Concerns with educational quality have led to the implementation of external school evaluation (ESE), based on the premise that these processes can provide valuable information about schools and, consequently, create conditions for improvement. Improvement is based on the feedback, commonly in the form of an evaluation report, resulting from…

Course satisfaction surveys play a relevant role in Higher Education, aiding in the quality assessment of courses and informing academic promotions. Nonetheless, understanding potential biases and influential factors within these surveys is crucial to their equitable utilization within universities. This study delves into a deconstruction of…

Evaluation capacity building (ECB) is an essential element for generating credible and actionable evidence on Extension programs. This paper offers a discussion of ECB efforts in Cooperative Extension and how such efforts enable Extension professionals to collect and use credible and actionable evidence on the quality and impacts of programs.…

Using a survey of college of business deans, the authors investigate perceptions of published rankings of academic programs. Published rankings have become quite prominent, and anecdotal evidence suggests great efforts are being undertaken to be included in rankings or enhance rankings. The authors conducted a survey of business school deans to…

The assessment movement that has emerged on American college campuses over the last twenty years emphasizes the need to carefully articulate the particular outcomes colleges seek for students, and it demands that faculty and administrators provide evidence of their students' success with respect to these outcomes. It also requires that this…

PISA is an extremely influential large-scale assessment, and its "policy lessons" are being incorporated in a range of nations all over the world. In this paper I argue that not only is PISA influencing policies and practices, but also that "seeing like PISA" is becoming a widespread phenomenon. Globally, education…

This paper presents a framework for program assessment and a case study in assessment for a university clothing and textile program in family and consumer sciences. Assessment activities and the process implemented by the Textile and Apparel Studies (TAS) major at Western Michigan University are explained. The process adopts the International…

This study portrays how a male instructor, his peers, and the department head used feedback from student ratings. A case study approach was employed to provide a holistic mode of inquiry that would be consonant with the exploration of issues addressed by the study. The method selected provided understanding of the process and events taking place…

Policy makers at the federal level have embraced an educator effectiveness agenda, which in turn has driven many states across the country to rapidly develop and implement new and more complex teacher evaluation systems. It is increasingly clear that the success of these nascent teacher evaluation systems partly depends on the will, skill, and…

In order to teach science well, science teachers need to know what to focus on in order to ensure their assessment of student learning is meaningful and useful for the students' on going learning and development. The diversity and range of content and skills within the subject of science mean that the assessment capabilities required by…

This case study uses evidence collected for accreditation and programme improvement at a small university Master's and certification programme in Educational Leadership Development to describe efforts to help leadership candidates use data during the programme's final internship experience. Programme features supporting the growth of candidates'…

Background: Data-based decision making can lead to increased student achievement; however, schools struggle with the implementation of data-based decision making. Professional development in the use of data is therefore urgently needed. However, professional development is often ineffective in terms of improving the knowledge, skills, and attitude…

This paper aims to inspire stakeholders working with quality of higher education (such as members of study boards, study programme directors, curriculum developers and teachers) to critically consider their evaluation methods in relation to a focus on student learning. We argue that many of the existing methods of evaluation in higher education…

Student evaluation of teaching is commonplace in many universities and may be the predominant input into the performance evaluation of staff and organisational units. This article used publicly available student evaluation of teaching data to present examples of where institutional responses to evaluation processes appeared to be educationally…

This study investigated the Individual Learning Plans of eighty-eight students who were deaf and hard of hearing attending facilities and schools for the deaf in Victoria Australia. The students' assessment and planning portfolios were scrutinised for evidence of formal and informal assessment used to generate goals for the Individual Learning…