The Strategic Education Research Partnership(SERP) is a bold, ambitious plan that proposes arevolutionary program of education research anddevelopment. Its purpose is to construct a powerfulknowledge base, derived from both researchand practice, that will support the efforts of teachers,school administrators, colleges of education,and policy officials—with the ultimate goal of significantlyimproving student learning. The proposalsin this book have the potential to substantiallyimprove the knowledge base that supports teachingand learning by pursuing answers to questionsat the core of teaching practices. It calls for thelinking of research and development, includinginstructional programs, assessment tools, teachereducation programs, and materials. Best of all, thebook provides a solid framework for a program ofresearch and development that will be genuinelyuseful to classroom teachers.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation''s report card, has chronicled students'' academic achievement in America for over a quarter of a century. It has been a valued source of information about students'' performance, providing the best available trend data on the academic achievement of elementary, middle, and secondary school students in key subject areas. NAEP''s prominence and the important need for stable and accurate measures of academic achievement call for evaluation of the program and an analysis of the extent to which its results are reasonable, valid, and informative to the public.

This volume of papers considers the use and application of NAEP. It provides technical background to the recently published book, Grading the Nation''s Report Card: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress (NRC, 1999), with papers on four key topics: NAEP''s assessment development, content validity, design and use, and more broadly, the design of education indicator systems.

Since the late 1960s, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the nation''s report card—has been the only continuing measure of student achievement in key subject areas. Increasingly, educators and policymakers have expected NAEP to serve as a lever for education reform and many other purposes beyond its original role.

Grading the Nation''s Report Card examines ways NAEP can be strengthened to provide more informative portrayals of student achievement and the school and system factors that influence it. The committee offers specific recommendations and strategies for improving NAEP''s effectiveness and utility, including:

The book explores how to improve NAEP framework documents—which identify knowledge and skills to be assessed—with a clearer eye toward the inferences that will be drawn from the results.

What should the nation expect from NAEP? What should NAEP do to meet these expectations? This book provides a blueprint for a new paradigm, important to education policymakers, professors, and students, as well as school administrators and teachers, and education advocates.

How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice provides a broad overview of research on learners and learning and on teachers and teaching. It expands on the 1999 National Research Council publication How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition that analyzed the science of learning in infants, educators, experts, and more. In How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice asks how the insights from research can be incorporated into classroom practice and suggests a research and development agenda that would inform and stimulate the required change.

The committee identifies teachers, or classroom practitioners, as the key to change, while acknowledging that change at the classroom level is significantly impacted by overarching public policies. How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice highlights three key findings about how students gain and retain knowledge and discusses the implications of these findings for teaching and teacher preparation. The highlighted principles of learning are applicable to teacher education and professional development programs as well as to K-12 education. The research-based messages found in this book are clear and directly relevant to classroom practice. It is a useful guide for teachers, administrators, researchers, curriculum specialists, and educational policy makers.

Americans have long recognized that investments in public education contribute to the common good, enhancing national prosperity and supporting stable families, neighborhoods, and communities. Education is even more critical today, in the face of economic, environmental, and social challenges. Today''s children can meet future challenges if their schooling and informal learning activities prepare them for adult roles as citizens, employees, managers, parents, volunteers, and entrepreneurs. To achieve their full potential as adults, young people need to develop a range of skills and knowledge that facilitate mastery and application of English, mathematics, and other school subjects. At the same time, business and political leaders are increasingly asking schools to develop skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and self-management - often referred to as "21st century skills."

Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century describes this important set of key skills that increase deeper learning, college and career readiness, student-centered learning, and higher order thinking. These labels include both cognitive and non-cognitive skills- such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, effective communication, motivation, persistence, and learning to learn. 21st century skills also include creativity, innovation, and ethics that are important to later success and may be developed in formal or informal learning environments.

This report also describes how these skills relate to each other and to more traditional academic skills and content in the key disciplines of reading, mathematics, and science. Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century summarizes the findings of the research that investigates the importance of such skills to success in education, work, and other areas of adult responsibility and that demonstrates the importance of developing these skills in K-16 education. In this report, features related to learning these skills are identified, which include teacher professional development, curriculum, assessment, after-school and out-of-school programs, and informal learning centers such as exhibits and museums.

Assessments, understood as tools for tracking what and how well students have learned, play a critical role in the classroom. Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards develops an approach to science assessment to meet the vision of science education for the future as it has been elaborated in A Framework for K-12 Science Education (Framework) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These documents are brand new and the changes they call for are barely under way, but the new assessments will be needed as soon as states and districts begin the process of implementing the NGSS and changing their approach to science education.

