The Psychology of Education Section 2017 Annual Conference was held in Edinburgh between October 27-28, 2017. Learning, teaching and assessment in education was the theme of the conference. The program offered two keynotes given by Professor Christine Merrell from Durham University and Professor Lisa Woolfson from University of Strathclyde and the…

In generalizability theory studies in large-scale testing contexts, sometimes a facet is very sparsely crossed with the object of measurement. For example, when assessments are scored by human raters, it may not be practical to have every rater score all students. Sometimes the scoring is systematically designed such that the raters are…

With recent developments in technology, online tests and digital tools offer school psychologists and school counsellors alternate modes of assessment. These new technologies have the potential to increase accessibility to tests (through greater portability), allow school psychologists and school counsellors to service more students (through…

Informed by Goffman's influential essay on "The neglected situation" this paper examines the contextual and interactive dimensions of performance in large-scale educational assessments. The paper applies Goffman's participation framework and associated theory in linguistic anthropology to examine how testing situations are framed and…

This article is a state-of-the-art synthesis of literature concerned with the concept of Numeracy (also known internationally by other terms such as mathematical literacy), and the teaching, learning and assessment practices associated with this construct. Numeracy is a concept used to identify the knowledge and capabilities required to…

Institutional cultures of assessment are praised as beneficial to student learning. Yet, extant studies have not explored the theoretical foundations and pragmatic approaches to shaping cultures of assessment. The researchers used the Delphi method to explore 10 higher education assessment leaders' attitudes and theoretical perspectives regarding…

Assessment is an integral part of the instructional process. It can provide valuable information to both students and teachers. Assessments can be a vector to quality corrective instruction, a second chance for struggling students to demonstrate success, and a means to provide a more complex challenge for advanced students. This article discusses…

Educational assessments define what aspects of learning will formally be given credit and therefore have a huge impact upon teaching and learning. Although the impact of high-stakes national and international assessments on teaching and learning is considered in the literature, remarkably, there is little research on the connection between…

Recent methods to improve generalizations from nonrandom samples typically invoke assumptions such as the strong ignorability of sample selection, which is challenging to meet in practice. Although researchers acknowledge the difficulty in meeting this assumption, point estimates are still provided and used without considering alternative…

We describe an application of the assessment triangle, using a learning progression as the "cognition" vertex. We summarize two studies to evaluate whether evidence of student performance is consistent with our progression. In Study 1, we conducted think alouds using draft assessment activities and evaluated responses in relation to the…

Within this application brief, we propose a comprehensive model for mapping the shape and optimizing the effectiveness of leadership education in campus-wide university settings. The four-level model is highlighted by inclusion of a philosophy statement detailing the values and purpose of leadership education on campus, a set of skills and…

Curricular revision can be an arduous and challenging process. The literature favors a rational planned process for doing so, but offers little advice regarding how to proceed when the time required for such an approach is not available. This article describes our use of four concepts from complexity science to revise a medical school curriculum…

The purpose of this article is to describe the strategies that four undergraduate faculty science, technology, engineering, and mathematics reform communities of practice use to sustain themselves to scale up reforms in higher education. The study was informed by literature on communities of practice and analyzed data gathered through document…

W. Edwards Deming has suggested 96% of organization performance is a function of the organization's structure. He contends only about 4% of an organization's performance is attributable to the people. This is a fundamental difference as most school leaders work with the basic assumption that 80% of a school's performance is related to staff and…

Workforce projections indicate that a majority of jobs to be created in the U.S. economy will require some form of postsecondary education (Cappelli, 2015; Carnevale, Smith, & Strohl, 2010). At the same time, colleges and universities are being held accountable for completion and graduation of their students (The Commission, 2014) and…