Students in STEM know well the stress, challenge, and effort that accompany college exams. As a widely recognizable feature of the STEM classroom experience, high-stakes assessments serve as crucial cultural gateways in shaping both preparation and motivation for careers. In this essay, we identify and discuss issues of power around STEM exams to…

A January 2024 survey found that 72 percent of parents had considered a new school for their children in the past year. And in 2025, Texas and Tennessee are poised to become the next states to enact education savings account (ESA) programs, potentially giving millions more students the education options that their parents want for them. As a…

Language teaching activism is a political movement for educational transformation where the role of teachers and languages, as a medium of instruction and literacy, are fundamental for equity and social justice. This paper analyzes the reflections from elementary school teachers from Austin (Texas, U.S.) and Oaxaca (Mexico) during a collaborative…

In recent years, the Indonesian government has put greater emphasis on promoting critical thinking in the education system, including the notion of critical thinking in national examinations, curriculum, and graduate outcomes for school education. Nevertheless, as in many testing-oriented countries, fostering critical thinking in the Indonesian…

The Pirie-Kieren Model (PKM) was a paradigm shift in theories of learning by presenting a coherent, consistent theory compatible with complexity theory. PKM recognized that learning is non-linear, recursive, iterative, and emergent. PKM was one of the first theories to depart from the linear models of learning that dominated theories of learning…

A Vygotskian approach to assessment is proposed by invoking the distinction between the development of lower and higher psychological functions. Higher psychological functions are specifically human and develop with the use of cultural tools via mediation. Accordingly, a distinction is made between tests that are based on association, which have…

It has been argued in the literature on (language) testing that any act of testing/assessment can impact: (1) educators' curriculum design; (2) teachers' teaching practices; and (3) students' learning behaviors. This quality of any given testing situation or act of assessment has been called washback, or backwash if you will. Washback falls into…

With the proliferation of video-based professional development (PD) courses for mathematics teachers, understanding the role of the facilitators of these courses has become an emerging field of theoretical and empirical study. The purpose of this article is to address some of the challenges and opportunities that facilitation of discussions…

In recent years, educators, administrators, policymakers, and measurement experts have called for assessments that support educators in making better instructional decisions. One promising approach to measurement to support instructional decision-making is diagnostic classification models (DCMs). DCMs are flexible psychometric models that…

Because standardized tests in science are not given to PreK-3 students in Ohio, this report examined the longitudinal effects of learning from a teacher who had participated in the NURTURES professional development program. Specifically, it looked at the effects on students' mathematics and reading learning in grades 2-5 and science learning in…

In a 1984 essay, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago, asserted that tutoring offered "the best learning conditions we can devise" and that tutors could raise student achievement by two full standard deviations--or, in statistical parlance, two "sigmas." The influence of Bloom's two-sigma…

Given the practical significance of vocabulary testing in language teaching and the theoretical foundations of developing a vocabulary test, four well-established vocabulary tests are introduced for diagnostic purpose together with their corresponding validation studies, with a focus on the designed purpose, the selection of the items, the…

This paper reflects on UK mathematics education following the poor performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) metric, which compares reading, science, and mathematics across 27 countries. We compared a range of features within secondary school mathematics in the UK with the countries outperforming the UK. We note…

The field of language testing has made great strides in measuring language use. It is a monolingual construct, however, that anchors standardized language testing operations and classroom practices. Language use and performance research, see for example the MLJ special issue of 2011, demands that language testing operations also consider…

Changes in the economy and society lead to a growing necessity of financial education. In this context, we investigate the approaches to financial education in secondary schools in the United States and Germany. We seek to answer the question if and how the implementation of financial education is similar and different between the two countries.…