Over 2000 years ago, Aristotle wrote of four distinct causes at play in the world we know. Those causes, the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause, were meant to refer to ontological and, by extension, epistemological concerns, and were powerful enough to be seized upon and used in some form by those of very…

As China runs towards the forefront of global economic power, people begin to pay growing attention to the quality of life and medical education that play a significant role in sustaining the development by providing healthier labor force. It is evident that in the process of globalization new curricula in line with international standards top…

Practitioners in the field of pharmacy are often confronted with ill-structured problems. Specifically, pharmacists are tasked with making patient-specific recommendations that are both safe and effective, which requires combining knowledge from the biomedical, behavioral, and pharmaceutical sciences. Given the dynamic nature of pharmacy as a…

There is a growing agreement among the academic community, in schools and among researchers, concerning the advantages of formative assessment and the limitations of large-scale assessment. In this paper, the school-based assessment reform of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) popularly known in India as continuous and comprehensive…

This article presents a critical review of the education system and curriculum reforms in basic education in Kenya from independence in 1963 to date. It presents a philosophical and pragmatic basis for content review and the curriculum reform process. Data collection involved a critical review of relevant literature; including several curriculum…

Formative assessment is strongly advocated as a critical component of Australian teachers' work. This article examines the evolving policy expectations and support for teachers' formative assessment practices in the context of two recent Australian education reforms: the introduction of the first national curriculum and of new professional…

In higher education, the principle of constructive alignment for devising teaching, learning activities and assessment tasks is the underpinning concept in curriculum design and development to achieve intended learning outcomes. Student's deep learning is critical and it is the responsibility of the curriculum developer to make sure that synergy…

British Columbia (BC) has experienced a significant teacher shortage for years. While every region of the province is impacted, rural and remote communities have experienced a worsening shortage especially during the pandemic. Additionally, there is a critical shortage of specialist teachers across the province. This Education Brief outlines five…

The first "Connecting Practice and Research" column (Lampi, Dimino, & Salsburg Taylor, 2015), introduced a Research-to-Practice partnership (Coburn & Penuel, 2016) between two faculty from a community college and a university professor who were aiming to develop effective integrated reading and writing (IRW) instruction through a…

Scotland, in common with many countries internationally, has been learning how to align ideas from research with policy and practice. This article considers what Scotland learned from large-scale evaluations of its Assessment is for Learning (AifL) programme and the extent to which this evidence was used to inform future learning within the…

This paper argues for the use of "developmental" evaluation as a design-based research tool for sustainable curriculum innovation in professional higher education. Professional education is multi-faceted and complex with diverse views from researchers, professional practitioners, employers and the world of politics leaving little…

The authors of this article, all of whom have been a part of this effort to assess argumentation in literacy-rich science curriculum, have struggled with our attempts to build 3 argument-related assessments--understanding, critiquing, and constructing arguments about scientific phenomena in both oral and written modes. Loosely affiliated with the…

In recent years, learning progressions (LPs) have captured the interest of educators and policy makers. There have been numerous efforts to develop LPs aligned to college and career readiness standards, to unpack these standards, and to provide more clarity on the pathways students follow to reach them. There is great variation, however, in the…

The author explores the balance of responsibility for effective formative reading assessment between classroom teachers and the curricular structure within which they work.

La Trobe University Library has embarked on an institution-wide project with the objective of enabling students to engage with scholarly and credible information from the first year. This initiative by the library is in response to La Trobe curriculum reform. In particular, it aligns information literacy with the inquiry/research graduate…