This article presents a historical and contemporary account of Lithuania's national public education assessment system and its transformation since the country's declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. We explore how the external examination system has developed in relation to ongoing curriculum reforms over the last 30 years,…

The purpose of this study is to describe, critically analyse and discuss the Swedish system of assessing ethics education in compulsory school through national tests. The publicly available tests from 2013 for grades six and nine have been studied as have the assessment instructions for teachers. Staff responsible for the test construction have…

All educational testing is intended to have consequences, which are assumed to be beneficial, but tests may also have unintended, negative consequences (Messick, 1989). The issue is particularly important in the case of large-scale standardized tests, such as Australia's "National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy" (NAPLAN), the…

This article reviews recent studies on English language teaching (ELT) in South Korea, where a great deal of research has been produced in recent years in local journals. In this article we review 95 studies from a pool of some 1,200 published between 2009 and 2014 on English language teaching and learning, focusing on research within the public…

This article, which draws heavily on the Sutherland Inquiry report into the delivery of National Curriculum testing in 2008, outlines important aspects of the failure that year to report test-scores on time, considers the extent to which ministers might have been held more accountable and reviews the state of the long struggle to replace the…