This paper explores the perspectives of principals, teachers and key actors within the Irish primary school context regarding standardised assessment following a cultural flashpoint in the Irish education system, marked by the embedding of governmental policy regarding literacy and numeracy. A survey methodology was employed which incorporated the…

All universities are concerned with students earning D's, F's, or withdrawing (DFW) from their courses, particularly in STEM and gateway courses. One way to reduce this rate is to improve the instructional practices in a course by introducing learning strategies, including spaced and interleaved retrieval practice in formative assessments.…

This study aimed to explore the relationship between students' understanding of the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) and their learning practices through standard multiple regression (SMR) and structural equation modeling (SEM) with the purpose of unraveling the working mechanism of washback. A total number of 3105 Chinese senior high…

Peer-assisted learning and group facilitation have been proven to foster active participation in small-group learning, and these effective teaching modalities have been shown to enhance learning outcomes. This study introduced a student peer facilitator role in an anatomy small-group curriculum for pre-clerkship medical students and explored its…

There now exists an established body of work outlining the challenges international students can face as part of the acculturation process, including a range of academic and non-academic pressures to overcome. For many students, writing essays in academic English for the first time is problematic. This article considers pedagogical approaches for…

This study investigates the utilisation and perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) applications among mathematics and science teachers in enhancing students' learning experience in mathematics classrooms. One prominent AI application this research seeks to explore, given its recent rise in popularity and usage, is ChatGPT. The study aims to…

The study examined challenges EFL teachers in Burkina Faso face in teaching listening and speaking to grade 10 students in centralized education systems and how they address these issues. The primary obstacle is the focus on national exam formats, which prioritize grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, sidelining communicative language…

In the context of examination-oriented education and the pressure of college entrance examinations (known as the "Gaokao"), Chinese high school students often experience academic burnout. Previous research has shown that effort-reward imbalance (ERI) is an important predictor of academic burnout among high school students, but the…

Research on Portuguese language exams in the language assessment field remains scarce. To bridge this gap, this study examined washback from the large-scale, high-stakes Portuguese proficiency tests created by the Center of Evaluation of Portuguese as a Foreign Language ("Centro de Avaliação de Português Língua Estrangeira," or CAPLE as…

This qualitative case study aimed to examine pre-service teachers' and teacher educators' interactions during their English grammar lessons via the WhatsApp platform. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model was employed to categorize the WhatsApp interactions based on social, cognitive and teacher presences. Participants wrote their reflections for…

This research examined the writing difficulties faced by Thai students taking the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Academic Writing module. The study examined error patterns in IELTS Writing Tasks to highlight how English writing proficiency impacts international university admission prospects. Despite universities commonly…

This study explores the impact of sociocultural theory-based instruction on enhancing L2 learners' writing skills including grammatical accuracy, coherence, cohesion, task response, and lexical resources for the IELTS. To this end, a cohort of 40 participants, spanning intermediate and advanced proficiency levels, was divided into experimental and…

Moving from one educational setting to another is often accompanied by various psychological and emotional stressors. In the case of English education in Japan this is exacerbated further by an enduring ideological division in the field between English for test-taking and the use of English as a communicative tool. In order to explore potential…