Every school district needs a system of sound superintendent performance evaluation. School district superintendents are and must be accountable to their school boards, communities, faculties, and students for delivering effective educational leadership. To assure that they are evaluated fairly, competently, and functionally, superintendents need to help their school boards plan and implement evaluation systems that adhere to the evaluation standards.Superintendent Performance E...

Teacher Evaluation: Guide to Professional Practice is organized around four dominant, interrelated core issues: professional standards, a guide to applying the Joint Committee's Standards, ten alternative models for the evaluation of teacher performance, and an analysis of these selected models. The book draws heavily on research and development conducted by the Federally funded national Center for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation (CREATE). Th...

What goals should be addressed by educational programs? What priorities should be assigned to the different goals? What funds should be allocated to each goal? How can quality services be maintained with declining school enrollments and shrinking revenues? What programs could be cut if necessary? The ebb and flow of the student population, the changing needs of our society and the fluctuation of resources constantly impinge on the education system. Educators must deal with students, commun...

This book discusses key aspects of life in schools and classrooms, and surveys the changes that have occurred over the years in educational research, policy making and practice in these school and classroom settings. It not only examines cutting-edge research in these areas, but also showcases good practices in the field. Among the topics reviewed are recent developments in assessment, methods for collecting and analysing data on classroom practice, school leadership and the pros and cons ...

Over the course of ten years, this extensive qualitative study focused on the academic resilience phenomenon. The research delves into the educational resilience experiences of fifty low socioeconomic students of color from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. In addition to chronicling specific protective factors and processes active in the students' lives, several symbiotic relationships between groups of protective factors are documented and explored. A Resilience Cycle ...

This book takes a developmental perspective at the use of scoring rubrics to assess student work. Citing developmental characteristics of each age, the author presents examples and adaptations of assessment rubrics on a variety of subjects for teachers from kindergarten through adult/college. After a presentation of foundation information on rubrics, separate chapters are devoted to each grade level from primary through adult. Written so that each chapter can be addressed independently, th...

This book examines the crucial role that sound file selection plays in assessing listening ability and introduces the reader to the procedure of textmapping, which explores how to exploit a sound file. The book discusses the role of the task identifier, the task instructions and the example, and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of different test methods. Guidelines for developing listening items, and procedures that can be used in peer review and task revision are also provided. A ran...

Developing educational software requires thinking, problematizing, representing, modeling, implementing and analyzing pedagogical objectives and issues, as well as conceptual models and software architectures. Computer scientists face the difficulty of understanding the particular issues and phenomena to be taken into account in educational software projects and of avoiding a naïve technocentered perspective. On the other hand, actors with backgrounds in human or social sciences face the d...

In this thesis, quantum estimation theory is applied to investigate uncertainty relations between error and disturbance in quantum measurement. The author argues that the best solution for clarifying the attainable bound of the error and disturbance is to invoke the estimation process from the measurement outcomes such as signals from a photodetector in a quantum optical system. The error and disturbance in terms of the Fisher information content have been successfully formulated and provi...

With new standards emphasizing higher-order thinking skills, students will have to demonstrate their ability to do far more than simply remember facts and procedures. But what's the best way for teachers to ensure that students have such skills? In this highly accessible guide, author Susan M. Brookhart shows how to do just that, by providing specific guidelines for designing targeted questions and tasks that align with standards and assess students' ability to think at higher levels....

Research evidence indicates that formative assessment is one of the most effective ways of enhancing student learning. It is, however, difficult to implement successfully, principally because what is tested through summative assessment has such a powerful influence on teacher and student actions. This book scrutinizes the relationship between testing and learning from alternative perspectives to the dominant literature from the major Anglophone countries. It develops the notion of contextu...