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Many medical schools are moving toward integrated curricula in response to the 2010 Carnegie report. However, there is often apprehension that student performance on standard assessment metrics of medical knowledge acquisition could suffer during the transition period. Therefore, we sought to analyze the impact of curriculum redesign on the medical knowledge acquisition of the transitional cohort, as measured by NBME subject exam scores. The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health Legacy curriculum followed a standard 2 + 2 medical school educational model, including traditional, department-based, third-year clinical clerkships. In the new ForWard curriculum, students enter clinical rotations one semester earlier, and those core clinical experiences are organized within four integrated blocks combining traditional clerkship specialties. This retrospective program evaluation compares NBME subject exam scores between the final cohort of Legacy third-year students (2016–17) and first cohort of ForWard students (2018) for the Adult Ambulatory Medicine, Medicine, Neurology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Surgery exams. NBME subject exam mean scores ranged from 75.5–79.4 for the Legacy cohort and 74.9–78.7 for the ForWard cohort, with no statistically significant differences in scores identified for each individual exam analyzed. Results remained constant when controlled for student demographic variables. Faculty and students may worry about impacts to the transitional cohort during curriculum redesign, however our results suggest no substantive negative effects to acquisition of medical knowledge during transition to an integrated curriculum. Further monitoring is necessary to examine whether medical knowledge acquisition remains stable or changes after the integrated curriculum is established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve patient outcomes in robotic surgery, robotic training and education need to be modernised and augmented. The skills and performance levels of trainees need to be objectively assessed before they operate on real patients. The main goal of the first Orsi Consensus Meeting on European Robotic Training (OCERT) was to establish the opinions of experts from different scientific societies on standardised robotic training pathways and training methodology. After a 2-d consensus conference, 36 experts identified 23 key statements allotted to three themes: training standardisation pathways, validation metrics, and implementation prerequisites and certification. After two rounds of Delphi voting, consensus was obtained for 22 of 23 questions among these three categories. Participants agreed that societies should drive and support the implementation of benchmarked training using validated proficiency-based pathways. All courses should deliver an internationally agreed curriculum with performance standards, be accredited by universities/professional societies, and, trainees should receive a certificate approved by professional societies and/or universities after successful completion of the robotic training courses. This OCERT meeting established a basis for bringing surgical robotic training out of the operating room by seeking input and consensus across surgical specialties for an objective, validated, and standardised training programme with transparent, metric-based training outcomes. The Orsi Consensus Meeting on European Robotic Training (OCERT) is an international, multidisciplinary, Delphi-panel study of scientific societies and experts focused on training in robotic surgery. The panel achieved consensus that standardised international training pathways should be the basis for a structured, validated, replicable, and certified approach to implementation of robotic technology. The Orsi Consensus Meeting on European Robotic Training (OCERT) is an international, multidisciplinary, Delphi-panel study of scientific societies and experts focused on training in robotic surgery. It established a basis for bringing surgical robotic training out of the operating room by seeking input and consensus across surgical specialties for an objective, validated, and standardised training programme with transparent, metric-based training outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment and evaluation at all levels of educational systems have become policy priorities for many countries. Two common reasons for this are student learning expectations and accountability. Although much effort has been put into the creation and refinement of content standards, standardized tests, and methods for using testing results, there has been less attention paid to the development of performance standards (proficiency levels) that greatly affect policy decision making. The present study investigates the Objective Standard Setting Model (OSS) as an improved criterion-referenced method for setting multilevel performance standards. To demonstrate how OSS can be employed for performance standard setting, our study used data from preservice teachers completing an assessment literacy test in a pre- and posttest environment. Using OSS, performance standard levels of proficient and excellent were established with clear content-related descriptions of growth in student content mastery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) has initiated educational change and school improvements. As part of the school reform agenda, ADEC has introduced school self-evaluation-Irtiqaa (SSE-Irtiqaa). This research probes the effectiveness of school administrators (SAs), including principals, vice principals, academic principals, and heads of faculty, and their perceptions of the implications and implementation of SSE-Irtiqaa. The study also intends to improve school quality and help benchmark Abu Dhabi public schools with international academic standards, by tracing challenges faced during the SSE-Irtiqaa process. Public SAs are the participants of this study. This research is an exploratory case study that employed a qualitative research tool. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with 14 administrators representing 6 public schools in Abu Dhabi. Findings and recommendations shed light on the areas and paths of development required to facilitate and improve the SSE-Irtiqaa process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the standards and guidelines for training interventional neuroradiology (INR) in Europe. Defined is the training charter in interventional neuroradiology for trainees who wishes to obtain competence in INR. Highlighted is the aim of the curriculum that constitutes an approved training program for all embers, associated members, and countries within UEMS.

