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Against a backdrop of high-stakes assessment policies in the USA, this paper explores the challenges, promises and the “state of the art” with regard to designing standardized achievement tests and educational assessment systems that are instructionally useful. Authors deliberate on the consequences of using inappropriately designed tests, and in particular tests that are insensitive to instruction, for teacher and/or school evaluation purposes.

The method used is a “moderated policy discussion”. The six invited commentaries represent voices of leading education scholars and measurement experts, juxtaposed against views of a prominent leader and nationally recognized teacher from two American education systems. The discussion is moderated with introductory and concluding remarks from the guest editor, and is excerpted from a recent blog published by Education Week. References and author biographies are presented at the end of the article.

In the education assessment profession, there is a promising movement toward more research and development on standardized assessment systems that are instructionally sensitive and useful for classroom teaching. However, the distinctions among different types of tests vis-à-vis their purposes are often unclear to policymakers, educators and other test users, leading to test misuses. The authors underscore issues related to validity, ethics and consequences when inappropriately designed tests are used in high-stakes policy contexts, offering recommendations for the design of instructionally sensitive tests and more comprehensive assessment systems that can serve a broader set of educational evaluation needs. As instructionally informative tests are developed and formalized, their psychometric quality and utility in school and teacher evaluation models must also be evaluated.

Featuring perspectives of scholars, measurement experts and educators “on the ground”, this article presents an open and balanced exchange of technical, applied and policy issues surrounding “instructionally sensitive” test design and use, along with other types of assessments needed to create comprehensive educational evaluation systems.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how participants in diverse schools newly implement the Sanford Harmony social and emotional learning (SEL) program and perceive its benefits for students and overall school climate.

The current study employed a convergent parallel mixed-methods design with a sample of five elementary schools in the western USA. Measures included classroom observations, administrator interviews, teacher interviews and focus groups, student focus groups, and a teacher questionnaire.

Findings indicated expected variation in implementation across schools, although all participants reacted favorably to the program and, importantly, would recommend the program to others. Administrators, teachers and students all saw the value of the program, particularly in terms of student relationship building and improved school climate. Implementation challenges experienced by schools were consistent with research on diffusion of innovations.

The present study demonstrates the importance of effective professional development, continued support, collective decision making and intentional integration of the SEL program throughout a school to support robust implementation and ultimately achieve intended outcomes.

Researchers have yet to examine in-depth implementation of the Sanford Harmony program and how best to support scale-up and more intentional implementation in schools. As implementation fidelity is a key component of a program achieving intended outcomes, the findings from the present study contribute to the knowledge base of supporting SEL program implementation.

This article informs school leaders and staffs about existing research findings on the use of data-driven decision-making in creating class rosters. Given that teachers are the most important school-based educational resource, decisions regarding the assignment of students to particular classes and teachers are highly impactful for student learning. Classroom compositions of peers can also influence student learning.

A literature review was conducted on the use of data-driven decision-making in the rostering process. The review addressed the merits of using various quantitative metrics in the rostering process.

Findings revealed that, despite often being purposeful about rostering, school leaders and staffs have generally not engaged in data-driven decision-making in creating class rosters. Using data-driven rostering may have benefits, such as limiting the questionable practice of assigning the least effective teachers in the school to the youngest or lowest performing students. School leaders and staffs may also work to minimize negative peer effects due to concentrating low-achieving, low-income, or disruptive students in any one class. Any data-driven system used in rostering, however, would need to be adequately complex to account for multiple influences on student learning. Based on the research reviewed, quantitative data alone may not be sufficient for effective rostering decisions.

Given the rich data available to school leaders and staffs, data-driven decision-making could inform rostering and contribute to more efficacious and equitable classroom assignments.

This article is the first to summarize relevant research across multiple bodies of literature on the opportunities for and challenges of using data-driven decision-making in creating class rosters.

The intent of this research is determine the extent to which selfreported measures of fiscal condition are consistent with commonly identified measures of fiscal condition using secondary financial data. While the field of government finance has amassed a lengthy list of research on fiscal condition and fiscal stress assessment, there remains a gap in the research on the extent to which practitioners' perceptions of fiscal stress are consistent with such measures. Our results suggest that there is limited evidence of a relationship between self-reported and objective measures of fiscal condition

This paper aims to explore the learning styles of nascent entrepreneurs in developing their entrepreneurial marketing (EM) skills in teams while studying for the entrepreneurial business degree in one UK University. It advances the interlink between EM and entrepreneurial learning (EL) theories and demonstrates how working in teams assists in developing EM skills through EL in the educational context.

This qualitative case study adopts a thematic approach to analysing 9 audio-recorded workshops of 13 entrepreneurial students who work in teams to develop entrepreneurial ventures. Audio-recorded sessions were used to monitor the entrepreneurial and marketing behaviour of the young entrepreneurs and reveal the context and skills used in their learning process.

The findings show that the observed undergraduate entrepreneurial students develop their EM competence through collective, exploratory and exploitative, as well as supportive and individual learning. These learning styles intersect and prove to be effective in mastering both marketing and venture development skills in teampreneurial educational setting.

This case study demonstrates how the concepts of EM and EL are linked in both theory and practice. It makes suggestions on how entrepreneurial courses at the university could be further developed to assist the young entrepreneurs in effectively acquiring business knowledge and skills. This knowledge can also be implemented by small and large organisations to foster a co-creative collective learning environment leading to more innovations, experimentations and creative thinking.

