The present study contributes to the development of effective measures to evaluate classroom climate, especially in elementary education where these remain limited. In addition, it addresses a typical "flaw" of several studies by approaching classroom climate as a group-level construct rather than an individual characteristic. Following…

Many quality assurance systems rely on high-stakes assessment for course certification. Such methods are not as objective as they might appear; they can have detrimental effects on student motivation and may lack relevance to the needs of degree courses increasingly oriented to vocational utility. "Alternative assessment" methods can…

Principals and teachers do not use large-scale assessment results because the lack of distinct and reliable subtests prevents identifying strengths and weaknesses of students and instruction, the results arrive too late to be used, and principals and teachers need assistance to use the results to improve instruction so as to improve student…

Although skill shortages are often portrayed as a significant problem for the Australian economy, there is surprisingly little evidence about their prevalence, causes and consequences. It is difficult to find robust evidence about where skill shortages occur, why they occur, what businesses try to do about them and whether their responses are…

In the last four years McKinsey and Company have produced two highly influential reports on how to improve school systems. The first McKinsey report "How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top" has since its publication in 2007 been used to justify change in educational policy and practice in England and many other…

Although priding itself on high rates of literacy achievement, New Zealand's track record in the last two decades has noticeably declined. Successive New Zealand governments have invested heavily in trying to redress this decline with limited success. Demographic changes in population due to immigration provide a partial explanation, but arguably,…

School improvement is much sought and often claimed. However, it is questionable whether overall achievement in countries such as the USA or England has improved by any significant amount over thirty years. Several school improvement programmes have been claimed as successful, but evaluations, even where they exist, are generally poor: based on…

This paper examines the current academic and policy literatures concerning school evaluation in primary and secondary education within the OECD countries. First, it provides a typology of the existing systems of school evaluation across the OECD. It encompasses the diverse criteria and instruments commonly used to carry out schools evaluation, as…