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This chapter presents the author’s experiences over a 47-year career as a feminist applied sociologist at Educational Testing Service (ETS), a private non-profit research and testing company. The author presents early experiences that influenced her to become a feminist and a sociologist; her reactions to graduate school, the culture of academia, and her choice to leave before finishing her PhD to become an applied sociologist; the author’s early work in the ETS research department which included graduate school and gender-related publications; and the substantial part of author’s career as an applied sociologist and administrator in ETS’s corporate side. ETS’s founding with the mission to expand educational opportunities with fair, well-designed tests, and to further social science knowledge laid the groundwork for a corporate culture characterized by values of fairness, respect for individuals and diversity, and integrity. The ETS Standards for Quality and Fairness, along with annual reviews of testing programs for following these measurement standards, supported cultural norms, attitudes, and behaviors related to fairness. The multifaceted concept of fairness has been key not only to the author’s experience within the corporate culture but to the wide variety of responsibilities that the author had during her career.

Open Courseware, in many ways, was the starting point towards mainstream discussion and adoption of open learning, particularly in higher education. In its first iteration, the concept specifically excluded assessment recognition, and credentialisation, which aims to ‘liberate’ knowledge without shattering the designing, teaching and awarding processes traditional education has relied upon for decades, if not centuries.

This chapter offers practicable alternatives to some of the most pressing problems facing urban public education in the United States. The narrowing of the curriculum and the emphasis on “high stakes testing” and test preparation has contributed greatly to the high dropout rates in urban public schools. “Freedom Schooling: A New Approach to Federal-Local Cooperation in Public Education” was published in 1978 to address these problems by calling for an expansion of alternative public schools modeled after the innovative educational programs developed at urban magnet schools in the arts, music, science, foreign languages and cultures, sports and athletics, and other fields. Since that time, research on the public magnet schools has revealed that the innovative curricula increase student motivation, lower dropout rates, and produce levels of academic achievement higher than in traditional public schools. In calling for the development of “freedom schools” as alternatives to the traditional public schools, the goal is to motivate the students through the innovative content areas and have them pursue mastery of specific skills and talents in the arts, music, sports, technology, and other areas. Moving beyond the narrow emphasis on testing in reading and mathematics, students attending the “freedom schools” would be expected to demonstrate mastery of specific artistic forms, musical techniques, athletic practices, technological innovations, or other skills. The opening of “freedom schools,” focused on mastery learning, would address the academic failure in urban public schools by raising motivational levels and developing student mastery in specific areas of educational practice.

For more than a decade, there has been an increased focus on the need for accountability and transparency about the value that United States and international higher education institutions add to students' knowledge and skills to help increase their economic productivity and career opportunities. This focus on accountability and transparency within the U.S. dates to 2005 when former US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings established a Commission on the Future of Higher Education to develop a national strategy for higher education reform. This led to an increased focus on measuring value added within higher education institutions and using value-added scores to make institutional comparisons. This chapter presents a brief history of value added within the United States and presents high-level summaries of initiatives, assessments used to measure value added, and a review of how value added is measured. We also present challenges around methodology and interpretation of results. Lastly, we discuss some of the future directions in evaluating value added in higher education and areas for future research.

Parts of a recent (1989) Educational Testing Service publication are reprinted here: a report of a comparative survey (by tests) of mathematics and science education among 13‐year‐olds in Canada, Ireland, Korea, Spain, the UK and the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

Introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

Provides information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

In 1983, BRS of Latham, New York introduced two databases entirely devoted to information on tests. The new databases are the Educational Testing Service Test Collection (search label ETSF) and the Mental Measurements Yearbook (search label MM‐YD). BRS is at present the only vendor for both databases. The ETSF file is produced by the Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ and is based on their collection. The database has over 5,000 test records with newly acquired instruments added through quarterly updates. Tests included measure or assess achievement, aptitude, attitudes, interests, personality, sensory‐motor skills, special populations, and vocational/occupational areas. Both commercially available tests and unpublished research instruments are included. Foreign language versions of tests are also included. The searchable paragraphs are accession number, title, author, year, decriptors, identifiers, grade level, target audience, notes, abstract, availability, resource type, update code, and subtests. A unique feature of this database is the ability to search within a test for subtests that assess specific skills or factors.

Requests for tests and measuring instruments for use in class assignments and faculty and student research are both familiar and frustrating to most academic librarians. In typical scenarios, an education student wants to measure aggression in children or a nursing student needs a test for patient mobility. Even the faculty member who may know the name of a scale may not know its author or how to obtain a copy. All are looking for a measure applicable to a specific situation and each has come to the library in hopes of walking away with a copy of the measure that day. Those familiar with measurement literature know that accessing measures can be time consuming, circuitous, and sometimes impossible. The standard test reference books, such as the Mental Measurements Yearbook and Tests in Print (both of which are published by the Buros Institute, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska), are of limited use. These books typically do not include actual instruments or noncommercial tests from the journal and report literature. While these standard reference books are essential to a test literature collection, sole use of them would mean bypassing large numbers of instruments developed and published only in articles, reports, papers, and dissertations. Sources are available to locate additional measurements, tests, and instruments, but they are widely dispersed in the print and electronic literature.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

The findings provide information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.