With the recent uptick of violence in schools, it is essential to strategize new concepts for promoting nonviolent tendencies in children and creating safe environments. Through nonviolent teaching techniques, it is possible to effectively demonstrate mutual respect, tolerance, and compassion in order to have a lasting peace. Cultivating a Culture of Nonviolence in Early Childhood Development Centers and Schools aims to expand and deepen multicultural nonviolent teaching techniques and concepts to achieve desired outcomes for early childhood development centers, schools, institutions of higher learning, and centers of teacher development and training. While highlighting topics including child development, conflict resolution, and classroom leadership, this book is ideally designed for teachers, directors, principals, teacher organizations, school counselors, psychologists, social workers, government officials, policymakers, researchers, and students.

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.

Aspects of education law provides a comprehensive description and analysis of the laws that currently inform, prescribe and influence the activities of educators and education managers, whether on the sports fields or in the boardroom, at the blackboard or behind a desk.

This fifth edition of Aspects of education law places emphasis on the legal aspects that pertain to learner misconduct in South African schools, with extended chapters on human rights and school governance, and has been thoroughly updated in terms of new legislation and case law. It includes discussions of the position of the child as legal subject, the educator’s duty of care and the administrative aspects of school management.

Aspects of education law has become an essential resource for educators, lawyers, members of governing boards and parents, and all of those who are interested in ensuring high-quality schooling in South Africa. Previous editions have been hailed as being “among the highest in the international community” and “a must for … scholars throughout the world with an interest in comparative education law” by American academics.