National goals and performance standards were introduced in Sweden during the 1990s as part of a curriculum reform. The intention was to detect shortcomings among students and provide support to those students who did not reach the passing grade in one (or several) subject/s. Despite this reform, approximately one-fourth of the students do not…

The use of assessments in public schools in the United States to link student test scores to school performance has arguably transformed assessments into accountability tools. Dennis S. Rosemartin, a former elementary classroom teacher, is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona. His area of specialization is teacher preparation and…

One goal of the US Department of Education-funded Project Insights was to see if the use of Problem-based Learning (PBL) would encourage students to reveal previously unseen academic potential. Two PBL units were taught to 271 sixth grade students in 13 classrooms. Afterwards, teachers identified students who demonstrated previously unseen…

The purpose of this study was to investigate teacher practices of enabling factors in the implementation of technology-assisted PBL, in Tatweer schools in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This study also explored how the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) National Education Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS.T) were used in Tatweer…

This booklet analyzes the concept of competence in education and explores the background of this increasingly popular form of assessment. It focuses on the role of competence in four countries the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and South Africa and defines what is meant by competence. The report states that competence-based…

Curriculum transformation was examined at seven higher education institutions in the USA that were developing "performance-based" teacher-education programmes. A heuristic was created to differentiate the contemporary performance standards-based assessment movement from its historical predecessor, competency- or performance-based teacher…

Scientific literacy and authenticity have gained a lot of attention in the past few decades worldwide. The goal of the study was to develop various authentic assessments to investigate students' scientific literacy for corresponding to the new curriculum reform of Taiwan in 1997. In the process, whether ninth graders were able to apply school…