In Los Angeles Unified School District (Los Angeles Unified), high school seniors who attend a Linked Learning pathway--an industry-themed school or small learning community within a school--complete a portfolio and defense. Linked Learning is an approach to education, delivered in an industry-aligned "pathway," that aims to increase the…

The edTPA, a recent example of a teacher candidate assessment, has influenced how teacher education classes are taught and how teacher candidates are learning. We describe three tensions present in candidate narratives during two separate years of edTPA implementation: attention to the edTPA rubrics vs. the student teachers' real teaching, a focus…

Educators in the visual arts and other disciplines have long been advocates for portfolio development and assessment strategies that showcase advanced high school students' highest levels of achievement as well as their longitudinal growth in authentic ways. At the time of this research study, Advanced Placement (AP) art teachers in three…

The main aim of this study was to determine the impact of authentic assessment strategies on student performance among Junior High School students, in the Tema Metropolis in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. The study employed a descriptive research design to determine the effect of authentic assessment strategies on students' performance. The…

Adoption of new instructional standards in science demands high-quality information about classroom practice. Teacher portfolios can be used to assess instructional practice and support teacher self-reflection anchored in authentic evidence from classrooms. This study investigated a new type of electronic portfolio tool that allows efficient…

The purpose of this study was to examine our work with the edTPA while teaching 100 elementary/middle school licensure students in the College of Education at our university. This study investigated: How did the process of implementing edTPA alter our licensure program both broadly and as individual teachers during years one and two?

Science teacher educators in the United States are currently preparing future science teachers to effectively implement the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) and, in thirteen states, to successfully pass a content-specific high stakes teacher performance assessment, the edTPA. Science education and teacher performance assessment…

This study examined four secondary schools in Northern Ireland serving a significant percentage of low income families: two schools from the "Maintained" (de-facto Catholic) sector, one school from the "Controlled" (de-facto Protestant) sector, and one school from the "Integrated" (mixed faith) sector. The objective…

In the field of initial teacher training, portfolios are widely used to assess pre-service teachers' performance as well as the outcomes of university-based teacher preparation programmes. However, little is known about the explicit design of portfolio assessment mechanisms in teacher preparation programmes. Issues related to the design and…

In the opening paper in this Special Edition I outlined the major issues that led to the establishment of "project e-scape". The project was intended to develop systems and approaches that enabled learners to build real-time web-based portfolios of their performance (initially) in design & technology and additionally to build systems…

Most innovations have contextual pre-cursors that prompt new ways of thinking and in their turn help to give form to the new reality. This was the case with the e-scape software development process. The origins of the system existed in software components and ideas that we had developed through previous projects, but the ultimate direction we took…

In this article I describe the context within which we developed project e-scape and the early work that laid the foundations of the project. E-scape (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments) is centred on two innovations. The first concerns a web-based approach to portfolio building; allowing learners to build their…

This paper reports on the results of a 3-year study conducted at the Centre for Schooling and Learning Technologies (CSaLT) at Edith Cowan University in collaboration with the Curriculum Council of Western Australia which concerns the potential to use digital technologies to represent the output from assessment tasks in the senior secondary…

An applied Information Technology (IT) course that is assessed using pen and paper may sound incongruous but it is symptomatic of the state of high-stakes assessment in jurisdictions such as Western Australia. Whereas technology has permeated most aspects of modern life, including schooling, and more has been demanded of education systems in terms…

In many ways assessment drives the curriculum and often pedagogy at all levels of education. In a world where it is more important what you can do with what you know rather than just what you know, it is critical that practical performance is assessed in reliable and valid ways that are also cost-effective. Increasingly the use of digital…