Within the recognized tensions between statewide testing and the process of teaching and learning, formative assessment's potential for improving student learning and for shedding light "inside the black box," has received increased attention from scholars in different countries. In their critical review, Dunn & Mulvenon (2009)…

Lee Cronbach once expressed the view that all roads lead to construct validity. In looking to clarify the consensus definition of validity, and its place in assessment, Newton is also led to the troublesome idea of construct validity. To be sure, he addresses other validity issues, but in this commentary, I will restrict my attention to construct…

Over the previous two decades, the era of accountability has amplified efforts to measure educational effectiveness more than Edward Thorndike, the father of educational measurement, likely would have imagined. Expressly, the measurement structure for evaluating educational effectiveness continues to rely increasingly on one sole…

This article provides a "lineage" of decisions related to education policy which takes comparison as its motive, knowledge and method. A conceptual chain of world system, internationalization, convergence in education and globalization is briefly outlined. The paper examines decision-making in education policy according to agreement,…

Starting with the premise that better assessment leads to more informed decisions about student learning, we investigated the factors that lead to assessment improvement. We used "meta-assessment" (i.e., evaluating the assessment process) to identify academic programs in which the assessment process had improved over a two-year period.…

The Australian Disability Standards for Education 2005 (Cth) require education providers to make reasonable adjustments in educational assessment so that students with disability can participate on the same basis as other students and be able to demonstrate what they know and can do. Reasonableness is governed by a determination of the balance of…

One of the most popular student modeling approaches is Constraint-Based Modeling (CBM). It is an efficient approach that can be easily applied inside an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). Even with these characteristics, building new ITSs requires carefully designing the domain model to be taught because different sources of errors could affect…

Conceptually, learning progressions hold promise for improving assessment and instruction by precisely outlining what students know and don't know at particular stages of knowledge and skill development. Based upon a synthesis of the literature, a rationale for the use of learning progressions maps to clarify how learning progresses in English…

Background/Context: The evolution of validity understandings from mid-century to now has emphasized that test validity depends on test purpose--adding consequence considerations to issues of interpretation and evidentiary warrants. Purpose: To consider the tensions created by multiple purposes for assessment and sketch briefly how we got to where…

Meritocracy functions in Singapore as the key principle of governance and educational distribution. However, the concept of meritocracy itself contains a number of inherent contradictions, most evidently witnessed in the tension between its egalitarian and elitist strands. This tension is documented in the recommendations of Singapore's recent…

In most parts of America, teachers will soon be experiencing evaluative scrutiny far more intense than anything they've ever known. This recent ratcheting up of teacher appraisals can be traced directly to a pair of federal initiatives that have enticed educational officials in nearly every state to shape up--and also toughen up--their state's…

In response to the subjection of universities in Britain and elsewhere to 'free market' ideology and the resulting narrow concern with claimed economic effects and benefits, this essay explores some of the processes of persuasion and justification as they are employed in debate and in resistance to this damaging orthodoxy. First, the short-term…

VET (vocational education and training) is a fascinating sector. Aligned closely with the labour market and sandwiched between two major sectors, it is continually buffeted by political winds, susceptible to the ideologies of different governments. Often labelled the "poor cousin", debates continue to rage about its quality. This paper…

As teacher educators, we implore teacher candidates to understand the cultures and experiences of their students to engage them in learning. Yet, preservice teachers are seldom asked what they hope to learn in their training to become teachers of young children. In this study, we examined the interests, resources, and expectations of millennial…

This article presents the case of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Pakistan's former North-West Frontier Province, and its provincial educational assessment policies and practices. These policies and practices affect millions of Culturally Linguistically Diverse and Exceptional (CLDE) children who live in rural and remote areas, and areas afflicted by…