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. Aided by dozens of examples across grade levels and subject areas, readers will learn how to: Take a student perspective and view assessment questions and tasks as ""problems to solve."" Design multiple-choice questions that require higher-order thinking. Understand the difference between ""open"" and ""closed"" questions and how to use open questions effectively. Vary and control the features of performance assessment tasks, including cognitive level and difficulty, to target different thinking skills. Manage the assessment of higher-order thinking within the larger context of teaching and learning. Brookhart also provides an ""idea bank"" that teachers can use to jump-start their own thinking as they create assessments. Timely and practical, How to Design Questions and Tasks to Assess Student Thinking is essential reading for 21st century teachers who want their students to excel in the classroom and beyond.

As a predominant teaching paradigm, foreign language learning has increasingly been one of the crucial elements that leads to career accomplishments for students. Due to this, foreign language assessment has emerged as a major topic in the field of foreign language learning. The Handbook of Research on Perspectives in Foreign Language Assessment examines perspectives on language assessment through reflections on classroom applications and makes recommendations to strengthen quality language assessments by drawing on a variety of research methodologies. It also provides a foundation as to why foreign language assessment as a discipline should be refocused with caution, what sort of theoretical and practical implications should be in place for foreign language teachers, and in what ways it may be possible to provide futuristic perspectives on foreign language assessment for test developers and users involved in language assessment. Covering key topics such as testing, literacy, and language teaching, this major reference work is ideal for industry professionals, policymakers, administrators, researchers, academicians, scholars, practitioners, instructors, preservice teachers, teacher educators, librarians, and students.

500 Ways to Achieve Your Highest Score

We want you to succeed on the Math sections of the ACT. That's why we've selected these 500 questions to help you study more effectively, use your preparation time wisely, and get your best score. These questions are similar to the ones you'll find on the ACT, so you will know what to expect on test day. Each question includes a concise, easy-to-follow explanation in the answer key for your full understanding of the concepts. Whether you have been studying all year or are doing a last-minute review, "McGraw-Hill's 500 ACT Math Questions to Know by Test Day" will help you achieve the high score you desire.

Sharpen your subject knowledge, and build your test-taking confidence with: 500 ACT Math questions Full explanations for each question in the answer key A format parallel to that of the ACT exam

Quality accreditation in higher education institutions (HEIs) is currently a buzzword. The need to maintain high-quality education standards is a critical requirement for HEIs to remain competitive in the market and for government and regulatory bodies to ensure the quality standards of programs offered. From being an implicit requirement that is internally addressed, quality assurance activities become an explicit requirement that is regularly audited and appraised by national and international accreditation agencies. HEIs are voluntarily integrating quality management systems (QMS), institutional and program-specific, in response to the political and competitive environment in which it exists. Through its higher education department or by creating non-profitable accreditation bodies, many governments have implemented a quality framework for licensing HEIs and invigilates its adherence based on which accreditation statuses are granted for HEIs. Global Perspectives on Quality Assurance and Accreditation in Higher Education Institutions provides a comprehensive framework for HEIs to address quality assurance and quality accreditation requirements and serves as a practical tool to develop and deploy well-defined quality management systems in higher education. The book focuses on the critical aspects of quality assurance; the need to develop a concise and agile vision, mission, values, and graduate attributes; and to develop a system that effectively aligns the various activities of the HEI to the attainment of the strategic priorities listed in the institutional plans. The chapters each cover the various facets of the quality assurance framework and accreditation agencies' requirements with practical examples of each. This book is useful for HEI administrators, quality assurance specialists in HEIs, heads of academic departments, internal auditors, external auditors, and other practitioners of quality, along with stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in quality assurance and accreditation in higher education.

This book creatively redefines how teacher educators and faculty in secondary and post-secondary language education can become designers with intercultural education in mind. The author aligns theoretical frameworks with practical features for revising the modern language curriculum via themes and novel tasks that transfer language learning from classroom to community, developing communicative competence for mediation and learner autonomy along the way. For novice and experienced instructors alike, this book empowers them to: - design curriculum from transferable concepts that are worthy of understanding and have value within the culture(s) and to the learner; - develop assessments that ask the learner to solve problems, and create products that transfer concepts or address needs of various audiences that they will encounter in community, life, and work; - direct language learners through a spiral, articulated program that supports academic, career and personal goals. Pedagogical features include a glossary of key terms, research-to-practice boxes, scaffolded design tasks, reflection questions and template samples representing language exemplars from the following languages and cultures: Arabic, Chinese, Ede Yoruba, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Ladino, Nahuatl, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Te Reo Maori and Urdu. The accompanying online resources offer blank templates, PowerPoints and guides for designing bespoke curricula with key performance assessments.

