As states across the country continue their implementation of the Teacher Performance Assessment Portfolio (edTPA), a complex and high-stakes certification requirement for teacher certification, there are important lessons for educators and education advocates to learn from New York State's implementation. As Linda Darling-Hammond, developer and…

The purpose of this article is to invite focused discussion and critical debate about the instruments currently used to select students for art colleges in Europe and North America. At this time of significant expansion and diversification in practices of art making, we must ask if current selection instruments still work. What evidence is there…

Assessment expectations are communicated to students in various ways and at different points in the semester. The provision of written information in learning guides given to students at the start of semester articulates what they are to do and how well they are to perform in assessment tasks. This paper examines how assessment expectations at an…

In the opening paper in this Special Edition I outlined the major issues that led to the establishment of "project e-scape". The project was intended to develop systems and approaches that enabled learners to build real-time web-based portfolios of their performance (initially) in design & technology and additionally to build systems…

Research has indicated the importance of evaluating the experiences related to developing e-portfolios (electronic portfolio) to contribute to the overall excellence in teaching and learning. Researchers (instructors) of the present study used an exit e-portfolios, a questionnaire and follow up interviews to describe development and evaluation of…

In this article I describe the context within which we developed project e-scape and the early work that laid the foundations of the project. E-scape (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments) is centred on two innovations. The first concerns a web-based approach to portfolio building; allowing learners to build their…

Assessment plays an integral role in teaching and learning in higher education and teachers have a strong interest in debates and commentaries on assessment as and for learning. In a 1-year graduate entry teacher preparation program, the temptation is to emphasize assessment in an attempt to ensure students "cover" everything as part of…

This study examines academic trends in learning and assessment theories based on the OPPA (One Page Portfolio Assessment), which was developed in 2002. The study also clarifies the theoretical framework, teaching practices, application, and effectiveness of the OPPA. The OPPA was developed to solve three teaching and learning challenges: (1) how…

This paper reports on the results of a 3-year study conducted at the Centre for Schooling and Learning Technologies (CSaLT) at Edith Cowan University in collaboration with the Curriculum Council of Western Australia which concerns the potential to use digital technologies to represent the output from assessment tasks in the senior secondary…

An applied Information Technology (IT) course that is assessed using pen and paper may sound incongruous but it is symptomatic of the state of high-stakes assessment in jurisdictions such as Western Australia. Whereas technology has permeated most aspects of modern life, including schooling, and more has been demanded of education systems in terms…

In 1998, the California legislature passed Senate Bill SB 2042 which replaced the previous teacher certification legislation. The new law required that all elementary and secondary teacher certification programs in the State of California align their programs with new teaching standards. These standards included Teacher Performance Expectations…

This article reports on the outcomes from the "e-scape Primary Scientific and Technological Understanding Assessment Project" (2009-2010), which aimed to support primary teachers in developing valid portfolio-based tasks to assess pupils' scientific and technological enquiry skills at age 11. This was part of the wider…

This study aims to begin to uncover the detailed ways that pre-service elementary teachers examine and understand mathematics teaching, the grain size at which they do so, and what constitutes evidence of teaching mathematics for understanding for pre-service mathematics teachers. Thus, the central research questions for this study are: (a) What…

This paper describes an action research, school situated project conducted with partnership funding from Learning and Teaching Scotland, Scottish Qualifications Authority and Becta, the UK government's agency for communications technology in education. Based on "e-scape" (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments),…

There is a critical need for research into the use of digital technologies to support the assessment of performance on complex tasks in schools. This paper reports on a component of a pilot study aimed at investigating the use of digital forms of performance assessment, manageable within schools, with high levels of reliability and capable of…