Evaluating and improving instructional quality is important in pre-service teacher education, given it is a crucial factor for students' learning gains. This process is complex and involves multiple classroom events with various interpretations. Criteria for instructional quality are rarely applied systematically in teacher education, leading to…

Comparison is an important geographic method and a common task in geography education. Mastering comparison is a complex competency and written comparisons are challenging tasks both for students and assessors. As yet, however, there is no set test for evaluating comparison competency nor tool for enhancing it. Moreover, little is known about…

This article explores the German discourse of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as it has emerged and changed over time. The conceptual elements of the triad of care, child raising and education ("Betreuung," "Erziehung" und "Bildung") are described and illustrated by salient points in the development of…

Assessing cases of child welfare requires the ability to engage with different sources of information systematically. This study examined how case-based learning (CBL) can be used to support social work students (N = 104) acquire knowledge crucial to assessing cases of child welfare and whether benefits of CBL could be maximized by structuring the…

Pressure on evaluators has been investigated recently by surveys in the USA, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. This study compares the results of those studies regarding pressure on evaluators in different countries. The findings suggest that independence of evaluations does not exist for many respondents. Moreover, the person who commissioned the…

Explanatory typologies have recently experienced a renaissance as a research strategy for constructing and assessing causal explanations. However, both the new methodological works on explanatory typologies and the way such typologies have been used in practice have been affected by two shortcomings. First, no elaborate procedures for assessing…

This study compares the application of probing techniques in cognitive interviewing (CI) and online probing (OP). Even though the probing is similar, the methods differ regarding typical mode setting, sample size, level of interactivity, and goals. We analyzed probing answers to the International Social Survey Programme item battery on specific…

The article reveals specific features of functioning systems of higher education quality monitoring at the present stage, taking into account national traditions, historical experience and mentality of the population. The article introduces a comparative analysis of monitoring actors at national, regional and local levels in two countries. The…

In this paper, I argue for more and better learning metrics in higher education, eventually through an international, comparative assessment of students' learning outcomes. Better learning measures may help to improve transparency in the system by addressing the information asymmetry problem. If not addressed adequately, the lack of transparency…

People use many different products made from plastics every day. But conventional plastics such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) do not always have a good reputation in society at large. Bioplastics such as thermoplastic starch (TPS) promise to be better alternatives but are they really better than conventional plastics? This article presents a new…

Teachers' professional knowledge is assumed to be a key variable for effective teaching. As teacher education has the goal to enhance professional knowledge of current and future teachers, this knowledge should be described and assessed. Nevertheless, only a limited number of studies quantitatively measures physics teachers' professional…

This paper complements previous studies on the effects of health on wages by addressing the problems of unobserved heterogeneity, sample selection, and endogeneity in one comprehensive framework. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we find the health variable to suffer from measurement error and a number of tests provide…

This article investigates if online evaluation leads to different results than paper-and-pencil evaluation. Given that most previous studies confound the evaluation mode (online versus paper) with the evaluation situation (in class versus after class), we expected that evaluation results would be influenced only by the evaluation situation,…

Humphry (this issue) has written a thought-provoking piece on the interpretation of item discrimination parameters as scale units in item response theory. One of the key features of his work is the description of an item response theory (IRT) model that he calls the logistic measurement function that combines aspects of two traditions in IRT that…

Cognitive ability tests are widely used in organizations around the world because they have high predictive validity in selection contexts. Although these tests typically measure several subdomains, testing is usually carried out for a single subdomain at a time. This can be ineffective when the subdomains assessed are highly correlated. This…