Multilevel Modeling Methods with Introductory and Advanced Applications provides a cogent and comprehensive introduction to the area of multilevel modeling for methodological and applied researchers as well as advanced graduate students. The book is designed to be able to serve as a textbook for a one or two semester course in multilevel modeling. The topics of the seventeen chapters range from basic to advanced, yet each chapter is designed to be able to stand alone as an instructional unit on its respective topic, with an emphasis on application and interpretation. In addition to covering foundational topics on the use of multilevel models for organizational and longitudinal research, the book includes chapters on more advanced extensions and applications, such as cross-classified random effects models, non-linear growth models, mixed effects location scale models, logistic, ordinal, and Poisson models, and multilevel mediation. In addition, the volume includes chapters addressing some of the most important design and analytic issues including missing data, power analyses, causal inference, model fit, and measurement issues. Finally, the volume includes chapters addressing special topics such as using large-scale complex sample datasets, and reporting the results of multilevel designs. Each chapter contains a section called Try This!, which poses a structured data problem for the reader. We have linked our book to a website (http://modeling.uconn.edu) containing data for the Try This! section, creating an opportunity for readers to learn by doing. The inclusion of the Try This! problems, data, and sample code eases the burden for instructors, who must continually search for class examples and homework problems. In addition, each chapter provides recommendations for additional methodological and applied readings.

Education today has been influenced by several factors that are changing the purpose and goals of understanding and thinking and, consequently, how we assess students' understanding. One of these influences has been the rapid advancement and accessibility of digital technologies. While the use and impact of digital technologies as a valuable tool to improve teaching and learning is well documented, there is little discussion of innovative methods used to assess teaching and learning in digital environments. It is important educators view assessments considering the tools used for learning. Even when digital technologies are ubiquitous in education, assessment methods continue to use traditional assessments, typically multiple-choice or short answer. They are inadequate to provide information about a student's reasoning and conceptual understanding, thus they are limited in measuring the sophisticated knowledge and skills needed for 21-century careers. Digital technologies can support inquiry-based learning that is essential to developing a deep conceptual understanding of the content. Innovative practices that include digital-based assessment models allow students to demonstrate higher-order skills while integrating digital technologies as a powerful teaching tool. The book explores the use of digital-based assessments to measure knowledge, shares research and pedagogies related to digital-based assessments, identifies digital tools and applications for the effective assessment of learning, shares models of digital-based assessment in digital learning environments, and identifies best practices and innovation in digital-based assessment. It is ideal for higher education faculty, classroom teachers, administrators, policymakers, educational technologists, and graduate students.

What Do Principals Do? provides a comprehensive and expansive look into a high school principal's job. Rather than a survey asking principals how much time they spend on various tasks, this work provides empirical evidence of exactly what a principal does every day of the year and how much time he spends doing it. Based on the results of a three-year longitudinal study conducted by a California High School Principal of the Year (Association of California School Administrators, 2012), this book reveals precisely what a principal does, when he does it, and how much time he spends doing it. The study identifies 72 discrete tasks performed by principals and examines how much time (disaggregated by day, week, month, and year) they spend on each of those 72 tasks. The results of the data collection are the foundation of the book. The findings are supplemented with explanations and analyses that reveal the workings of K-12 education and give readers a glimpse of life in a comprehensive high school. This is a must read for everyone considering a life in public school administration. The author, Dr. Jonathan Hurst, the longest running principal in Elsinore High School's 130-year history, provides insightful commentary and relevant anecdotes from a rich and rewarding career served in a large comprehensive high school in Southern California. This book provides detailed, quantitative evidence and an explanation for just what a principal does and how much time he spends doing it. In the process, it demonstrates the requisite skills for effective school governance, administrative multi-tasking, and productive principal behavior. Data collected covers three years and encompasses over 20,500 tasks and 7,500 hours of work. This is a useful augmentation to existing administrative credential course readings as it provides evidence for what the research and authors are saying and demonstrates those skills, procedures, and operations that are an everyday part of a school administrator's job. But the appeal for What Do Principal's Do? goes beyond those seeking knowledge about educational administration. Besides the facts and figures about how a principal spends his time, Dr. Hurst offers explanations for why and how the time is spent, and he provides insight into the educational scene. This book has appeal for students in teacher education programs, because it explains school communities and life in a school system, and that also makes it appealing to the lay person or parent who wants to understand how schools work.