Expectations and how they are communicated influence employees’ motivation, effort, goals, efficacy and performance. This study examined faculty performance evaluation standards and processes of 60 academic departments in research universities for motivationally relevant elements. Characteristics were systematically analysed to understand their content and motivational implications. They were examined for features influential on employee engagement, effort, persistence, innovation and organizational commitment, in an iterative, qualitative process. The researchers distilled eight key features of performance standards with influential, research-based motivational implications and analysed how they are demonstrated in the standards. These eight motivationally positive components were evident, but not consistent across these standards. Findings suggest that higher education institutions re-examine their faculty performance standards, consider their motivational messages and implications. Further research on faculty performance standards is also indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is meant to outline the modalities in which The Goals 2000 Educate America. Act started the reform based on national standards in American Education. After presenting the types of national standards focused on Opportunity to Learn Standards, the paper analyzes how the national standards are perceived in Romanian education, starting from a survey on representative subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the opportunities and barriers for K-12 engineering education standards. It mentions that the primary functions of an educational standard center is rallying support, increasing coherence, and measuring attainment. It highlights the difference of several standards from the content standards including performance standards, professional development standards, and teaching standards. It notes that the era of the standards-based reform and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education as the disciplinary emphasis for reform, engineering has been disregarded.

In the 1990s, most US states adopted new forms of performance-based accountability, e.g., performance-based budgeting, funding, or reporting. This study analyzed changes in institutional performance following the adoption of these new accountability standards. We measured institutional performance by representative education and research indicators—graduation rates and levels of federal research funding. We collected data from 1997 to 2007 and used a hierarchical linear modeling growth curve analysis. The main finding was that states which adopted performance-based accountability did not see a noticeable increase in institutional performance. In addition, we highlighted a critical policy issue—whether state and institutional factors contribute most to institutional performance in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the unintended consequences of the New Public Management (NPM) in universities is often feared to be a division between elite institutions focused on research and large institutions with teaching missions. However, institutional isomorphisms provide counter-incentives. For example, university rankings focus on certain output parameters such as publications, but not on others (e.g., patents). In this study, we apply Gini coefficients to university rankings in order to assess whether universities are becoming more unequal, at the level of both the world and individual nations. Our results do not support the thesis that universities are becoming more unequal. If anything, we predominantly find homogenisation, both at the level of the global comparisons and nationally. In a more restricted dataset (using only publications in the natural and life sciences), we find increasing inequality for those countries, which used NPM during the 1990s, but not during the 2000s. Our findings suggest that increased output steering from the policy side leads to a global conformation to performance standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The No Child Left Behind Act's emphasis on universal standards of academic performance, defined as proficiency in grade-level core curriculum and state academic assessments, challenges general education program personnel to higher standards of professional practice. Because schools must report student achievement by subgroups, including students with disabilities and English language learners (ELLs), reform efforts have increasingly focused on closing the achievement gap between these subgroups and mainstream peers. However, little information is available about the qualifications of teachers who serve ELLs who also have disabilities. This article delineates critical teacher competencies to address the needs of these students and of ELLs who are at risk for special education placement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementation integrity is a potentially critical issue for problem-solving teams (PST) and most response-to-intervention models. The current study hypothesized that providing performance feedback, which has consistently been shown to increase implementation integrity, to PSTs would enhance the procedural integrity of the process. The PSTs for three elementary schools were provided performance feedback with a 20-item checklist created from the literature. A multiple-baseline design across schools revealed an immediate change in level after providing performance feedback. The resulting percentages of non-overlapping data were 90.9%, 90.0%, and 100%. However, PSTs still did not monitor student progress, assess the effectiveness of the intervention, or measure the integrity with which the intervention was implemented even after receiving feedback. Thus, providing performance feedback could be a method to increase the fidelity with which critical components of data-based problem-solving are implemented, but these data suggest the need for additional research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

