Adaptive comparative judgment (ACJ) has proven to be a valid, reliable, and feasible method for assessing student performance in open-ended design scenarios. In addition to the use of ACJ for purely assessment and evaluation, research has demonstrated an opportunity to identify the design values of judges involved with the ACJ process. The…

Although investigations into evaluation theories, methods, and practices have been occurring since the late 1970s, research on evaluation (RoE) has seemingly increased in the past decade. In this review, 257 studies published in 14 evaluation-focused journals over a 10-year period (between 2005 and 2014) were identified as RoE and then classified…

With a focus on the United States, this paper addresses the basic social indicators question: How are we doing? More specifically, with respect to children, how are our kids (including adolescents and youths) doing? These questions can be addressed by comparisons: (1) to "past historical values", (2) to "other contemporaneous units" (e.g.,…

This study compares the content and sources of the pedagogical beliefs of 106 pre-service teachers in two teacher education programmes in China and the USA. Qualitative data were collected using an open-ended survey instrument to compare similarities and differences in the content and sources of participants' pedagogical beliefs. The findings…

The weightings of the four component indicators of the UNDP's Human Development Index HDI appear to be arbitrary and have not been given justification. This paper develops a variant of the HDI, calculated to reflect peoples' revealed evaluations of education and the productivity of work. The resulting Calibrated human Development Index CDI has a…

The aim of the paper is to assess the construct validation of a multidimensional measure of social cohesion which is well theoretically grounded and has an equivalent/comparable interpretation across all European countries. Up-to-now published research on social cohesion is deficient in either one or both of these important aspects. This paper…

Knowledge about ecology and environmental education (EE) constitutes a basic tool for promoting a sustainable future, and was a target area of the BIOHEAD-Citizen Project. School textbooks were considered as representative sources of evidence in terms of ecology and environmental education, and were used for comparison among the countries…

The terms evaluation, assessment, and appraisal are often used interchangeably in research on schools and pupils. Guidelines for their use and some of the similarities and differences in their meanings are explicated. The concept of evaluation is narrowed to refer to use of information on pupil behavior. Four separate components of…

Social studies preservice teachers received background information on Kohlberg's theory of moral development and were trained to use one of the rater guides in his new "issue stage scoring system." They were directed to score sample moral thought statements, some on an intuitive basis and some with the rater guides. No overall differences between…