In his introduction to this useful site, psychology professor Jon Mueller presents two arguments. First, he claims that our current educational system fails to teach the need for critical skills for success in the 21st century. Second, he posits that the reason for this is, at least partially, due to confusion about how to assess those skills. The website is an answer to that confusion. Here...

BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research is the product of the National Research Council's Committee on Undergraduate Biology Education to Prepare Research Scientists for the 21st Century. Offered by the National Academies Press as a free electronic report, BIO2010 details recommendations for "bringing undergraduate biology education up to the speed of today's research...

The US Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has online the 1999 edition of the well regarded Condition of Education (last reviewed in the August 16, 1996 Scout Report). This compendium of 60 indicators selected by education studies professionals and based on data from various NCES studies describes the "current status and recent progress of education in the...

The US Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has online the latest editions of one of their informative publications. As with previous editions, the 2001 edition of the Condition of Education (last reviewed in the June 09, 2000 Scout Report) reviews indicators of the state of education in the US for a general audience. The 59 indicators are concentrated in six...

Founded in 1956, the Council of the Great City Schools "serves as the national voice for urban educators, providing ways to share promising practices and address common concerns." The Council itself is a coalition of 60 of the United States' largest urban public school systems, and advocates on behalf of students through legislation, research, and management designed to improve the educational...

The Edutopia website aims to "look beyond high-stakes testing to learn about different ways of assessing the full range of student ability - social, emotional, and academic achievement." Readers may want to begin with the five articles that explain Edutopia's philosophy on assessment, which include an overview, a history, a look at what the experts say, a post about how we should measure student...

Released in November 2004, the fifth annual edition of the Brown Center Report on American Education (as it does every year) analyzes the difficulty of items on the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), examines the content training of middle school math teachers, and evaluates the Blue Ribbon Schools Program. Some of the initial findings from the report are a bit...

Originating from the Reinvention Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, this 41-page report is a follow-up report to the original Boyer Commission Report on undergraduate education first released in 1998. Following up on the 1998 report, this document examines the progress made by various universities in 10 different aspects of undergraduate educational areas identified by the...

The motivating vision behind the Rethinking Schools organization is the notion of "the common school." This vision includes the belief that schools are integral "not only to preparing all children to be full participants in society, but also to be full participants in this country's ever-tenuous experiment in democracy." The organization was founded in Milwaukee in 1986, and has been intimately...

Colleges and universities around the world have embarked on a new era of assisting teachers with their classroom manner and organization. The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at Pennsylvania State University has created this site to give educators access to a wide range of excellent teaching and learning tools. The materials and resources here are divided into the following sections:...