In the World Library of Educationalists, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions so the world can read them in a single manageable volume, allowing readers to follow th
A practical, comprehensive manual for assessment design and implementation Assessment in Student Affairs, Second Edition offers a contemporary look at the foundational elements and practical application of assessment in student affairs. Higher education administration is increasingly called upon to demonstrate organizational effectiveness and engage in continuous improvement based on information generated through systematic inquiry. This book provides a thorough primer on all stages of the assessment process. From planning to reporting and beyond, you'll find valuable assessment strategies to help you produce meaningful information and improve your program. Combining and updating the thoroughness and practicality of Assessment in Student Affairs and Assessment Practice in Student Affairs, this new edition covers design of assessment projects, ethical practice, student learning outcomes, data collection and analysis methods, report writing, and strategies to implement change based on assessment results. Case studies demonstrate real-world application to help you clearly see how these ideas are used effectively every day, and end-of-chapter discussion questions stimulate deeper investigation and further thinking about the ideas discussed. The instructor resources will help you seamlessly integrate this new resource into existing graduate-level courses. Student affairs administrators understand the importance of assessment, but many can benefit from additional direction when it comes to designing and implementing evaluations that produce truly useful information. This book provides field-tested approaches to assessment, giving you a comprehensive how-to manual for demonstrating—and improving—the work you do every day. Build your own assessment to demonstrate organizational effectiveness Utilize quantitative and qualitative techniques and data Identify metrics and methods for measuring student learning Report and implement assessment findings effectively Accountability and effectiveness are the hallmarks of higher education administration today, and they are becoming the metrics by which programs and services are evaluated. Strong assessment skills have never been more important. Assessment in Student Affairs gives you the knowledge base and skill set you need to shine a spotlight on what you and your organization are able to achieve.
In this valuable resource, well-known scholars present a detailed understanding of contemporary theories and practices in the fields of measurement, assessment, and evaluation, with guidance on how to apply these ideas for the benefit of students and institutions. Bringing together terminology, analytical perspectives, and methodological advances, this second edition facilitates informed decision-making while connecting the latest thinking in these methodological areas with actual practice in higher education. This research handbook provides higher education administrators, student affairs personnel, institutional researchers, and faculty with an integrated volume of theory, method, and application.
This encyclopedia is the first major reference guide for students new to the field, covering traditional areas while pointing the way to future developments.
Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.
This book looks at the foundations of school self-evaluation from a scientific as from a practical perspective. Planning concepts, restructuring of education systems, organizational theory on schools, evaluation methodology and models of school effectiveness and school improvement are discussed as contributing to the overall conceptualization of school self-evaluation. A broad range of approaches is presented and methodological requirements are discussed. School self-evaluation contains controversial issues that reflect tension between the need for objectivity in a context that is permeated by values and potential conflicts of interests. Similar tensions may be seen to exist with respect to the static and "reductionist" aspects of available data collection procedures in a complex and dynamic situation and the appeal for external accountability on the one hand and improvement oriented self-refection on the other. The mission of the book is to clarify these tensions and offer ways to deal with them in practical applications. The school effectiveness knowledge base is offered as a substantive educational frame of references that serves an important function in selecting relevant factors for data collection and the use of the evaluation results.
SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY PRICE (Valid until 3 months after publication) Assessment and evaluation are crucial aspects of any educational system and rarely can they have been so central to educational policy-making and the reform of schooling as at the present time. (The introduction of the National Curriculum and Testing system in the UK and the test-based No Child Left Behind legislation in the USA are but two high-profile examples.) Assessment processes interact with curriculum and teaching methods to frame the student experience of education, and the outcomes of assessment are crucially important in determining individual educational progression and socio-economic futures. Equally, assessment is used by policy-makers to focus instruction on core elements of educational provision, and the aggregate outcomes of assessment are employed to measure the quality and effectiveness of an educational system. Good quality assessment is vital to individual student life-chances and to issues of parental choice, school reputation, government policy evaluation, and long-term economic development. Poor quality assessment can disrupt all of these elements of an effective school system by, for example, narrowing what is taught and learned to only the limited range of skills and abilities examined through paper-and-pencil tests. As serious thinking about and around assessment and evaluation continues to flourish and develop, this new title in Routledge s Major Themes in Education series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by Harry Torrance, a leading scholar in the field, this Routledge Major Work is a four-volume collection of foundational and cutting-edge contributions. With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editor, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Educational Assessment and Evaluation is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be valued by specialists in assessment and evaluation and scholars working in related areas as well as by educational policy-makers and professionals as a vital one-stop research tool.
Bringing together the expertise of top evaluation leaders from around the world, The SAGE International Handbook of Educational Evaluation addresses methods and applications in the field, particularly as they relate to policy- and decision-making in an era of globalization. The comprehensive collection of articles in the Handbook compels readers to consider globalization influences on educational evaluation within distinct genres or families of evaluation approaches. Key Features Discusses substantive issues surrounding globalization, and its implication for educational policy and practice and ultimately evaluation; Includes state-of-the-art theory chapters and method chapters within scientific, accountability-oriented, learning-oriented, and political genres of evaluation approaches; Provides real-world case exemplar chapters to illustrate core concepts within genres; Extends dialogue on controversial topics and contemporary educational evaluation tensions in the context of globalization; Summarizes, by means of an integration chapter, the issues, tensions and dilemmas confronting educational evaluators in an era of globalization. Serving as a state-of-the-art resource on educational evaluation, this volume is designed for graduate students, evaluation scholars and researchers and professional evaluation practitioners with an interest in educational program and policy evaluation.
Providing detailed illustrations using cases from pioneering schools around the globe at both the primary and secondary level, this book demonstrates how a relational orientation to evaluation in education can enhance learning processes, foster students' engagement and vitality relationships, and elevate the evaluation of teaching and the school as a whole.
"This book explores the development of online assessment and the way practitioners of online learning can modify their methodologies in the design, development, and delivery of their instruction to best accommodate their participants"--Provided by publisher.
