This literature review explores current post-secondary practices for evaluating online instructors. As enrollment of students in online courses has steadily increased over the last few decades, instructor evaluation has lagged behind. Through a thematic analysis of existing literature, this review seeks to answer these questions: (1) How are…

This report describes an initiative undertaken from 2016-2017 by the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution and Education International (EI) to develop tools to measure the breadth of learning opportunities to which children and youth are exposed in an education system. The Breadth of Learning Opportunities (BOLO)…

The paper solves the problem of the relationship of external diagnosis and self-diagnosis of readiness of teachers to innovative activity. It highlights major disadvantages of measurement tools that are used to this process. The author demonstrates an alternative approach to harmonizing the diagnosis, based on a modular diagnostic model, general…

Traditionally, evaluation has primarily tried to answer the question "Does a program, service, or policy work?" Recently, more attention is given to questions about variation in program effects and the mechanisms through which program effects occur. Addressing these kinds of questions requires moving beyond assessing average program…

Student surveys have gained prominence in recent years as a way to give students a voice in their learning process, and teacher self-reports have always been an effective instrument for revealing the planning, intentions, and expectations behind a given lesson. Though student and teacher surveys are widely used, extant research in education has…

Engagement is one of the most widely misused and overgeneralized constructs found in the educational, learning, instructional, and psychological sciences. The articles in this special issue represent a wide range of traditions and highlight several key conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and analytical issues related to defining and measuring…

While the evidence for the effectiveness of the use of stories in science teaching and learning is strengthening in current research and literature, the intervention itself, namely, the science story, still suffers from a lack of definition and conception. The purpose of this paper is to determine the amount of narrative relative to non-narrative…

The APPA Facilities Performance Indicators (FPI) is perhaps one of the most powerful analytical tools that institutional facilities professionals have at their disposal. It is a diagnostic facilities performance management tool that addresses the essential questions that facilities executives must answer to effectively perform their roles. It…

Two quantitative measures of school performance are currently used, the average points score (APS) at Key Stage 2 and value-added (VA), which measures the rate of academic improvement between Key Stage 1 and 2. These figures are used by parents and the Office for Standards in Education to make judgements and comparisons. However, simple…

Assessing student performance is a central challenge for music educators. In alignment with previous research, this article asserts that rubrics provide a viable and useful structure for assessing music performance. To expand the potential of rubrics in music education, challenges to effective rubric construction are identified and addressed…

In the original paper, it was argued that while there is an array of methods and methodologies available, their use is delimited by the culture of accountability that prevails in public sector institutions, a fact that is particularly problematic given the complexity and diversity of evaluation contexts today. This short rejoinder, to responses…

Mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) measures have been widely adopted by researchers. Critics have debated the value of such measures and questioned the type of knowledge that these access. This article reports on a study where the challenges in measuring teachers' knowledge were illuminated through investigating relationships between the…

Public school critics often point to rising expenditures and relatively flat test scores to justify their school reform agendas. The claims are flawed because their analyses fail to account for the difference in data types between dollars (ratio) and test scores (interval). A cost-benefit analysis using dollars as a common metric for both costs…

Evaluation occurs within a specific context and is influenced by the economic, political, historical, and social forces that shape that context. The culture of evaluation is thus very much embedded in the culture of accountability that currently prevails in public sector institutions, policies, and program. As such, our understanding of the…

The absence of universally accepted definitions for direct and indirect assessment motivates the purpose of this article: to offer definitions that are literature-based and theoretically driven, meeting K. Lewin's (1945) dictum that, "There is nothing so practical as a good theory" (p. 129). The authors synthesize the literature to…