How do you judge the quality of a school, a district, a teacher, a student? By the test scores, of course. Yet for all the talk, what educational tests can and can’t tell you, and how scores can be misunderstood and misused, remains a mystery to most. The complexities of testing are routinely ignored, either because they are unrecognized, or because they may be—well, complicated.Inspired by a popular Harvard course for students without an extensive mathematics background, Measu...

For decades we've been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there's still little consensus on what works, and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on, however, is that schools need to be held accountable—we need to know whether what they're doing is actually working. But what does that mean in practice?High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has become a major problem. Daniel Koretz, one of the nation's...

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ‘A monumental, gripping book … Outstanding’ SUNDAY TIMES‘Noise may be the most important book I've read in more than a decade. A genuinely new idea so exceedingly important you will immediately put it into practice. A masterpiece’Angela Duckworth, author of Grit‘An absolutely brilliant investigation of a massive societal problem that has been hiding in plain sig...

Critics of intelligence tests—writers such as Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, and Daniel Goleman—have argued in recent years that these tests neglect important qualities such as emotion, empathy, and interpersonal skills. However, such critiques imply that though intelligence tests may miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of what is important in the cognitive domain. In this book, Keith E. Stanovich challenges this widely held assumption.Stanovich shows that IQ tes...

Is our case strong enough to go to trial? Will interest rates go up? Can I trust this person? Such questions - and the judgments required to answer them - are woven into the fabric of everyday experience. This book, first published in 2002, examines how people make such judgments. The study of human judgment was transformed in the 1970s, when Kahneman and Tversky introduced their 'heuristics and biases' approach and challenged the dominance of strictly rational models. Their work highlight...

An introduction for undergraduates to every stage of sociological research, showing how to deal effectively with typical problems they might encounter. The book is fully updated to include examples from the LA riots and the 1992 presidential elections.

Bridge the great divide between distanced administrative duties and daily classroom impact. This book introduces a top-down power mechanism called defined autonomy, a concept that focuses on district-defined, nonnegotiable, common goals and a system of accountability supported by assessment tools. Defined autonomy creates an effective balance of centralized direction and individualized empowerment that allows building-level staff the stylistic freedom to respond quickly and effectively to ...

This is an beginning book on statistics and research. It could be used by undergraduate students and graduate students alike. The book covers several methods of research including correlational and experimental methods. Rudiments of descriptive statistics and inferential statistics are also presented.

This second edition provides managers and students the nuts and bolts of assessment processes and selection techniques. With this knowledge, managers learn to make informed personnel decisions based on the results of tests and assessments. The book emphasizes that employee performance predictions require well-formed hypotheses about personal characteristics that may be related to valued behavior at work. It also stresses the need for developing a theory of the attribute one hypothesizes as...

Arguing that traditional, test-based evaluation has a negative effect on many students, this book describes new methods of assessing student performance.

Research Methods in Africana Studies is a major contribution to the discipline of Africana studies and social science involving people of African descent in general. This textbook is the first of its kind, offering instruction on how to conduct culturally relevant critical research on Africana communities in the American context, in addition to the African diaspora. It contains a collection of the most widely used theories and paradigms designed for exploring, explaining, and adva...

Educational policy-makers around the world constantly make decisions about how to use scarce resources to improve the education of children. Unfortunately, their decisions are rarely informed by evidence on the consequences of these initiatives in other settings. Nor are decisions typically accompanied by well-formulated plans to evaluate their causal impacts. As a result, knowledge about what works in different situations has been very slow to accumulate. Over the last several decades, ad...