Our revision resources are the smart choice for those revising for the external assessment for the Enterprise BTEC Tech Award. This book will help you to: Revise all the essential content and key skills Organise your revision with the one-topic-per-page format Speed up your revision with the helpful hints on how to tackle questions and tasks Track your revision progress with at-a-glance check boxes Check your understanding with annotated example responses Practise with revision questions and answers. Revision is more than just this Guide! Our student textbook supports your learning throughout your BTEC Tech Award in Enterprise . It contains all the content you need to progress through your course and includes: Activities that will help you apply the new skills you have learned Clear explanations of topics and plenty of examples to put the learning into context 'Check my Learning' activities to help you review your understanding Opportunities to practise your skills for assessment.

Exam Board: AQA Academic Level: GCSE Subject: History: Conflict and tension in Asia, 1950-1975 First teaching: September 2016 First Exams: Summer 2018 Designed for hassle-free, independent study and priced to meet both your and your students' budgets, this combined Revision Guide and Workbook is the smart choice for those revising for AQA GCSE (9-1) History and includes: A FREE online edition One-topic-per-page format 'Now Try This' practice questions on topic pages Exam skills pages including Worked examples with exemplar answers Exam-style practice pages with practice questions in the style of the exams Guided support and hints providing additional scaffolding, to help avoid common pitfalls Full set of practice papers written to match the specification exactly

Exam Board: AQA Academic Level: GCSE Subject: Combined Science: Trilogy Higher First teaching: September 2016 First Exams: Summer 2018 Available for Foundation and Higher tiers. Each book contains three complete sets of practice papers with full worked solutions and hints and notes on the marks allocated directly alongside the relevant steps of the solution, so you can make most sense of them and build your confidence. Designed to survive the rigours of the classroom and home, all the papers are bound into a durable book. Accessible write-in format allows you to take an active role in your revision.

The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K-12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.

The main problems that prevent fast and high-quality document processing in electronic document management systems are insufficient and unstructured information, information redundancy, and the presence of large amounts of undesirable user information. The human factor has a significant impact on the efficiency of document search. An average user is not aware of the advanced option of a query language and uses typical queries. Development of a specialized software toolkit intended for information systems and electronic document management systems can be an effective solution of the tasks listed above. Such toolkits should be based on the means and methods of automatic keyword extraction and text classification. The categorization (or classification) of texts into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest in the last 10 years due to the increased availability of documents in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. Thus, research on keyword extraction, advancements in the field, and possible future solutions is of great importance in current times. Developing a Keyword Extractor and Document Classifier: Emerging Research and Opportunities presents an information extraction mechanism that can process many kinds of inputs, realize the type of text, and understand the percentage of the keywords that has to be stored. This mechanism then supports information extraction and information categorization mechanisms. This module is used to support a text summarization mechanism, which leads-with the help of the keyword extraction module-to text categorization. It employs lexical and information retrieval techniques to extract phrases from the document text that are likely to characterize it and determines the category of the retrieved text to present a summary to the users. This book is ideal for practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in the development of a new keyword extractor and document classifier method.

The evaluation of student performance and knowledge is a critical element of an educator's job as well as an essential step in the learning process for students. The quality and effectiveness of the evaluations given by educators are impacted by their ability to create and use reliable and valuable evaluations to facilitate and communicate student learning. The Handbook of Research on Assessment Literacy and Teacher-Made Testing in the Language Classroom is an essential reference source that discusses effective language assessment and educator roles in evaluation design. Featuring research on topics such as course learning outcomes, learning analytics, and teacher collaboration, this book is ideally designed for educators, administrative officials, linguists, academicians, researchers, and education students seeking coverage on an educator's role in evaluation design and analyses of evaluation methods and outcomes.

