A range of electronic corpora has become increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. Less attention, however, has been paid to making other types of digital data available. This is especially true of that which one might describe as 'unconventional', namely, dialects, child language and bilingual databases. This book is a first step toward developing similar standards for enriching and preserving these neglected resources.

 

Arguing that national standards are not written to support effective instruction and assessment, Marzano (Cardinal Stritch U.) and Haystead propose a way to transform them into usable aids for instruction, with an emphasis on formative assessment in the classroom. They claim that the standards propose too much content and that they mix multiple dimensions in a single statement.