Evaluation has not been used to its fullest potential in environmental education (EE). Pressures from external stakeholders can cause organizations to focus on reporting requirements at the expense of conducting evaluations that support programmatic improvement. Understanding practitioners' satisfaction with their evaluation processes and the…

Increasingly, attention is being turned toward the actions of students in relation to feedback. This paper presents the outcomes of a questionnaire study researching what undergraduate and postgraduate architecture students perceive as the purpose of feedback, how they use feedback on their coursework, and what makes them more likely to act on it.…

Assessment and feedback practices sit at the heart of education and the student experience. This paper reports on undergraduate perceptions of assessment and feedback in the Department of Geography at King's College London, UK. Twenty-eight first and second-year students across six focus groups provided comments on their understanding of feedback,…

It is one thing to produce an innovative, construct-based assessment task; it's another to produce 10 a year that are comparable in difficulty, measure the same competencies, are free of differential item functioning, and can be scaled and equated. These challenges contributed to the failure of the performance (or authentic) assessment movement of…

This study explores foundation phase teachers' assessment literacy, and their understanding and use of formative and summative assessment. Using questionnaires, observations and interviews, data were obtained from Grade 1, 2 and 3 teachers from a school each in quintile 2, 3 and 5. Teachers from all three schools demonstrated equally low levels of…

The current age of standardization and accountability in education presents a need for educators to be proficient consumers and producers of data. To understand what mathematics teachers see as the purpose of data and assessment, as well as their perceived needs in these areas, we administered a survey to all mathematics teachers in two school…

Although evaluation serves many purposes in education, there is virtually unanimous agreement that evaluation is a critical component of all school improvement processes. Hamilton et al. (2003) asserted that "assessment and evaluation should be built into reform programs from the outset" (p. 26). Kimball, Lander, and Thorn (2010)…

One of the simplest indicators of teaching or course effectiveness is student ratings on one or more global items from the entire rating scale. That approach seems intuitively sound and easy to use. Global items have even been recommended by a few researchers to get a quick-read, at-a-glance summary for summative decisions about faculty. The…

Background: Hundreds of evaluators visit the Claremont Colleges in southern California each year to discuss a wide range of topics related to improving the quality of evaluation practice. Debates between thought leaders in the field have been one of the most popular and informative ways to advance understanding about how best to practice…

The preceding articles in this issue describe a diverse range of projects which had in common the aim of implementing or improving the practice of formative assessment, and thereby to secure some of the benefits attributed to it. This article attempts to set up a framework within which each of the different studies may be located and…

The role of data analysis in the jobs of instructional leaders has become as commonplace as teachers creating lesson plans and taking roll in the classroom. Teachers and building leaders routinely use interim assessment data to develop thoughtful and robust instructional plans that address identified areas of student need. The link between the…

Written in a refreshing conversational style, this text thoroughly prepares students, program administrators, and new evaluators to conduct evaluations or to use them in their work. The book's question-driven focus and clear discussions about the importance of fostering evaluation use by building collaborative relationships with stakeholders set…

Child assessment practices in English and Korean preschools were compared by analysing data from interviews with educators, examples of child assessment, and official documents from each country. Child assessment in England was systematically implemented and characterised by several methodological and procedural strengths, whereas assessment in…

The purpose of this study is to evaluate, using a randomized experimental design, the efficacy of TERC's "Using Data" program to change teacher behavior and improve student learning outcomes. The "Using Data" intervention provides professional development and technical assistance to teachers to help them use data…

In recent years, interest has spiked in data-driven decision making in education--that is, using various types of student data to inform decisions in schools and classrooms. In October 2008, the Council of the Great City Schools and American Institutes for Research (AIR) launched a project funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that focused…