Individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities are able to reliably express their likes and dislikes through direct preference assessment. Preferred items tend to function as rewards and can therefore be used to facilitate the acquisition of new skills and promote task engagement. A number of preference assessment methods are…

Motivated by the multiple-measures clause of recent federal policy regarding student eligibility for alternate assessments based on modified academic achievement standards (AA-MASs), this study examined how scores or combinations of scores from a diverse set of assessments predicted students' end-of-year proficiency status on statewide…

Professional educators in the classroom, library, counseling center, or anywhere in between share one overarching goal: ensuring all students receive the rich, well-rounded education they need to be productive, engaged, citizens. This regular feature explores the work of professional educators--their accomplishments and their challenges--so that…

For accreditation and programmatic decision making, education school administrators use inter-rater reliability analyses to judge credibility of student-teacher assessments. Although weak levels of agreement between university-appointed supervisors and cooperating teachers are usually interpreted to indicate that the process is not being…

This article is a report of a study that used data from multiple sources to explore the hypothesis that systemic barriers inherent in Colorado's teacher evaluation policies often contribute to ineffective teacher evaluations across the state. Data were collected from extant studies, focus groups, and surveys of teachers, site…

Nonprofit organizations are under great pressure to use evaluations to show that their programs "work" and that they are "effective." However, empirical evidence indicates that nonprofits struggle to perform useful evaluations, especially when conducted under accountability pressures. An increasing body of evidence highlights…

Process use refers to the ways in which stakeholders and/or evaluands change as a function of participating in evaluation activities. Although the concept of process use has been well discussed in the literature, exploration of methodological strategies for the measurement and assessment of process use has been limited. Typically, empirical…

Service-learning is an instructional strategy used by faculty at hundreds of institutions, including those that are members of Campus Compact, an organization committed to service-learning and community/civic engagement. For this study, researchers examined a variety of online survey assessment tools used in service-learning projects. The…

Owing to the increasing diversity of assessments in higher education, feedback should be provided to students in a format that can assist future and alternative work. This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of the Essay Feedback Checklist on future alternative assessments. Participants were assigned to one of two groups, one of which…

This article analyses the student assessment procedures of 12 universities in the UK, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic with respect to their alignment with the European standards and guidelines on the quality of assessing higher education students (European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance [ESG] 1.3). Based on qualitative…

For most classroom teachers, recognizing when students are engaged in literacy activities--and perhaps more glaringly, when they are not--is a process that is key to evaluating the potential success of the instruction being offered. Students who are engaged have their eyes on what they are doing, are ardently attending to the teacher's read…

This article focuses on the assessment procedures of Norwegian PhD theses as viewed by external members of evaluation committees from three countries with different examination systems; the USA, the UK and Sweden. Their viewpoints give useful information not only on the pros and cons with the Norwegian system, but also on the strengths and…

The development of student thinking skills is a major goal of business education. As with other such goals, student outcomes assessment must be undertaken to measure goal achievement. Thinking is difficult to teach; it is also difficult to assess. The purpose of this article is to improve management educators' understanding of student…

In 2006, our School of Management began the serious path of assessing both the "hard skills" (such as accounting, finance, and strategy) and the "soft skills" (such as leadership, team work, and ethics) of our MBA Program. The data generated from examining the "soft skills" that we want students to learn within our…

It has become common practice for management students to participate in some sort of self-assessment or multisource feedback assessment (MSF; also called 360-degree assessment or multirater assessment) during their management degree program. These assessments provide students invaluable feedback about themselves and assist students in their…