In this era of constant change, principals need to be able to handle high levels of complexity in its governance and policy implementation. Planning ahead is not sufficient; being able to interpret and plan the future into strategic responses is a huge focus in educational development today. The Leaders in Education Program (LEP) is a 6-month…

"Teach For All" is a global network of state-based organizations that translate "Teach For America's" market model of school reform into moral projects of nation-building abroad. Referring to this challenge as one of "scaling" the organization, its leaders elaborate a theory of change that hinges on replicability: in…

Previous investigations of the ability of content experts and test developers to estimate item difficulty have, for themost part, produced disappointing results. These investigations were based on a noncomparative method of independently rating the difficulty of items. In this article, we argue that, by eliciting comparative judgments of…

If students are to meet higher standards, all educators in the system have to learn how to engage students in reasoning about complex ideas. What levers can state boards of education and state education agencies pull to support the professional learning that makes this possible? A research-practice partnership in Tennessee may shed light on this…

In late 2014, higher education leaders and experts in pedagogy were convened by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) to develop a scalable and comprehensive program on the essentials of college teaching. The result is ACUE's Course in Effective Teaching Practices in which faculty learn about and implement evidence-based…

Geoscientists analyze and integrate spatial and temporal information at a range of scales to understand Earth processes. Despite this, the concept of scale is ill defined and taught unevenly across the K-16 continuum. This literature review focuses on two meanings of scale: one as the magnitude of the extent of a dimension and the other as a…

The purpose of this multistudy report was to adapt the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (BPNSFS) to the Italian context. Two studies were conducted. In Study 1, we investigated the dimensionality, reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity of the instrument in a sample of 544 participants (males = 41%) from 16…

Many successful piloted programs fail when scaled up to a national level. In Kenya, which has a long history of particularly ineffective implementation after successful pilot programs, the Tusome national literacy program--which receives funding from the United States Agency for International Development--is a national-level scale-up of previous…

The Next Generation Science Standards propose a multidimensional model of science learning, comprised of Core Disciplinary Ideas, Science and Engineering Practices, and Crosscutting Concepts (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Accordingly, there is a need for student assessment aligned with the new standards. Creating assessments that validly and reliably…

This report provides a description of the development process, field testing, and psychometric properties of the fall 2015 grades 3-5 Elementary Mathematics Student Assessment (EMSA), a student mathematics test designed to be administered in a whole-group setting to students in grades 3, 4, and 5. The test was administered to 2,614 participating…

Miller (1956) identified his famous limit of 7 plus or minus 2 items based in part on absolute identification--the ability to identify stimuli that differ on a single physical dimension, such as lines of different length. An important aspect of this limit is its independence from perceptual effects and its application across all stimulus types.…

As state boards of education and other state policymakers consider the future of schools, sorting fad technology from technology that accelerates learning is key. Virtual reality (VR) is one such technology with promise that seems unlikely to fizzle. Hailed as potentially transformative for education and still in the early stages of application,…

In this study we investigated when an equating conversion line is problematic in terms of gaps and clumps. We suggest using the conditional standard error of measurement (CSEM) to measure the scale scores that are inappropriate in the overall raw-to-scale transformation.

We describe the development and validation of a three-tiered diagnostic test of the water cycle (DTWC) and use it to evaluate the impact of prior learning experiences on undergraduates' misconceptions. While most approaches to instrument validation take a positivist perspective using singular criteria such as reliability and fit with a measurement…

Cultural consensus theory (CCT) is a data aggregation technique with many applications in the social and behavioral sciences. We describe the intuition and theory behind a set of CCT models for continuous type data using maximum likelihood inference methodology. We describe how bias parameters can be incorporated into these models. We introduce…