When employees believe in and trust their management it motivates and encourages employees' participation in decision making which improves employees' efforts, benefits their job satisfaction and commitment to work. All of these factors, in turn, contribute to a trustworthy manager‐employee relationship. While the literature supports this premise, there is little empirical evidence that patterns of causal inference in the relationship are clearly understood. This three part empirical case aims to focus on studying the relations between employee trust in management in a Quebec manufacturing company and their job satisfaction, intention to quit, level of employee participation in decision making and their commitment.

This empirical case will test five hypothesis regarding seven variables influencing the level of employee engagement and commitment, employee turnover, employee participation in decision making processes and job satisfaction.

The article finds that employee trust in management is an important determinant of their willingness to participate in decision making. Insufficient employee participation in decision making in turn leads to low level of employee job satisfaction and employee commitment. Lack of employee commitment and engagement affects the employee's intention to quit.

The sample size of the office workers was not sufficient in order to have statistically significant results of the correlations between the variables for the production department employees, and for the office/administrative staff. This could have helped to determine the level of internal communication specifically, but also the level of all of the other variables for the two different groups of employees.

This article offers useful insights for management in relation to strengthening interpersonal trust within an organization and introducing employee empowerment practices.

Owing to lack of trust in management, there will be high employee turnover. This in its turn will have a negative effect on both the performance of management and employees’ welfare, job satisfaction and commitment.

The findings provide empirical evidence to support theoretical models that link employee trust in management, participation in decision making, job satisfaction, commitment, turnover intentions and highlight the impact of these factors on organizational performance.

This article models debt market equilibrium given an expanded notion of rational behavior. The model extends Diamond's model of reputation acquisition, by assuming that some prospective borrower‐investors are opportunistic utility maximizers, while others are unwilling to mislead borrowers as to their intended use of borrowed funds. We find that the presence of honest borrowers is necessary to the function of debt markets, and that, as in real‐world markets, opportunistic and honest agents can coexist. We further find that total economic activity is positively correlated to the proportion of trustworthy agents. A major research concern in financial economics is the reconciliation of observed behavior with the predictions of the perfect‐markets, utility‐maximization models, which have traditionally supplied the dominant paradigm in finance. The main focus of recent research has been on the predictions of Agency Theory, or simply Agency (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). Agency has its origins in the property rights literature of economic theory (Alchian, 1969) and, in essence, addresses the following question: How do rational agents act in imperfect markets? A whole range of market imperfections have been analyzed ranging from the simplest type of moral hazard and adverse selection (Thakor, 1989) to the debt capacity of an industry (Maksimovic and Zechner, 1991). Indeed, few if any areas of business theory have escaped Agency's scrutiny; it has, in effect, recast the theory of the firm. In this light, the firm becomes a structure whose efficiency depends upon its ability to mitigate the costs associated with Agency. Firms are “legal fictions which serve as a nexus for a set of contracting relations among individuals” (Jensen and Meckling, 1976, p.310). One of the major gaps in the one‐period models of agency behavior has been the inability of these models to explain management's “honest” behavior (Thaler, 1992). That is, managers do not always engage in such “rational” acts as risk‐shifting, or paying excessive dividends, in order to enrich shareholders (and themselves) at the expense of bondholders. A significant move toward reconciling Agency's predictions with observed behavior has resulted from the reputation‐acquisition work of Diamond (1989), building on the work of Kreps and Wilson (1982) and Milgrom and Roberts (1982). In these models, agents acquire reputations by demonstrating some consistent mode of behavior through multiple iterations of a contractual situation. Through these iterations, principals modify their beliefs concerning the future behavior of the agent by observing certain outcomes. In Diamond's model, rational agents will not continually choose either a risky project or safe project. Their choice is a function of the interest rate and the stage of the game. Specifically, these agents choose the risky project initially; then, as attrition among risk‐takers causes interest rates to drop, they shift to the safe project for some iterations. As the end of the game approaches, however, these agents once again revert to investing in the risky project. In comparison with the attention that has been devoted to identifying and analyzing market imperfections, the former part of the Agency question — namely the “rational agents” part — has attracted much less attention in the finance literature. In Agency models, rationality has been defined strictly in terms of the individual pursuit of pecuniary wealth. This expected‐utility model has been tested experimentally and has been found to be systematically violated, in at least two fundamental ways: 1) Individuals do not behave as if they are attempting to maximize wealth (Plott, 1986), and 2) Individual behavior is affected by notions of fairness and cooperation (Kahneman, et al, 1986). Attempts to construct a theory of capital market behavior which can accommodate this observed behavior are virtually nonexistent. This lack is probably due to the presumption that opportunistic agents will drive ethical agents out of the market. However, as we demonstrate in the model developed in this paper, this is not necessarily the case. By focusing attention specifically on Agency's rationality premise, the model developed here differs from antecedent Agency models. This article investigates the implication, for financial‐market equilibra, of an alternative rationality premise. We assume that some agents will display the virtues of honesty and trustworthiness in their dealings with Other agents. Modifying Diamond's (1989) model of reputation acquisition in debt markets, the impact of these ‘virtuous’ agents on financial‐market equilibria is investigated. The model indicates that the existence of trustworthy agents in financial markets is not merely desirable from an economic perspective, but actually is essential if debt markets are not to fail. Specifically, if lenders do not belief that some non‐trivial cohort of trustworthy agents exists, then lenders cease to lend and debt markets cease to function. Also, the greater the proportion of honest agents, the greater is the overall level of economic activity; indeed, the existence of honest agents will tend to induce at least some of the opportunistic agents to act virtuously. We find that, as Bowie observes in a more general context, “[i]t only pays to lie or cheat when you can free ride off the honesty of others” (1991, pp.11–12). In addition, the belief in a non‐trivial cohort of trustworthy agents can lead to the elimination of some agency problems.