Teachers' classroom assessment practices tend to encourage rote learning instead of meaningful learning. To enhance teachers' classroom assessment practices, teacher involvement in assessment construction appears necessary. To foster teacher professional growth in relation to this issue, a professional development programme on summative assessment…

Coaching is increasingly emphasised as a promising feature of professional development, yet concrete understanding of this complex process is lacking. This study investigates an observation-based coaching process by interviewing coaches and teachers from a three-year longitudinal PD programme. Findings indicate that coaches often supplemented…

Although continuous professional development (CPD) is a key strategy for physical education (PE) teachers to update skills and knowledge in order to provide the best possible education to students, various concerns have been voiced regarding the effectiveness and feasibility of CPD in the context of PE. One approach to CPD that seems promising in…

Objective: In the past decade, several authors have advocated that formative assessment programmes have an impact on teachers' knowledge. Consequently, various requirements have been proposed in the literature for the design of these programmes. Only few studies, however, have focused on a direct comparison between programmes with respect to…

Professional development of teachers has become an essential condition in today's knowledge-based society to sustain the quality of teaching. Therefore, the Dutch government promotes this professional development. As a result, Professional Development Plans (PDPs) are now increasingly used to stimulate and support the professional development of…

Today, organizations are increasingly implementing assessment tools such as Personal Development Plans. Although the true power of the tool lies in supporting the employee's continuing professional development, organizations implement the tool for various different purposes, professional development purposes on the one hand and promotion/salary…

Becoming a "winning organization" when one currently is an "ugly ducking" can be a difficult and strenuous task. BAT Niemeyer in the Netherlands succeeded in making such a transformation over the course of four years. Action learning was used, among other methods, to steer part of this transformation, in which employee…

Schools are increasingly integrating multidisciplinary education into their programmes. The Minister of Education, Culture and Science has introduced a new, integrated science subject in secondary education in the Netherlands, called Nature, Life and Technology (NLT). This research note describes the design of a generic model for a professional…

This research report builds on the results of the CATCH project (Webb and Dekker, 2002). The CATCH project is an effort to apply and scale up previous results and design a professional development program to bring about fundamental changes in teachers' instruction to support change in teachers' formative assessment practices. In this report we…

Describes the evaluation of a training program in the Netherlands to enhance the professional competence of residential child-care workers in dealing with difficult situations involving adolescents. Pretest and posttest data from 35 adult subjects and 20 controls indicate a significant increase in knowledge and behavior after the program. (SLD)