This article examines and offers insights to a year of Socratic circles in the context of a world history classroom. Grounding this practice in relevant research before offering examples from the classroom and providing advice to practitioners, this discussion strategy offers an antidote to the often divisive and destructive examples of…

This report reviews the collection, availability and quality of system-level data and metadata on education from countries participating in the PISA for Development project: Cambodia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Senegal and Zambia. PISA for Development aims to increase low income countries' use of PISA assessments for monitoring progress towards…

Standards-based grading (SBG) is an approach to assessment and reporting in which scores are attached to the specific learning objectives of a course, rather than to assignments or tests. Each score represents a student's mastery of that learning objective, and may change over time in response to evidence that her level of understanding has…

Teacher observation is regarded as an essential procedure in the teacher training process. However, the vast majority of observation experiences have a top-down approach, as they are usually established by experts such as university teaching staff or school inspectors working for the administration. With a bottom-up approach in mind, this paper…

Assessment tasks can focus student efforts in what they choose to study. This paper describes the development and initial application of an assessment matrix to support student learning in postgraduate research studies at the University of Adelaide. Students and supervisors in the multi-disciplinary Master programmes also benefit from the clear…

This book explores the Capability Approach (CA) as an alternative critical lens through which to regard early childhood education (ECE) curricula. The CA framework is a counter narrative to the narrow instrumentalism that reduces education to a mere process of academic skills acquisition for a future workplace. Primarily the book draws on the…

Action Research on Measuring Literacy Programme Participants' Learning Outcomes (RAMAA) aims to develop, implement and collaborate on the creation of a methodological approach to measure acquired learning and study the various factors that influence its development. This report examines how RAMAA I has been implemented over the past four years in…

Yeshiva high schools strive to educate and inspire their students. In addition to the formal educational curriculum, a large portion of these schools' budget is spent on various types of programs in order to achieve these goals. The purpose of this study was to determine which elements of the high school program were perceived by students as…

Education reforms in Russia are aimed at increasing goal-based instruction and at expanding the range of desired outcomes, but survey research data show that teachers are not well-prepared to implement these changes. (Contains 2 tables and 4 notes.)

The experience and reflection of participants of the Kansas Educational Leadership Institute (KELI) program are the focus of this article. Many Kansas superintendents face the challenge of working hundreds of miles from colleagues who wear similar hats and work in comparable roles. Often the closest professional mentors or peers live hours away,…

This article presents the findings of a large scale study that tested a comprehensive model of predictors of three manifestations of sustainability: continuation, institutionalization, and duration. Based on the literature the predictors were arrayed in four groups: variables pertaining to the project, the auspice organization, the community, and…

Eighty-four students at a regional southeastern university completed an anonymous 24-item questionnaire which was developed and designed to assess attitudes and general reasons that students enrolled in summer school at the university. The data showed where students learned about summer school, why they enrolled, if they would enroll in the future…

Since the first Circle of Trust retreat was offered in 2005, the Center for Courage & Renewal (CCR) and other individual facilitators across the United States, Canada, and Australia have continued to offer many cross-professional retreats, as they have proven extremely popular. They are designed for people from any profession who want to…

Recent changes in the English tuition fee policies have spurred a debate on the impacts on student choices for higher education. Expectations range from a sharp decrease in participation in higher education to relatively little change in student demand. We surveyed 1549 year 12 sixth-form students from four institutions spread geographically…

The study of protein-protein interactions is important to scientists in a wide range of disciplines. We present here the assessment of a lab-intensive course that teaches students techniques used to identify and further study protein-protein interactions. One of the unique elements of the course is that students perform a yeast two-hybrid screen…