now know that the world is governed by physics. We now understand the way biology nestles comfortably within that. The issue is how will the mind do that as well."--Allen Newell, December 4, 1991, Carnegie Mellon University. The argument John Anderson gives…

Students of biochemistry and related biosciences are urged to solve problems where kinetic parameters are calculated from initial rates obtained at different substrate concentrations. Troubles begin when they go to the laboratory to perform kinetic experiments and realize that usual laboratory instruments do not measure initial rates but only…