The new Framework and the NGSS are designed to guide educators in significantly altering the way K-12 science is taught. The Framework is aimed at making science education more closely resemble the way scientists actually work and think, and making instruction reflect research on learning that demonstrates the importance of building coherent understandings over time. It structures science education around three dimensions - the practices through which scientists and engineers do their work, the key crosscutting concepts that cut across disciplines, and the core ideas of the disciplines - and argues that they should be interwoven in every aspect of science education, building in sophistication as students progress through grades K-12.

Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards recommends strategies for developing assessments that yield valid measures of student proficiency in science as described in the new Framework. This report reviews recent and current work in science assessment to determine which aspects of the Framework''s vision can be assessed with available techniques and what additional research and development will be needed to support an assessment system that fully meets that vision. The report offers a systems approach to science assessment, in which a range of assessment strategies are designed to answer different kinds of questions with appropriate degrees of specificity and provide results that complement one another.

Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards makes the case that a science assessment system that meets the Framework''s vision should consist of assessments designed to support classroom instruction, assessments designed to monitor science learning on a broader scale, and indicators designed to track opportunity to learn. New standards for science education make clear that new modes of assessment designed to measure the integrated learning they promote are essential. The recommendations of this report will be key to making sure that the dramatic changes in curriculum and instruction signaled by Framework and the NGSS reduce inequities in science education and raise the level of science education for all students.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation''s report card, has chronicled students'' academic achievement in America for over a quarter of a century. It has been a valued source of information about students'' performance, providing the best available trend data on the academic achievement of elementary, middle, and secondary school students in key subject areas. NAEP''s prominence and the important need for stable and accurate measures of academic achievement call for evaluation of the program and an analysis of the extent to which its results are reasonable, valid, and informative to the public.

This volume of papers considers the use and application of NAEP. It provides technical background to the recently published book, Grading the Nation''s Report Card: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress (NRC, 1999), with papers on four key topics: NAEP''s assessment development, content validity, design and use, and more broadly, the design of education indicator systems.

How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice provides a broad overview of research on learners and learning and on teachers and teaching. It expands on the 1999 National Research Council publication How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition that analyzed the science of learning in infants, educators, experts, and more. In How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice asks how the insights from research can be incorporated into classroom practice and suggests a research and development agenda that would inform and stimulate the required change.

The committee identifies teachers, or classroom practitioners, as the key to change, while acknowledging that change at the classroom level is significantly impacted by overarching public policies. How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice highlights three key findings about how students gain and retain knowledge and discusses the implications of these findings for teaching and teacher preparation. The highlighted principles of learning are applicable to teacher education and professional development programs as well as to K-12 education. The research-based messages found in this book are clear and directly relevant to classroom practice. It is a useful guide for teachers, administrators, researchers, curriculum specialists, and educational policy makers.

Since the late 1960s, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the nation''s report card—has been the only continuing measure of student achievement in key subject areas. Increasingly, educators and policymakers have expected NAEP to serve as a lever for education reform and many other purposes beyond its original role.

Grading the Nation''s Report Card examines ways NAEP can be strengthened to provide more informative portrayals of student achievement and the school and system factors that influence it. The committee offers specific recommendations and strategies for improving NAEP''s effectiveness and utility, including:

The book explores how to improve NAEP framework documents—which identify knowledge and skills to be assessed—with a clearer eye toward the inferences that will be drawn from the results.

What should the nation expect from NAEP? What should NAEP do to meet these expectations? This book provides a blueprint for a new paradigm, important to education policymakers, professors, and students, as well as school administrators and teachers, and education advocates.

The Strategic Education Research Partnership(SERP) is a bold, ambitious plan that proposes arevolutionary program of education research anddevelopment. Its purpose is to construct a powerfulknowledge base, derived from both researchand practice, that will support the efforts of teachers,school administrators, colleges of education,and policy officials—with the ultimate goal of significantlyimproving student learning. The proposalsin this book have the potential to substantiallyimprove the knowledge base that supports teachingand learning by pursuing answers to questionsat the core of teaching practices. It calls for thelinking of research and development, includinginstructional programs, assessment tools, teachereducation programs, and materials. Best of all, thebook provides a solid framework for a program ofresearch and development that will be genuinelyuseful to classroom teachers.

