Sustainable Development Goals call on Members States to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" and sets a number of targets related to technical and vocational education and training (TVET). In order to collect input from the global TVET community, UNESCO-UNEVOC organized a…

In "Using Learning Progressions to Design Vertical Scales that Support Coherent Inferences about Student Growth" (hereafter ULR), Briggs and Peck suggest that learning progressions could be used as the basis of vertical scales with naturally benchmarked descriptions of student proficiency. They propose and provide a single example of a…

Program evaluation often suffers due to time constraints, imperfect instruments, incomplete data, and the need to report standardized metrics. This article about the evaluation process for the Wi$eUp financial education program showcases the difficulties inherent in evaluation and suggests best practices for assessing program effectiveness. We…

Korea has used three different teacher evaluation systems since the 1960s: teacher performance rating, teacher performance-based pay and teacher evaluation for professional development. A number of studies have focused on an analysis of each evaluation system in terms of its advent, development, advantages and disadvantages, but these studies have…

Modelling-based teaching activities have been designed and analysed from distinct theoretical perspectives. In this paper, we use one of them--the model of modelling diagram (MMD)--as an analytical tool in a regular classroom context. This paper examines the challenges that arise when the MMD is used as an analytical tool to characterise the…

Value-added "Progress" measures are to be introduced for all English schools in 2016 as "headline" measures of school performance. This move comes despite research highlighting high levels of instability in value-added measures and concerns about the omission of contextual variables in the planned measure. This article studies…

The presence of the general factor in interest and self-efficacy assessment and its meaning are reviewed. The general factor is found in all interest and self-efficacy assessment and has been viewed as (a) a nuisance factor with little effect on assessment, (b) a variable having substantive meaning and thus worthy of including in interpretation,…

Information literacy instruction traditionally focuses on evaluating a source for bias, relevance, and timeliness, and rightfully so; this critical perspective is vital to a well-formed research process. However, this process is incomplete without a similar focus on the potential biases that the student brings to his or her interactions with…

The paper examines the benefits claimed for action learning at individual, organisational and inter-organisational levels. It goes on to identify both generic difficulties in evaluating development programmes and action learning specifically. The distinction between formative and summative evaluation is considered and a summative evaluation…

Management by Objective through Open Performance Review and Appraisal System (OPRAS) was introduced in Tanzania for evaluation of public servants work performance in 2004. The aim of this study was to investigate how teachers perceive the implementation of OPRAS as a mechanism of assessing their work performance and making them accountable for…

A review of articles published in "Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education," over the last eight years (2006-2013) on assessment in higher education, since the introduction of the Bologna process, is the subject of the paper. The first part discusses the key issue of assessment in higher education and the method used for selecting…

The rapid rise of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) signals a shift in the ways in which digital teaching and learning are engaged in and understood. Drawing upon a comprehensive search of nine leading academic databases, this paper examines the initial phase of MOOC scholarship (2009-2013), and offers an analysis of these empirical studies that…

The article examines the tensions one superintendent in the USA experienced as he evaluated principals in a high-stakes environment that had undergone numerous transformations at the central office. Using qualitative methods, primarily, shadowing techniques, observations and debriefing, the following tensions emerged and were examined in light of…

Large classes are a reality in many tertiary programmes in the South African context and this involves several challenges. One of these is the assessment process, including the provision of meaningful feedback and implementing strategies to support struggling students. Due to large student numbers, multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are often used…

In the current article, we consider the influential position of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and discuss several methodological areas that demonstrate the need for caution when using and interpreting PISA results. We motivate our argument by briefly describing the program's increased influence in educational policy…