In the current article, we consider the influential position of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and discuss several methodological areas that demonstrate the need for caution when using and interpreting PISA results. We motivate our argument by briefly describing the program's increased influence in educational policy…

Black and Hispanic students are undeniably underidentified as gifted and underrepresented in gifted education. The underrepresentation of the two largest groups of "minority" students is long-standing, dating several decades, and is a serious area of contention. Most debates focus on the efficacy of traditional intelligence tests with…

The results of large-scale international assessments such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have attracted a considerable attention worldwide and are often used by policy-makers to support educational policies. To ensure that the published results represent the actual population, these surveys go through a thorough scrutiny…

Attention to evaluation quality is commonplace, even if sometimes implicit. Drawing on her 2010 Presidential Address to the American Evaluation Association, Leslie Cooksy suggests that evaluation quality depends, at least in part, on the intersection of three factors: (a) evaluator competency, (b) aspects of the evaluation environment or context,…

Purpose--The purpose of this research is to examine participants' response rate on dual style training course evaluation forms. These combine structured and open-ended formats. Pencil and paper forms have a long history of use by trainers in business and commerce and more recently in education. Research methods texts tend to have neglected the…

This article questions whether popular approaches to the assessment of technology integration with classroom instruction are valid. The article explores Messick's (1993) conceptualisation of consequential validity, in an attempt to understand what validity must be evident when the integration of technology with classroom instruction is assessed.…

Since the use of bibliometric instruments has grown and will continue to grow in the future, the quality, availability, and accessibility of data on publications and citations is of tantamount importance. But equally important is a correct use of the data. This means that an important task of the bibliometric field is to highlight not only what…

Objective: This study examines the quality of evaluation studies using qualitative research methods in the social work literature in terms of a number of criteria commonly adopted in the field of qualitative research. Method: Using qualitative and evaluation as search terms, relevant qualitative evaluation studies from 1990 to 2003 indexed by…

The prevalent use of student ratings in teaching evaluations, particularly the reliability of such data, has been debated for many years. Reports in the literature indicate that there are many factors influencing student perceptions of teaching. Three of these factors were investigated at the University of Western Australia, namely the broad…