Educational policies such as Race to the Top in the USA affirm a central role for testing systems in government-driven reform efforts. Such reform policies are often referred to as the global education reform movement (GERM). Changes observed with the GERM style of testing demand socially engaged validity theories that include consequential…

Background: The latest curriculum reform in Norway is one example of an education reform with a highly emphasised assessment for learning (AfL) agenda. Acknowledging that there is a lack of empirical research on AfL in physical education (PE), and that AfL potentially can have an important role to play in development of PE pedagogy, this paper set…

Educational data science (EDS) is an emerging, interdisciplinary research domain that seeks to improve educational assessment, teaching, and student learning through data analytics. Teachers have been portrayed in the EDS literature as users of pre-constructed data dashboards in educational technologies, with little consideration given to them as…

Enabling education has a respected and established place in Australian higher education as an alternative pathway into university study. While the value of enabling education in providing access to higher education is undeniable, its provision across Australia is necessarily diverse, as individual programs respond to the needs of their local…

With a national reputation for high standards and a rigorous assessment system, Massachusetts now faces a critical transition. The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education's (BESE) December 2015 decision to develop a new state assessment (Next-Generation MCAS) brought with it the opportunity to improve the 2011 state standards for…

All Florida schools teach the Florida Standards, and students' knowledge of these standards is assessed through the statewide Florida Standards Assessments (FSA). Student performance on the FSA provides important information to parents, teachers, policy makers, and the general public regarding how well students are learning the Florida Standards.…

This article reveals three emerging areas of conflict in the use of educational assessment instruments in compulsory education in Switzerland and outlines an analytical approach for detecting and analysing these areas of conflict. The approach combines a conceptual perspective, an evaluation perspective and a teaching perspective to show the…

The National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (INEE) in Mexico has begun to meet the challenges in evaluating indigenous children and teachers and the educational programs and policies targeted to them. Several evaluation projects are described in this paper. One is the "Previous, Free and Informed Consultation of Indigenous…

The Maine Legislature requested the Maine Education Policy Research Institute (MEPRI) to conduct an assessment of standardized testing in Maine schools to understand the amount, cost, and usefulness of it. This report summarizes the resulting effort, which included a literature scan, document analysis, and surveys of two groups of school…

This article summarizes assessment of cognitive skills through collaborative tasks, using field test results from the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project. This project, sponsored by Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft, aims to help educators around the world enable students with the skills to succeed in future career and…

Assessments come in many forms in part because they serve many purposes, and those purposes often vary by the stakeholders they support. Students, parents, teachers, and school, district and state leaders may all be end users of the information provided by various assessments. This brief supports state leaders' understanding of assessments by…

Arizona's First Things First partners with other agencies to create a high-quality, family-centered, comprehensive, and collaborative early childhood system that supports the development, health, and early education of all Arizona's children through age 5, helping ensure they enter kindergarten healthy and ready to succeed. One of First Things…

The future of Greece's well-being will depend on improving educational performance to raise employment and social outcomes. The challenges are significant, as public education expenditure in Greece has declined in recent years and learning outcomes are weak. To help the Greek government address these challenges, this report proposes a set of…

In December 2015, the U.S. Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and, with it, ushered in a new era of education policy in America. Leaving behind many of the most criticized aspects of its predecessor, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), this newest incarnation of the primary federal legislation guiding K-12 education provides state and…

Developed for California's local education agencies, this resource identifies six components an infrastructure needs to have in place to operate a well-functioning special education program. The publication also provides a tool for examining the degree to which these components are in place in your system. The results of that examination can help…