Educational goals and the PISA assessments: introduction to symposium

Introduction to the symposium.

Forty-five years ago a symposium on the ‘‘Lower Metazoa’’ was held in Pacific Grove, California. The resulting volume (Dougherty et al., 1963) sampled much of the then current study and thought about simple animals—sponges, cnidarians, ctenophores, flatworms, pseudocoelomates, and more. Extensive discussions of homology and phylogeny formed the basis for testing a variety of hypotheses concerni...

Introduction to The Olivieri symposium.

In failing...[her] when she needed them most, it is now clear that some members of the University’s Faculty of Medicine heard her muffled cries of academic freedom from the back room, yet their response was to serve another round of drinks and turn the music up louder. With the bombshell revelations in the...affair, the plug may have been pulled on this business sponsored party, and hopefully a...

Using FAME Assessments to Define Measurement Goals

Although assessment-based approaches and measurement-based approaches are often considered as competitors, they compliment each other very well. Assessments are strong in identifying improvement objectives within a relatively short time frame, but are weak in guiding the actual implementation of the proposed changes. Measurement, however, supports very well in supporting actual changes and prov...

The Educational Development Index: A Multidimensional Approach to Educational Achievements through PISA

This paper proposes a multidimensional index that summarizes three relevant aspects of the educational achievements, out of the data provided by the PISA Report, concerning reading abilities of 15-year-old students from 65 countries. The three aspects considered are: performance, equity, and quality. The Educational Development Index (EDI) is the geometric mean of the normalized values of those...

SYMPOSIUM Ecological Epigenetics: An Introduction to the Symposium