For the past two decades schools and teachers in New Zealand and elsewhere have been the subject of and subjected to intense public scrutiny of their performance and professional activities. In effect, policy solutions have cast teacher and school performance as a 'problem' to be solved/resolved via the intervention of the State. Consequently, the policy remedy has been the introduction of audit mechanisms such as systems of performance management to define, regulate and control teaching and teachers. That is, the State has directly intervened in the professional work and activities of teachers based on the flawed assumption that teachers cannot be trusted and therefore require the intervention of the State and its agencies to ensure their performance is aligned with organisational objectives. And while one of the hallmarks of a profession and professional practice is adherence to a set of prescribed standards, performance management has rendered teachers accountable to the State, not professional peers. And, as this article outlines, this has served to de-professionalise teaching and teachers' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study empirically evaluated a classification schema based on symbolic communication level use with students with significant cognitive disabilities. Ninety-five teachers of students with significant disabilities rated students' level of performance on 10 academic tasks. Cluster analysis suggested a range of two to four clusters solutions. Support was found for three clusters: symbolic (abstract), early symbolic (concrete), and pre-symbolic/awareness. The potential application of the classification system to planning general curriculum access and setting achievement expectations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on semi-structured interview data and participant observations of senior secondary Physical Education (PE) teachers and students at two school sites across 20 weeks of the school year. The data indicated that the teachers in this study made progressive judgements about students' level of achievement across each unit of work without explicit or overt reference to the criteria and standards represented in the schools' work programmes and in the Senior PE syllabus. The teachers' justification for such an approach was that the criteria and standards had become for them sufficiently 'internalised'. Determining students' levels of achievement was for the teachers somewhat 'intuitive', being reliant on their memory of students' performances, and influenced by the construct-irrelevant affective characteristics of the students. It is argued in this paper that such construct-irrelevance compromised the construct validity and possible inter-rater reliability of the decisions made and advantaged some students and marginalised others on the basis of characteristics that were not specifically related to the learning expected from following the syllabus. The potential inequities of such an approach are discussed and suggestions are made for the consolidation of the validity and reliability of teachers' judgements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a large body of research has focused on the effects of teachers' educational standards and/or expectations of different types of pupils related to pupils' ability, race/ethnicity, gender, and/or social class, there has been much less research on how such standards/expectations are formed by teachers' institutional structure. Previous research on the impact of institutional factors on teachers' pedagogy and curriculum has suggested the usefulness of a particular embedded, ecological model in studying the development of teachers' standards/expectations of pupils. This article uses ethnographic data gathered from one Belgian (Flemish) multicultural vocational and technical education school to illustrate the usefulness of this conceptual framework for studying the development of teachers' standards of assessment of pupils. The conclusion discusses implications for future research on the development of teachers' standards and/or expectations of pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, the new quality standard for learning, education, and training, ISO/IEC 19796-1, was published. Its purpose is to help educational organizations to develop quality systems and to improve the quality of their processes, products, and services. In this article, the standard is presented and compared to existing approaches, showing the methodology and its advantages for educational organizations. However, since the standard is a reference model, it has to be adapted to the needs and requirements of an organization. Hence, the main aspect is the adoption and implementation process: How can ISO/IEC 19796-1 successfully be implemented in educational organizations and support the variety of involved actors? To answer this question, the quality adaptation model identifies steps and instruments to bring the abstract standard into practice. The article closes with a case study evaluating the use and adequacy of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher quality is widely recognized as influencing student achievement and success in school. In this article, we consider various approaches to the assessment of teacher quality, including process-product observational measures, evaluation checklists, professional standards, large-scale surveys, and commercially available observation systems. We present examples of each from the special education literature, consider teacher education research genres for which each is appropriate, and evaluate each using a set of criteria that incorporates both practical and technical considerations. We advocate for multimethod approaches to teacher quality research and for more research relating what teachers know and do to what students learn, and we note that a stronger link between teachers and learners would allow for more rigorous evaluations of teacher preparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educators are faced with developing performance indicators for reporting to state and national agencies on pre-service teacher candidates' ability to teach using innovative pedagogy as well as content-specific standards. Portfolio assessment has gained momentum as a standard in assessing student-learning outcomes. This paper is a discussion of digital portfolio development as a stimulus to the intellectual involvement of the learner (a Type II application). Digital portfolio development is an activity that naturally involves intellectual involvement as the learner identifies the problem (developing the digital portfolio) and then problem solves as he or she creates the digital portfolio. Each student is in control of portfolio development and manipulates the Web-based software to create the professional portfolio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's reflection on geographical education standards in Germany. The German The general goal of the politicians and many experts in education is to establish a system of standards and regular evaluation in order to achieve a state of excellence in education and quality of geography in education. as soon as possible. Approach to standards involves developing 'process standards', which describe the 'throughput', or the often unknown remaining 'black box' of the classroom, involving the processes of teaching and learning in schools. Another approach to developing standards involves developing 'output standards' or 'performance standards'. These standards describe the expected outcome of teaching which will be tested. Educational standards can be formulated at different levels that is, minimum standards; regular standards; and maximum standards which is the level of excellence. Curricula should not be replaced by standards and the clear distinction between curricula and standards should be noted. Curricula contain objectives stated in terms of knowledge, abilities and attitudes. They describe what, how, Standards will contain competencies which contain such cognitive and affective features as knowledge, abilities and attitudes, together they lead to a disposition, readiness, knowledge and ability to solve concrete problems.

