With a greater focus on employability upon graduation, universities are increasingly considering how the course experience links to knowledge and skill development. To assist with skill development, industry practice and authentic activities should be embedded into the curriculum. Designing and including authentic assessment helps to replicate…

The aim of the present study is to investigate how the concept of systematic quality work is perceived by school teachers. Eleven interviews were conducted and analysed according to the phenomenographical method, inspired by qualitative content analysis. Five qualitatively different descriptive categories were identified: (i) tools for…

This study examines the creation and implementation of a video-based assessment of teacher knowledge of effective teaching called the Video Assessment of Teacher Knowledge (VATK). The VATK was developed with the intention of creating an easily administered, standardised assessment that can potentially provide information on teacher candidate…

The research literature identifies the limitations of pre-service teacher training in the evaluation and assessment of educational software for classroom use. This study investigated the enhancement of IT pre-service teacher training in educational software evaluation through the incorporation of software evaluation techniques from the software…

The main aim of this paper is to compare the opinions and perceptions of trainee teachers in Spain and the United Kingdom on the most appropriate procedures, activities and exercises to assess historical knowledge. A closed questionnaire was developed with a Likert-type scale (1-5). The sample was 506 questionnaires of students of the Teacher…

This paper draws upon a broader piece of research on assessment in higher education, particularly focusing on issues regarding the fairness and effectiveness of the assessment methods and their implications for the learning process. The perceptions of undergraduate students are analysed taking into account the effectiveness and fairness of both…

Contributing to a lack of studies related to generic skills (GS) assessment, especially in non-Western university contexts, this article reports a study that explored practices and challenges of assessing students' GS in the Business Administration programmes in six Vietnamese universities. Content analysis of interviews with 41 teachers of skills…

In the last two decades Dutch primary school students scored below expectation in international mathematics tests. An explanation for this may be that teachers fail to adequately assess their students' understanding of learning goals and provide timely feedback. To improve the teachers' formative assessment practice, researchers, curriculum…

This paper describes a randomised controlled trial conducted with 10 secondary schools in England to evaluate the impact and feasibility of Fresh Start as an intervention to help new entrants with low prior literacy. Fresh Start is a synthetic phonics programme for small groups of pupils, here implemented three times per week over 22 weeks. The…

Validity is a central principle of assessment relating to the appropriateness of the uses and interpretations of test results. Usually, one of the inferences that we wish to make is that the score reflects the extent of a student's learning in a given domain. Thus, it is important to establish that the assessment tasks elicit performances that…

Our study focuses on the correlation of concept map (CMap) structures and learning success tested with short answer tests, taking into particular account the complexity of the subject matter. Novice sixth grade students created CMaps about two subject matters of varying difficulty. The correlation of the complexity of CMaps with the post-test was…

School quality care has become important in many Western countries. Expectations are high, but little is known about the nature and extent of the use of self-evaluation instruments within schools. From this longitudinal study into the use of a Dutch school self-evaluation instrument, it became clear that schools vary in the extent to which they…

In this paper, we highlight the importance for teachers of having sound practical skills in interacting with students, parents, administrators and other teachers, and argue that the development of such skills is often insufficiently considered in professional training. We then present a new framework for conceptualizing practical skills in dealing…

Parental involvement and teacher perceptions of parental involvement in the education of children were studied in relation to level of parental education and pupil achievement. A questionnaire was administered to 218 parents and 60 teachers. Correlational analyses and paired-sample analyses showed teacher perceptions to be weakly related to…

Measures of school performance based on pupil attainment are becoming more sophisticated, with DfES piloting "contextualized value-added" measures. However, most such measures are based on simple sums of residuals about "expected" values, but it is clear from national data that distributions of performance are not symmetrical…