Assessment for Learning (AfL) is complex requiring teacher competences for collecting, analysing and interpreting evidence of student progress, and for adapting instruction and learning accordingly. In this study, the four-component instructional design (4C/ID) model for complex learning was used to design a teacher professional development (TPD)…

Tasks are essential in fostering students' learning processes, and thinking skills are considered to be of central importance to learning. In order to analyse how tasks promote the development of thinking skills in school geography, we need an instrument that looks beyond a simple distinction between lower and higher order thinking. It should be…

Objective: In the past decade, several authors have advocated that formative assessment programmes have an impact on teachers' knowledge. Consequently, various requirements have been proposed in the literature for the design of these programmes. Only few studies, however, have focused on a direct comparison between programmes with respect to…

The world is undergoing a major transformation that requires new skills and qualifications, new ways for people to know about skills and qualifications, and new ways to acquire skills and qualifications. This toolkit is about skills and qualifications, and the benefits they provide for people in a changing environment. It focuses specifically on…

Improvements in workforce skills are essential for European countries to attain higher economic growth and to compete effectively on product markets. Literature indicates a positive relationship between levels of education and productivity growth. This report builds on and expands this body of research in two ways: (1) It investigates the…

Reports on exploratory empirical investigations on the performances of Dutch secondary education students in identifying unexpressed premises and argumentation schemes. Finds that, in the absence of any disambiguating contextual information, unexpressed major premises and non-syllogistic premises are more often correctly identified that…

The AVMB (General Preparation for Society and Career) educational route was developed in the Netherlands for students with little interest in vocational offerings or with too few skills for vocational training. The program aims to equip young people with skills for simple service jobs through experiential and work-based learning. (SLD)

Results of a comparison of conventional problem-solving strategies with alternative strategies involving worked-out problems and partially worked-out problems with a completion assignment for 46 Dutch secondary school students (45 males and 1 female) support the superiority of the alternatives, particularly the completion strategy, in solving…

Career education in the Netherlands is a regular part of the curriculum and provides students the opportunity to collect information about different professions and studies. The policy of the Dutch administration is to stimulate the creation of secondary schools with both vocational and academic tracks. Career education is designed to balance…

This article gives a description of three analyses concerning the construct learning to learn and the assessment of cross-curricular skills. First, the correspondence between learning to learn and cross-curricular skills is examined by means of a theoretical content analysis. Second, the nature of cross-curricular skills is studied through a…

Two studies were conducted to determine how students perform psychomotor tasks and how teacher behavior influences performance. Study 1, conducted with about 100 technical students in a metal working class in a technical school in The Netherlands, showed that a process-based heuristic approach, stimulating students to perform complex psychomotor…

The impact of developments in work organizations on the skilling process in the Netherlands was studied through a macro analysis of available statistical information about the development of education for work in the Netherlands and case studies of three Dutch firms. The macro analysis focused on the following: vocational education in the…