Focuses on the social and human dimensions of standard-setting for test scores. Creation of performance standards; Forums for long-term deliberations about public education; Importance of moral obligations to provide rigorous and caring education for U.S. children.

Focuses on the application of validity argument to the selection of senior educational administrators in the state government education authority in Western Australia. Appropriateness of performance standard; Use of standards-based reporting; Distinction between performance standard and cut score.

This viewpoint describes why excellence is a necessary goal of the teaching profession, The author describes how the Purposes of The Delta Kappa Gamma Society International can lead members towards excellence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of program evaluation is both simple and appealing. Program outcomes are measured and compared to some minimum performance standard or threshold. In practice, however, evaluation is difficult. Two fundamental problems of outcome measurement must be addressed. The first, which we call the problem of auxiliary outcomes, is that we do not observe outcome of interest. The second, which we call the problem of counterfactual outcomes, is that we do not observe the threshold standard. This article examines how performance standards should be set and applied in the face of these problems in measuring outcomes. The central message is that the proper way to implement standards varies with the prior information an evaluator can credibly bring to bear to compensate for incomplete outcome data. By combining available data with credible assumptions on treatments and outcomes, the performance of a program may be deemed acceptable, unacceptable, or indeterminate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Licensure, credentialling and academic institutions are seeking new innovative approaches to the assessment of professional competence. Central to these recent initiatives is the need to determine standards of performance, which separate the competent from the non-competent candidate. Setting standards for performance assessment is a relatively new area of study. Consequently, there is no one recommended approach to setting standards. The goal of this guide is to familiarize the reader with the framework, principles, key concepts and practical considerations of standard setting approaches and to enable the reader to make 'educated' choices in selecting the most appropriate standard setting approach for their testing needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors offers criticism of the U.S. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. He comments that it and the test-based accountability (TBA) system need to be revised. He notes that TBA test scores tend to be inflated to earn performance-based incentives. Also discussed are the so-called proficiency threshold and the proficient performance standard with criticism aimed at the NCLB reward system that focuses attention on a single performance statistic. The author also refers to a shortage of sound evidence on the benefits of the NCLB law and he discusses changes that are needed in implementing the NCLB Act.

Focuses on the Possessional Certification Teaching Standards I and II as embodied by piano teacher Veronika Harms who has a master of music degree in piano performance. Achievements of Harms; Requirements for fulfilling Standard I; Characteristics of competent music teachers.

Provides information on the set of five Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Professional Certification Program Teaching Standards created by the MTNA National Certification Commission as of December 2003. Aim of the creation of the standards; Motive for developing the teaching standards; Implication of the standards for the program's requirements.