Anniversary Issue Available

Anniversary Issue is available in flipbook and PDF format   |    Email Article

Research & Practice in Assessment has cause for celebration – the journal commemorated its tenth anniversary! The board of the Virginia Assessment Group, under the leadership of RPA’s founding editor, identified the need for a journal dedicated to publishing the work of assessment scholars and practitioners, and in Fall 2006 the inaugural issue of RPA was published online. The journal grew from a newsletter of the Virginia Assessment Group to an online journal appealing to an international audience and the scholarship featured in RPA evolved as did higher education assessment.

To commemorate the tenth year of RPA, I am proud to introduce this special anniversary issue of Research & Practice in Assessment. I invited the three former editors of RPA to submit articles, contributing their thoughts and observations on the scholarship and practice of assessment with as few restrictions as possible. As one of these authors stated, I gave an inch and they took a mile! These special contributors have been active assessment researchers, scholars, and practitioners for over a decade and each left an indelible mark on RPA through their leadership and the contributions featured in this volume.

In this special anniversary issue, Anderson and Curtis provide a retrospective of the assessment literature from early psychometric studies to the more recent focus on improving student learning. The authors also include a call to involve students in student learning assessment practices. Fulcher, Smith, Sanchez, Ames, and Meixner advance the process of improving student learning through the “weigh pig, feed pig, weigh pig” model. To demonstrate this work they provide a practical example for improving student learning. Brown examines assessment and its relationship to seven accountability fields through his conceptual model. He challenges readers to close the gaps between the silos through innovative practice and research.



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