As we enter the 21st Century, many individuals both within and outside of education have expressed their general dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs in our public schools and institutions of higher education. Indeed, the literature is replete with calls for educational reform. Here, we make another call for educational reform by arguing that measurable change in student performance should serve as the gold standard for making judgments about effective instruction. We argue further that student change data can serve as an important component in the evaluation of teacher preparation programs and as a guiding force in current educational reform efforts. We describe a few promising assessment technologies that allow us to capture more direct, repeated, and contextually based measures of student learning, and propose an improvement-oriented inquiry approach to teaching and learning.
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