Despite the best of intentions on the part of overworked and undertrained classroom teachers, instructional planning can too often be described as idiosyncratic, haphazard, and lacking any logically or pedagogically defensible structure. In this article, Tim Westerberg highlights the importance of a unifying planning framework that ensures…

This conceptual paper proposes a model to describe the quality of student dialogue during participative collaborative problem solving. Drawing on the participation metaphor of learning, we argue that the construct of mathematical sophistication is useful to describe the quality. We then present two frameworks, mathematical competencies and…

Background: The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (Council of Europe 2001) has, over the past decade, come to be widely used as a reference tool for teaching, learning and assessment (Alderson 2002; North 2014). The focus of the current study is on scaling the China Standards of English (CSE) vocabulary descriptors for College English…

External music examiners play a significant role in assessing, verifying and maintaining musical standards. Educational output endorsed by external examiners serves to verify, modify and legitimise internal behaviour. This article examines some of the "inside practices" of external music examiners in the context of quality assurance. It…