In the United States, the nomenclature of adult education includes adult literacy, adult secondary education, and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) services provided to undereducated and limited English proficient adults. Those receiving adult education services have diverse reasons for seeking additional education. With the passage of the WIA, the assessment of adult education students became mandatory-regardless of their reasons for seeking services. The law does allow the states and local programs flexibility in selecting the most appropriate assessment for the student. The purpose of the NRC's workshop was to explore issues related to efforts to measure learning gains in adult basic education programs, with a focus on performance-based assessments.
Value-added methods refer to efforts to estimate the relative contributions of specific teachers, schools, or programs to student test performance. In recent years, these methods have attracted considerable attention because of their potential applicability for educational accountability, teacher pay-for-performance systems, school and teacher improvement, program evaluation, and research. Value-added methods involve complex statistical models applied to test data of varying quality. Accordingly, there are many technical challenges to ascertaining the degree to which the output of these models provides the desired estimates. Despite a substantial amount of research over the last decade and a half, overcoming these challenges has proven to be very difficult, and many questions remain unanswered-at a time when there is strong interest in implementing value-added models in a variety of settings. The National Research Council and the National Academy of Education held a workshop, summarized in this volume, to help identify areas of emerging consensus and areas of disagreement regarding appropriate uses of value-added methods, in an effort to provide research-based guidance to policy makers who are facing decisions about whether to proceed in this direction.
The routine jobs of yesterday are being replaced by technology and/or shipped off-shore. In their place, job categories that require knowledge management, abstract reasoning, and personal services seem to be growing. The modern workplace requires workers to have broad cognitive and affective skills. Often referred to as "21st century skills," these skills include being able to solve complex problems, to think critically about tasks, to effectively communicate with people from a variety of different cultures and using a variety of different techniques, to work in collaboration with others, to adapt to rapidly changing environments and conditions for performing tasks, to effectively manage one's work, and to acquire new skills and information on one's own. The National Research Council (NRC) has convened two prior workshops on the topic of 21st century skills. The first, held in 2007, was designed to examine research on the skills required for the 21st century workplace and the extent to which they are meaningfully different from earlier eras and require corresponding changes in educational experiences. The second workshop, held in 2009, was designed to explore demand for these types of skills, consider intersections between science education reform goals and 21st century skills, examine models of high-quality science instruction that may develop the skills, and consider science teacher readiness for 21st century skills. The third workshop was intended to delve more deeply into the topic of assessment. The goal for this workshop was to capitalize on the prior efforts and explore strategies for assessing the five skills identified earlier. The Committee on the Assessment of 21st Century Skills was asked to organize a workshop that reviewed the assessments and related research for each of the five skills identified at the previous workshops, with special attention to recent developments in technology-enabled assessment of critical thinking and problem-solving skills. In designing the workshop, the committee collapsed the five skills into three broad clusters as shown below: Cognitive skills: nonroutine problem solving, critical thinking, systems thinking Interpersonal skills: complex communication, social skills, team-work, cultural sensitivity, dealing with diversity Intrapersonal skills: self-management, time management, self-development, self-regulation, adaptability, executive functioning Assessing 21st Century Skills provides an integrated summary of the presentations and discussions from both parts of the third workshop.
This volume offers insights from modeling relations between teacher quality, instructional quality and student outcomes in mathematics across countries. The relations explored take the educational context, such as school climate, into account. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is the only international large-scale study possessing a design framework that enables investigation of relations between teachers, their teaching, and student outcomes in mathematics. TIMSS provides both student achievement data and contextual background data from schools, teachers, students and parents, for over 60 countries. This book makes a major contribution to the field of educational effectiveness, especially teaching effectiveness, where cross-cultural comparisons are scarce. For readers interested in teacher quality, instructional quality, and student achievement and motivation in mathematics, the comparisons across cultures, grades, and time are insightful and thought-provoking. For readers interested in methodology, the advanced analytical methods, combined with application of methods new to educational research, illustrate interesting novel directions in methodology and the secondary analysis of international large-scale assessment (ILSA).
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.
Classroom Assessment and Educational Measurement explores the ways in which the theory and practice of both educational measurement and the assessment of student learning in classroom settings mutually inform one another. Chapters by assessment and measurement experts consider the nature of classroom assessment information, from student achievement to affective and socio-emotional attributes; how teachers interpret and work with assessment results; and emerging issues in assessment such as digital technologies and diversity/inclusion. This book uniquely considers the limitations of applying large-scale educational measurement theory to classroom assessment and the adaptations necessary to make this transfer useful. Researchers, graduate students, industry professionals, and policymakers will come away with an essential understanding of how the classroom assessment context is essential to broadening contemporary educational measurement perspectives. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing. There seems to be widespread agreement that—when it comes to the writing skills of college students—we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong. Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules—such as the five-paragraph essay—designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments. In Why They Can't Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.
The book analyzes worldwide changes in school organization and the teaching profession, and how the profession has been impacted by education policies that promote assessments and accountability. It also identifies some shifts in professional positions, statuses and profiles, and characterizes the impact and contextualization of professional standards that shape teaching practices and the management of schools. Further, the book provides relevant comparative and empirical data on the restructuring of the teaching profession in an era of globalization through a critical perspective on and an overview of the main research and comparative findings across countries. As such, the book is not only directed to educational researchers but will also interest professionals and policymakers, addressing a broader education and policy community concerned by the new aspects shaping the teaching profession in the 21st century.
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.