In South Africa, the Department of Basic Education and Training (DBE) is responsible for primary and secondary education (Grades R-12). In an effort to improve educational standards in literacy, numeracy and mathematics, especially in the Foundation Phase (FP) levels of education, the DBE has developed several initiatives and campaigns. To monitor…

This report informs Senator the Hon. Simon Birmingham, Minister for Education and Training, the Parliament of Australia, the Australian higher education community and the general public about the performance of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA or the Agency) during the financial year ending 30 June 2016. Prepared…

Most position descriptions for college and university faculty include benchmarks that indicate assumptions about collegiality. Criticism about this practice has been voiced for years. But case law in the United States has upheld the use of collegiality as a factor in decisions regarding faculty employment, tenure, and promotion. Indeed, several…

Background: Assessment grades are "estimates" of ability or performance and there are many reasons why an awarded grade might not meet a candidate's expectations, being either better or poorer than anticipated. Although there may be some obvious reasons for grade discrepancies, such as a lack of preparation or under-performance, there…

In order for standard setting to retain public confidence, it will be argued there are two important requirements. One is that the judges' allocation of students to performance bands would yield results broadly consistent with the expectation of the wider educational community. Secondly, in the absence of any change in educational performance,…

Recently, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) completed a study to connect the scale of the North Carolina State End of Grade (EOG) Testing Program used for North Carolina's mathematics and reading assessments with NWEA's Rausch Interval Unit (RIT) scale. Information from the state assessments was used in a study to establish…

An item banking method that does not use Item Response Theory (IRT) is described. This method provides a comparable grading system across schools that would be suitable for low-stakes testing. It uses the Angoff standard-setting method to obtain item ratings that are stored with each item. An example of such a grading system is given, showing how…

This report provides the historical background and interpretive analysis needed to understand controversies surrounding Common Core and its associated tests. In this report, Williamson M. Evers presents a revised and expanded version of his expert report for "Jindal v. United States Department of Education et al.," No. 14-CV- 534 (M.D.…

Qualitative manuscripts occupy a multidimensional world and can vary by their "latitude" (where they are with respect to the humanities and sciences), "longitude" (where they are with respect to the length and number of data excerpts), and "altitude" (where they are with respect to the level of theorizing). In this article, I discuss these 3…

According to the author, last year they set out to apply the four-step approach that they found in research from the University of Kentucky to design a unit for their language arts curriculum. They identified the appropriate standards, figured out what skills they would teach in conformance with the standards and what outcomes were expected, and…

With new Common Core State Standards assessments in K12 mathematics due to be in use by the start of the 2014-2015 school year, many district administrators and teachers do not know what they should know about them now and are not taking steps they should be taking to prepare for them. While they are aware that the assessments are being developed,…

A domestic credit union engages in a systematic performance improvement plan to better leverage a technical application within its organization. By engaging stakeholders early in the process, standardizing the organization's nomenclature, and building strategic partnerships, the credit union was able to achieve both quantitative and qualitative…

In a world where governments increasingly attempt to impose regulation on all professional activities, this paper advocates that professional standards for teachers be developed "by the profession for the profession". Foucauldian archaeology is applied to two teacher standards documents recently published in Australia, one developed at…

The aging of society requires more trained aging specialists. Are higher education institutions prepared? Results of a comparison of gerontology programs in 2000 and 2010 indicate that the number of programs has declined and that higher education is not prepared. To address this challenge, the authors propose that gerontology be professionalized.…

There has been an exponential growth in assessment methods to diagnose disorders on the autism spectrum. Many reasons for this trend exist and include advancing knowledge on how to make a diagnosis, the heterogeneity of the spectrum, the realization that different methods may be needed based on age and intellectual disability. Other factors…