For better or for worse, the assessment of research quality is one of the primary drivers of the behaviour of the academic community with all sorts of potential for distorting that behaviour. So, if you are going to assess research quality, how do you do it? This article explores some of the problems and possibilities, with particular reference to…

Local, state, and national economies are facing unprecedented levels of international competition. The current fiscal crisis has hampered the ability of many governments in the developed world to directly facilitate economic growth. At the same time, many governments in the developing world are investing significant new resources into local…

The collection of student feedback is seen as a central strategy to monitor the quality and standards of teaching and learning in higher education institutions. The increasing use of technology to support face-to-face, blended and distance courses has led managers as well as practitioners to become increasingly concerned to identify appropriate…

Semester assessment of college wind band members is an issue that conductors would probably agree falls within their academic freedom. Institutions may award as little as no credit or even a percentage of a credit for ensemble participation, although the time and effort required of the students and their conductor is undoubtedly equivalent to, or…

Examinees who take high-stakes assessments are usually given an opportunity to repeat the test if they are unsuccessful on their initial attempt. To prevent examinees from obtaining unfair score increases by memorizing the content of specific test items, testing agencies usually assign a different test form to repeat examinees. The use of multiple…

Wikis are one of the newest features of Web 2.0. This article describes the implementation of a project in a marketing course in which students created an interactive textbook using wiki software. Several surprises encountered along the way are described, and the unique problem of grading individual contributions to a wiki is discussed. The author…

A new reform movement in Japanese tertiary education has emerged which is more economy centered, more market sensitive, and more influenced by a government shift towards decentralization. With the dramatic decline in the 18 year old population, a buyer's market has led to the introduction of student evaluation of teaching surveys (SETs) partly as…

There is a growing body of literature about assessment in higher education. Much of it is devoted to advocating the benefits of assessment, describing how assessment initiatives and programs might be organized within an institution, identifying key attributes of successful assessment projects (leadership, resources, faculty engagement), and…

Schools and school systems throughout the nation are increasingly experimenting with using various instructional technologies to improve productivity and decrease costs, but evidence on both the effectiveness and the costs of education technology is limited. A recent report published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sets out to describe "the…

Evaluating the impact of instructional innovations and coordinating instruction, assessment, and testing present complex tensions. Many evaluation and coordination efforts aim to address these tensions by using the coherence provided by modern cognitive science perspectives on domain-specific learning. This paper introduces an alternative…

A long-held ambition for many educators and assessment experts has been to integrate summative and formative assessments so that data from external assessments used for system monitoring may also be used to shape teaching and learning in classrooms. In turn, classroom-based assessments may provide valuable data for decision makers at school and…

To conduct evaluations that can benefit individual programs as well as the field as a whole, environmental educators must have the necessary evaluation competencies. This exploratory study was conducted to determine to what extent a self-directed learning resource entitled "My Environmental Education Evaluation Resource Assistant" (MEERA) can…

This article chronicles the evolution of a large research extensive institution's General Education writing assessment efforts from an initial summative focus to a formative, improvement focus. The methods of assessment, which changed as the assessment purpose evolved, are described. As more data were collected, the measurement tool was…

Nonrandom assignment of students to teachers can bias value-added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein (2008, 2010) shows that typical value-added models indicate large counterfactual effects of fifth-grade teachers on students' fourth-grade learning, indicating that classroom assignments are far from random. This article quantifies…

This article provides the background and context to the important issue of assessment and equity in relation to Indigenous students in Australia. Questions about the validity and fairness of assessment are raised and ways forward are suggested by attending to assessment questions in relation to equity and culture-fair assessment. Patterns of…