This paper presents policy document analysis as practical tool that can be put to valuable use by educational leaders and can also be adopted as a research method. Educational leaders are at the forefront of policy interpretation and consequently need knowledge and skills that enable them to analyse policy as part of their work in developing,…

Have teachers become too dependent on points? This article explores educators' dependency on their points systems, and the ways that points can distract teachers from really analyzing students' capabilities and achievements. Feldman argues that using a more subjective grading system can help illuminate crucial information about students and what…

Problem solving is recognized as a critical component to becoming a self-determined individual. The development of this skill should be fostered in the early years through the use of age-appropriate direct and embedded activities. However, many early childhood teachers may not be providing adequate instruction in this area. This column provides a…

The existence of several accessible sources has led to a proliferation of mediation models in the applied research literature. Most of these sources assume endogenous variables (e.g., M, and Y) have normally distributed residuals, precluding models of binary and/or count data. Although a growing body of literature has expanded mediation models to…

This article examines dyslexia intervention, highlighting tension between traditional medical discourses and pedagogical perspectives. The first of these tensions is regarding views of the learner being variously negative and needs-based versus positive and strengths-based. The second tension is between an atypical, outlier, normative assessment…

This research aims to create a School Self Evaluation Model which will enable schools to evaluate their own educational practices. Qualitative research method is adopted in the research. Research data were collected through literature review and document analysis. Opinions about the usefulness and consistency of the developed model in respect to…

The role of digital technology in assessment has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Naturally, technology offers many practical benefits, such as increased efficiency with regard to the design, implementation and scoring of existing assessments. More importantly, it also has the potential to have profound, transformative effects…

The use of assessments that require rater judgment (i.e., rater-mediated assessments) has become increasingly popular in high-stakes language assessments worldwide. Using a systematic literature review, the purpose of this study is to identify and explore the dominant methods for evaluating rating quality within the context of research on…

Development of reliable rubrics for educational intervention studies that address reading and writing skills is labor-intensive, and could benefit from an automated approach. We compare a main ideas rubric used in a successful writing intervention study to a highly reliable wise-crowd content assessment method developed to evaluate…

Final Year Projects (FYPs) play a significant role in undergraduate education in the computing field of study, and most of the related university departments and schools consider them an essential contribution to this study. However, issues such as whether to assign the projects individually or to a group of students, the procedures followed in…

This study explored the instructors' practices of assessing students for learning in selected Ethiopian higher education institutions. Mixed method approach was employed in collecting data from 80(55 males & 25 females) instructors. Stratified and purposive sampling was used. Questionnaire, semi-structured interview, and observation were used…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of Content Representations (CoRes) construction, and reflective peer discussions on pre-service physics teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Participants consisted of 16 third year pre-service physics teachers; 12 females and 4 males. The results show that the majority of participants…

An assessment seminar series in the April 2018 school holidays saw the launch of the New Zealand Assessment Institute (NZAI), and growing excitement about innovative assessment practice across the primary and secondary school sectors. What happened at this seminar series to generate enthusiasm, especially given schools' uncertainty about…

This study is a literature review on the findings of different studies on the dimensionality of language proficiency. It aims to particularly analyze the assumptions and the statistical findings of relevant research since it has always been an endless debate among linguists and language teachers about whether language proficiency is organized as a…

The interpretation of medical images is a primary task for radiologists. Besides two-dimensional (2D) images, current imaging technologies allow for volumetric display of medical images. Whereas current radiology practice increasingly uses volumetric images, the majority of studies on medical image interpretation is conducted on 2D images. The…