The debate between summative and formative assessment is creating a situation that increasingly calls to mind the famous slogan in George Orwell's (1945) "Animal Farm"--"Four legs good, two legs bad". Formative assessment is increasingly being portrayed in the literature as "good" assessment, which tutors should…

We have been developing a digital concept maps website (www.conceptmapsforlearning.com) based on the principles of effective assessment for learning. The purpose of this paper is to reveal its promising contributions to formative evaluation practices. The website reduces the workload of teachers as well as provides immediate and delayed feedback…

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…

As teachers work to ensure that their students meet and exceed standards set by state and national governing bodies, the need for teacher support becomes greater and greater. Teachers, who play the most important role in a student's education, are faced with a classroom full of children who understand concepts on many different levels. To gain…

This paper explores the implementation of formative assessment through the "autism lens" in order to analyse why the process can be exclusionary for some learners on the autism spectrum. The central thesis of the paper is that, where teachers have no understanding of the autism learning style, they are likely to revert to a normative,…

Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) commendably attempt to put descriptive theory at the center of pedagogy, assessment, and curriculum. The thrust of their article is that only through theories of learning will student progression be properly understood. Casting a critical eye over the faddish distinction between "formative" and "summative"…

In Volume 35, Issue 1 of the "Australasian Journal of Special Education," Carter, Stephenson and Strnadova (2011) replicated a study by Burns and Ysseldyke (2009). In Carter et al.'s study, 194 Australian special educators were asked to rate the extent to which they used eight instructional practices. These practices were applied…

This article examines the meanings and impact of "Assessment for Learning" initiatives in schools against the back drop of assessment reform in Singapore since 1997. It is argued that "Assessment for Learning" is understood in different ways, and these different meanings do not always benefit students' learning. The different…

Understanding and applying statistical concepts is essential in modern life. However, common statistical misconceptions limit the ability of students to understand statistical concepts. Although simulation-based computer assisted learning (CAL) is promising for use in students learning statistics, substantial improvement is still needed. For…

The Race to the Top (RTTT) Assessment Program has funded two state consortia to develop new assessment systems that measure student skills against a common set of college- and career-ready standards in mathematics and English language arts (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). The initial RTTT invitation to submit proposals prompted extensive…

The overall aim of this article is to analyze the relationships between the roles of assessment in pedagogy, the interactions between curriculum assessment and pedagogy, and the study of pupils' progression in learning. It is argued that well-grounded evidence of pupils' progressions in learning is crucial to the work of teachers, so that a method…

An audience response systems (ARS) allows students to respond to multiple choice questions using remote control devices. Once the feedback is collected and displayed, the teacher and students discuss misconceptions and difficulties experienced. ARSs have been extremely popular and effective in higher education science classrooms, although almost…

This article reviews the corpus of research on feedback, with a focus on formative feedback--defined as information communicated to the learner that is intended to modify his or her thinking or behavior to improve learning. According to researchers, formative feedback should be nonevaluative, supportive, timely, and specific. Formative feedback is…

The main purpose of the study was to compare the effectiveness of 5E learning cycle model based instruction and traditionally designed chemistry instruction on 10th grade students' understanding of state of matter and solubility concepts. In this study, 119 tenth grade students from chemistry courses instructed by same teacher from an Anatolian…

While researching student assumptions for the development of the Biology Concept Inventory (BCI; http://bioliteracy.net), we found that a wide class of student difficulties in molecular and evolutionary biology appears to be based on deep-seated, and often unaddressed, misconceptions about random processes. Data were based on more than 500…