Look, Listen, Learn, LEAD: A District-Wide Systems Approach to Teaching and Learning in PreK-12 lays out the transformational journey of Hampton City Schools (HCS), an urban school division of 30 schools in southeastern Virginia. Our school district faces numerous challenges, such as 62% of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch and 14% of students holding an IEP, and in 2015-2016, Hampton City Schools' state accreditation rate was approximately half the statewide rate and on a downward trend. In only three years, that was turned around and HCS exceeded the statewide accreditation rate, a more than 100% improvement with 100% of our schools accredited without conditions. We attribute this in large part to our dedicated educators and their implementation of district-wide systems for curriculum, instruction, checking for student understanding, climate, and culture. The goal of this book is to break down the process of what it takes to bring about large-scale educational change that is sustainable. We describe a process for developing a strong mission and vision to undergird the work around a variety of district-wide systems. This book provides insights into how to improve climate and culture, create a guaranteed and viable written curriculum, establish a process for evaluating its implementation, and create a balanced assessment framework to measure student success. Complete with example templates, action plans, and lessons learned, this book is a true example of theory-into-practice to bring about sustained improvement for all learners.

What is assessment literacy? It's a handful of fundamental understandings about the testing concepts and procedures that influence educational decisions. And it just might be the most cost-effective means of real school improvement. With characteristic humor and aplomb, assessment expert W. James Popham strips away the psychometrician-speak and condenses the complexities of educational testing to six practical and action-oriented understandings about validity, reliability, fairness, score reporting, formative assessment, and affective assessment. This book is for busy educators at the classroom and leadership levels who want: Tests that are worth the valuable time they take to administer. Tests that accurately measure what student have learned. Tests that fairly reflect teacher and school effectiveness. Tests that provide the instructionally useful data that will help students learn faster and better. Assessment Literacy for Educators in a Hurry is the fastest route to acquiring the measurement moxie necessary to understand and advocate for better assessment practices and build a case for stopping ineffective and harmful ones. In just a few hours' time, you can pick up the knowledge you need to do a whole lot of good-for your students, yourself, and our schools.

The new generation of tests is faced with new challenges. In the K?12 setting, the new learning targets are intended to assess higher?order thinking skills and prepare students to be ready for college and career and to keep American students competitive with their international peers. In addition, the new generation of state tests requires the use of technology in item delivery and embedding assessment in real?world, authentic, situations. It further requires accurate assessment of students at all ability levels. One of the most important questions is how to maintain test fairness in the new assessments with technology innovative items and technology delivered tests. In the traditional testing programs such as licensure and certification tests and college admission tests, test fairness has constantly been a key psychometric issue in test development and this continues to be the case with the national testing programs. As test fairness needs to be addressed throughout the whole process of test development, experts from state, admission, and licensure tests will address test fairness challenges in the new generation assessment. The book chapters clarify misconceptions of test fairness including the use of admission test results in cohort comparison, the use of international assessment results in trend evaluation, whether standardization and fairness necessarily mean uniformity when test?takers have different cultural backgrounds, and whether standardization can insure fairness. More technically, chapters also address issues related to how compromised items and test fairness are related to classification decisions, how accessibility in item development and accommodation could be mingled with technology, how to assess special populations with dyslexia, using Blinder?Oaxaca Decomposition for differential item functioning detection, and differential feature functioning in automated scoring. Overall, this book addresses test fairness issues in state assessment, college admission testing, international assessment, and licensure tests. Fairness is discussed in the context of culture and special populations. Further, fairness related to performance assessment and automated scoring is a focus as well. This book provides a very good source of information related to test fairness issues in test development in the new generation of assessment where technology is highly involved.

The delivery of educational content can take a variety of forms, depending on the dynamics of a particular classroom. With flipped classroom environments, students can better engage and retain concepts and information. Extending the Principles of Flipped Learning to Achieve Measurable Results: Emerging Research and Opportunities shows through detailed case studies how to measure flipped learning results in order to implement Deming's P-D-S-A cycle for achieving continual improvement in the flipped classroom. The book is built upon Dr. Michael G. Moore's theory of Transactional Distance. It highlights pedagogical coverage on topics such as individual and group interactive learning, learning spaces, learning materials, and instructor and student preparation. This book is an ideal reference source for educators, professionals, graduate students, researchers, and academics seeking information on the latest instructional strategies.

Classroom Assessment for Student Learning helps readers gather accurate information about students' achievement and use the assessment process and its results effectively to improve achievement. This user-friendly guide is full of practical tips, activities, and real-world examples of what assessment for learning looks like in today's classrooms. The 3rd Edition continues to focus on five keys to quality classroom assessment, with an enhanced emphasis on the formative use of classroom assessment results. The keys help readers 1) establish a clear assessment purpose to meet the information needs of all intended users; 2) base instruction and assessment on clear learning targets; 3) design or select all assessments to meet standards of accuracy; 4) communicate summative and formative results effectively; and 5) involve students in the assessment process and in using results to further learning.