Background: Teachers' perspectives provide crucial insights into classroom practice in early childhood education settings. Although many kindergarten programmes emphasise play "and" assessment to support children's learning and development, recent research suggests that there are some disparities between teachers' articulated role of…

Background: 'Learning to Learn' (L2L) is considered a key skill for the twenty-first century. It is understood here as a hyper-competence, which mobilises resources of the individual and/or groups in a sense-making effort to improve or update one's own learning. By means of classroom assessment during the teaching-learning cycle, teachers can…

Background: Within the realm of public education, there is a well-known "knowledge to practice gap" on current conceptions of classroom assessment. A collaborative research project undertaken by the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO) and a research team at Queen's University explored the roots of this gap from the…

Background and purpose: Research in formative assessment often pays close attention to the strategies which can be used by teachers. However, less emphasis in the literature seems to have been paid to study the application of formative assessment designs in practice. In this paper, we argue that a formative assessment design that we call…

Background: Many in education argue for the importance of incorporating teacher judgements in the assessment and reporting of student performance. Advocates of such an approach are cognisant, though, that obtaining a satisfactory level of consistency in teacher judgements poses a challenge. Purpose: This study investigates the extent to which the…

Background: Large-scale randomised controlled trials are relatively rare in education. The present study approximates to, but is not exactly, a randomised controlled trial. It was an attempt to scale up previous small peer tutoring projects, while investing only modestly in continuing professional development for teachers. Purpose: A two-year…

Background: In 2008 primary education in England reached, historically, another important phase in its development. Government reviewed the primary curriculum and some aspects of the national system of assessment. These government reviews coincided with an independent "Primary Review" based at the University of Cambridge to which the…

Background: From 2002 onwards, initiatives and first steps for the project International Comparative Analysis of Learning and Teaching (ICALT) have been taken by the inspectorates of education in England, Flanders (Belgium), Lower Saxony (Germany) and The Netherlands. The inspectorates of education in these European countries reviewed the results…