The Strategic Education Research Partnership(SERP) is a bold, ambitious plan that proposes arevolutionary program of education research anddevelopment. Its purpose is to construct a powerfulknowledge base, derived from both researchand practice, that will support the efforts of teachers,school administrators, colleges of education,and policy officials—with the ultimate goal of significantlyimproving student learning. The proposalsin this book have the potential to substantiallyimprove the knowledge base that supports teachingand learning by pursuing answers to questionsat the core of teaching practices. It calls for thelinking of research and development, includinginstructional programs, assessment tools, teachereducation programs, and materials. Best of all, thebook provides a solid framework for a program ofresearch and development that will be genuinelyuseful to classroom teachers.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation''s report card, has chronicled students'' academic achievement in America for over a quarter of a century. It has been a valued source of information about students'' performance, providing the best available trend data on the academic achievement of elementary, middle, and secondary school students in key subject areas. NAEP''s prominence and the important need for stable and accurate measures of academic achievement call for evaluation of the program and an analysis of the extent to which its results are reasonable, valid, and informative to the public.

This volume of papers considers the use and application of NAEP. It provides technical background to the recently published book, Grading the Nation''s Report Card: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress (NRC, 1999), with papers on four key topics: NAEP''s assessment development, content validity, design and use, and more broadly, the design of education indicator systems.

Since the late 1960s, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the nation''s report card—has been the only continuing measure of student achievement in key subject areas. Increasingly, educators and policymakers have expected NAEP to serve as a lever for education reform and many other purposes beyond its original role.

Grading the Nation''s Report Card examines ways NAEP can be strengthened to provide more informative portrayals of student achievement and the school and system factors that influence it. The committee offers specific recommendations and strategies for improving NAEP''s effectiveness and utility, including:

The book explores how to improve NAEP framework documents—which identify knowledge and skills to be assessed—with a clearer eye toward the inferences that will be drawn from the results.

What should the nation expect from NAEP? What should NAEP do to meet these expectations? This book provides a blueprint for a new paradigm, important to education policymakers, professors, and students, as well as school administrators and teachers, and education advocates.

How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice provides a broad overview of research on learners and learning and on teachers and teaching. It expands on the 1999 National Research Council publication How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition that analyzed the science of learning in infants, educators, experts, and more. In How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice asks how the insights from research can be incorporated into classroom practice and suggests a research and development agenda that would inform and stimulate the required change.

The committee identifies teachers, or classroom practitioners, as the key to change, while acknowledging that change at the classroom level is significantly impacted by overarching public policies. How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice highlights three key findings about how students gain and retain knowledge and discusses the implications of these findings for teaching and teacher preparation. The highlighted principles of learning are applicable to teacher education and professional development programs as well as to K-12 education. The research-based messages found in this book are clear and directly relevant to classroom practice. It is a useful guide for teachers, administrators, researchers, curriculum specialists, and educational policy makers.

Americans have long recognized that investments in public education contribute to the common good, enhancing national prosperity and supporting stable families, neighborhoods, and communities. Education is even more critical today, in the face of economic, environmental, and social challenges. Today''s children can meet future challenges if their schooling and informal learning activities prepare them for adult roles as citizens, employees, managers, parents, volunteers, and entrepreneurs. To achieve their full potential as adults, young people need to develop a range of skills and knowledge that facilitate mastery and application of English, mathematics, and other school subjects. At the same time, business and political leaders are increasingly asking schools to develop skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and self-management - often referred to as "21st century skills."

Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century describes this important set of key skills that increase deeper learning, college and career readiness, student-centered learning, and higher order thinking. These labels include both cognitive and non-cognitive skills- such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, effective communication, motivation, persistence, and learning to learn. 21st century skills also include creativity, innovation, and ethics that are important to later success and may be developed in formal or informal learning environments.

This report also describes how these skills relate to each other and to more traditional academic skills and content in the key disciplines of reading, mathematics, and science. Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century summarizes the findings of the research that investigates the importance of such skills to success in education, work, and other areas of adult responsibility and that demonstrates the importance of developing these skills in K-16 education. In this report, features related to learning these skills are identified, which include teacher professional development, curriculum, assessment, after-school and out-of-school programs, and informal learning centers such as exhibits and museums.

Assessments, understood as tools for tracking what and how well students have learned, play a critical role in the classroom. Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards develops an approach to science assessment to meet the vision of science education for the future as it has been elaborated in A Framework for K-12 Science Education (Framework) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These documents are brand new and the changes they call for are barely under way, but the new assessments will be needed as soon as states and districts begin the process of implementing the NGSS and changing their approach to science education.

