Early in the twentieth century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to create a pension system for the nation's college professors. The introduction of this pension system proved an ingenious educational reform. At the time, American higher education was a largely ill-defined…

Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) is a multi-site action-research project, focused on teaching and learning in pre-collegiate mathematics and English language arts courses at 11 California community colleges. In this report, the author discusses the data gathered over the course of the SPECC project and reflects…

In an insightful commentary, the author ruminates on the dilemmas of coaching in the context of high-stakes testing. [Drawn from an essay titled "Send Me in, Coach!" that the author has written for a future issue of "The New Teacher," a journal published by the City University of New York.]

Through an examination of one institution's efforts to strengthen teaching and learning on campus, the author makes a strong case for the use of common examinations as a powerful form of assessment as well as a fruitful context for faculty deliberations. Providing a continuing occasion for faculty inquiry and discussion, insuring grade…

It is hard to find a campus today that does not collect student evaluations of teaching. Not everyone, it is true, puts full stock in the results, but it is hard to argue with the idea that students have important perspectives to contribute. The writer advocates that listening to students is a good idea that does not go far enough. Describing…

The writer calls attention to the many traps associated with one of the most frequent uses of assessment: the technical difficulties of measuring changes in learning over time. Noting that psychometricians don't like "change" or "difference" scores in statistical analyses because they tend to have lower reliability than the original measures…