This article explores the German discourse of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as it has emerged and changed over time. The conceptual elements of the triad of care, child raising and education ("Betreuung," "Erziehung" und "Bildung") are described and illustrated by salient points in the development of…

There is a widespread consensus about the need for accreditation systems for evaluating post-graduate medical education programs, but accreditation systems differ substantially across countries. A cross-country comparison of accreditation systems could provide valuable input into policy development processes. We reviewed the accreditation systems…

In many of Germany's states the procedures for school inspections were amended following completion of a first evaluation cycle. This chapter examines the way changes carried out in the course of reform were configured with respect to content and process. It is based on the assumption that school inspections represent an institution whose…

In some institutions of higher learning, one of the approaches to successful governance is through student assessment of teachers, dubbed Student Assessment of Faculty or Student Evaluation of Teaching and extensively used in the United States of America (USA). In schools and colleges, the usual largest bloc and primary stakeholders are the…

This chapter examines whether commonality can be found across different institutions' approaches to assessment in language teacher education, and whether elements of individuality in these unique settings can be incorporated into a common framework, which can then be used as a model to be adapted to suit each partner's needs and requirements.…

National and international large-scale assessments (LSA) have a major impact on educational systems, which raises fundamental questions about the validity of the measures regarding their internal structure and their relations to relevant covariates. Given its importance, research on the validity of instruments specifically developed for LSA is…

In this paper the current national legislations, the quality assurance approaches and the activities of impact analysis of three quality assurance agencies from Romania, Spain and Germany are described from a strategic perspective. The analysis shows that the general methodologies (comprising, for example, self-evaluation reports, peer reviews,…

Demands related to the frequency of and time required for interactional tasks in everyday occupational routines are continuously growing. When it comes to qualifying a person's ability to interact with others, two prototypical concepts are often used: social competences and emotional intelligence. In connection to discussions about curriculum…

There exists a need to examine the practice of pushing functional curriculum to the bottom of the list to teach students with intellectual disabilities (ID). This article discusses how students with these disabilities could better transition into society if they are instructed appropriately. The author further investigates the current practices in…

The CEFR encourages teachers to resort to task-based activities in the language classroom. However, some resistance has been offered to this approach, due to lack of appropriate training and difficulty in meeting some basic practical conditions, as well as in finding resources and examples of good practices, as shown in a survey conducted within…

Language teaching centres have been tasked predominantly with ensuring that prospective and enrolled students are able to fulfil established language criteria required for both domestic and international study programmes. It is less common, however, that language centres are responsible for ensuring the language and communicative skills of…

In this paper, I argue for more and better learning metrics in higher education, eventually through an international, comparative assessment of students' learning outcomes. Better learning measures may help to improve transparency in the system by addressing the information asymmetry problem. If not addressed adequately, the lack of transparency…

The concepts of differentiation and profiling are cornerstones in discussions about the organisation of contemporary higher education systems, following the trends of massification and global competition. This contribution provides a system-level description and comparison of the German and Dutch higher education systems regarding these topics,…

Teachers' general pedagogical/psychological knowledge (PPK) can be defined as the knowledge needed to create and optimize teaching-learning situations across subjects, including declarative and procedural knowledge of classroom management, teaching methods, classroom assessment, and student heterogeneity. Although PPK is thought to be an important…

In four experiments, we investigated whether masked stimuli in priming experiments are subjected to early or to late selection. In Experiment 1, participants classified four target-pictures as being small or large. In line with early selection accounts, prime-pictures with a different perceptual appearance as the experienced targets did not elicit…