The new Framework and the NGSS are designed to guide educators in significantly altering the way K-12 science is taught. The Framework is aimed at making science education more closely resemble the way scientists actually work and think, and making instruction reflect research on learning that demonstrates the importance of building coherent understandings over time. It structures science education around three dimensions - the practices through which scientists and engineers do their work, the key crosscutting concepts that cut across disciplines, and the core ideas of the disciplines - and argues that they should be interwoven in every aspect of science education, building in sophistication as students progress through grades K-12.

Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards recommends strategies for developing assessments that yield valid measures of student proficiency in science as described in the new Framework. This report reviews recent and current work in science assessment to determine which aspects of the Framework''s vision can be assessed with available techniques and what additional research and development will be needed to support an assessment system that fully meets that vision. The report offers a systems approach to science assessment, in which a range of assessment strategies are designed to answer different kinds of questions with appropriate degrees of specificity and provide results that complement one another.

Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards makes the case that a science assessment system that meets the Framework''s vision should consist of assessments designed to support classroom instruction, assessments designed to monitor science learning on a broader scale, and indicators designed to track opportunity to learn. New standards for science education make clear that new modes of assessment designed to measure the integrated learning they promote are essential. The recommendations of this report will be key to making sure that the dramatic changes in curriculum and instruction signaled by Framework and the NGSS reduce inequities in science education and raise the level of science education for all students.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation''s report card, has chronicled students'' academic achievement in America for over a quarter of a century. It has been a valued source of information about students'' performance, providing the best available trend data on the academic achievement of elementary, middle, and secondary school students in key subject areas. NAEP''s prominence and the important need for stable and accurate measures of academic achievement call for evaluation of the program and an analysis of the extent to which its results are reasonable, valid, and informative to the public.

This volume of papers considers the use and application of NAEP. It provides technical background to the recently published book, Grading the Nation''s Report Card: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress (NRC, 1999), with papers on four key topics: NAEP''s assessment development, content validity, design and use, and more broadly, the design of education indicator systems.

How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice provides a broad overview of research on learners and learning and on teachers and teaching. It expands on the 1999 National Research Council publication How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition that analyzed the science of learning in infants, educators, experts, and more. In How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice asks how the insights from research can be incorporated into classroom practice and suggests a research and development agenda that would inform and stimulate the required change.

The committee identifies teachers, or classroom practitioners, as the key to change, while acknowledging that change at the classroom level is significantly impacted by overarching public policies. How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice highlights three key findings about how students gain and retain knowledge and discusses the implications of these findings for teaching and teacher preparation. The highlighted principles of learning are applicable to teacher education and professional development programs as well as to K-12 education. The research-based messages found in this book are clear and directly relevant to classroom practice. It is a useful guide for teachers, administrators, researchers, curriculum specialists, and educational policy makers.

Since the late 1960s, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the nation''s report card—has been the only continuing measure of student achievement in key subject areas. Increasingly, educators and policymakers have expected NAEP to serve as a lever for education reform and many other purposes beyond its original role.

Grading the Nation''s Report Card examines ways NAEP can be strengthened to provide more informative portrayals of student achievement and the school and system factors that influence it. The committee offers specific recommendations and strategies for improving NAEP''s effectiveness and utility, including:

The book explores how to improve NAEP framework documents—which identify knowledge and skills to be assessed—with a clearer eye toward the inferences that will be drawn from the results.

What should the nation expect from NAEP? What should NAEP do to meet these expectations? This book provides a blueprint for a new paradigm, important to education policymakers, professors, and students, as well as school administrators and teachers, and education advocates.

The Strategic Education Research Partnership(SERP) is a bold, ambitious plan that proposes arevolutionary program of education research anddevelopment. Its purpose is to construct a powerfulknowledge base, derived from both researchand practice, that will support the efforts of teachers,school administrators, colleges of education,and policy officials—with the ultimate goal of significantlyimproving student learning. The proposalsin this book have the potential to substantiallyimprove the knowledge base that supports teachingand learning by pursuing answers to questionsat the core of teaching practices. It calls for thelinking of research and development, includinginstructional programs, assessment tools, teachereducation programs, and materials. Best of all, thebook provides a solid framework for a program ofresearch and development that will be genuinelyuseful to classroom teachers.