With decentralisation becoming increasingly widespread across Europe, evaluation and accountability are becoming key issues in ensuring quality provision for all (Altrichter & Maag Merki, 2010; Eurydice, 2004). In Europe, the dominant arrangement for educational accountability is school inspections. The purpose of this research is to identify…

This study reports on a large-scale implementation of Assessment for Learning (AfL) in a Swedish municipality. The implementation was founded on two principles: (1) teaching should be informed by educational research; (2) to be successful teachers' professional development needs to be based in everyday classroom practice. From these principles,…

At the end of secondary education in The Netherlands, students have to pass a final examination, consisting of an internal school-based assessment and an external national assessment. According to the Dutch inspectorate, to ensure the quality of final examinations, the discrepancy between both assessments must be less than 0.5 points (on a scale…

Ohio's Butler Tech has been able to improve its student performance results from near the worst in Ohio to among the best in six years. At Butler Tech, performance measures are collected and analyzed on a regular basis at all levels of the institution to serve as constant feedback on how well the school is educating its students. In this article,…

As part of a multiyear research study on the preparation of educators to use assessment data for instructional improvement, the present study is a pilot test of a research-based professional development intervention for career-technical teachers. Forty-eight educators at nine sites in five states participated in a 1-day workshop followed by…

Measuring History complements the cases presented in Wise Social Studies Practices (Yeager & Davis, 2005). Yeager and Davis highlight the rich and ambitious teaching that can occur in the broad context of state-level testing. In this book, the chapter authors and I bring the particular state history tests more to the fore and examine how…