Many school change efforts aim to foster conditions for the development of students' twenty-first century skills in an equitable and comprehensive way, but methods to measure the frequency and quality of opportunities that students receive in school are lacking. In this study, we describe the design, testing, and initial evaluation of a…

Even though context, content, and task factors are considered essential parts of digitally delivered instructional feedback, their effects on learning performance are most often studied separately. A meta-analysis was carried out to address the effects of context, content, and task factors of digitally delivered instructional feedback on learning…

We present the validation of a questionnaire for compulsory secondary school students (seventh to tenth grade), designated "Educational learning environments for ESO pupils" (CEApA_ESO), for the purpose of evaluating learning environments. Although many instruments have been developed in this area, our work attempts to comprehensively…

Middle- and high-school students' attitudes towards online peer-assessment were described and examined in this study. One hundred and eighty-four (184) students answered a 16-item questionnaire about their experiences with an online peer-assessment tool called peerScholar. Overall, students in Canada converged with those in other countries with…

Favourable home learning environments (HLEs) support children's literacy, numeracy and social development. In large-scale research, HLE is typically measured by self-report survey, but there is little consistency between studies and many different items and latent constructs are observed. Little is known about the stability of these items and…

This article critically reviews the methodologies and methods that have been used for the evaluation of physical learning environments. To contextualize discussion about the evaluation of learning spaces, we initially chart the development of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) for non-domestic buildings. We then discuss the recent evolution of POE…

Proponents of performance assessments purport that they allow more options for student choice and autonomy and, therefore, are more motivating and more preferred by students. This study explored the role of stakes and the student's familiarity with the format in these examination preferences. A survey of 148 college students suggested that: their…

Professional schools prepare students to become competent professionals. Consequently, there is a need for assessments that can determine the acquisition of the relevant professional competencies. Although using performance assessment to replace traditional paper-and-pencil tests might provide one way to move forward, the use of performance…

Across several decades, educational researchers have investigated the contribution of the learning environment to the attainment of educational goals, such as improving academic achievement and motivation to learn. The term learning environment not only includes physical activities in the classroom (e.g. experiments kits, computers), but also…

This study investigated the effects of two contrasting learning environments on students' course experiences: a lecture-based setting to a student-activating teaching environment. In addition, the evaluative treatment involved five research conditions that went together with one of four assessment modes, namely, portfolio, case-based, peer…

The design of learning environment studies investigating students' perceptions often is multilevel in nature. This multilevel nature of studies can appear in the object of research (for example, teacher behaviour towards the individual student or towards the class), the level of perception (personalised perceptions or group perceptions) and the…

In educational research, characteristics of the learning environment are generally assessed by asking students to evaluate features of their lessons. The student ratings produced by this simple and efficient research strategy can be analysed from two different perspectives. At the "individual level", they represent the individual student's…

This article focuses on the design of competency-based performance assessment in e-learning. Though effort has been invested in designing powerful e-learning environments, relatively little attention has been paid to the design of valid and reliable assessments in such environments, leaving many questions to educational developers and teachers. As…

This study explored the role of student characteristics in studying micro teaching-learning environments. The overarching hypothesis is that teachers teach differently to micro environments in their classrooms. This study is the first of a series exploring the following four questions: (1) What student profiles are identified at the beginning of a…

In this article, we examine the construct and criteria validity of student and teacher ratings as indicators of instructional features. As parsimonious measures, student and teacher reports are frequently used to assess aspects of the learning environment. From a methodological perspective, however, both approaches have been questioned. Whereas…