This study examines the perceptions of Jordanian science teachers' conceptions of assessment, and how these perceptions are affected by the teacher's gender, length of experience, and subject variables. The teacher conception of the assessment questionnaire was completed by 488 teachers. It consisted of 27 items spread over four dimensions: school…

Although higher education institutions often engage in assessment practices, use of assessment results to improve student learning is rare (Blaich & Wise, 2011). We surmised that this rarity could be partially explained by unclear communication regarding what "use of results" means. The current study qualitatively investigated how…

Traditionally, models of instructional leadership espouse data-informed decision making in response to student assessment outcomes as one of the core school leader behaviors. In recent years, rising expectations from accountability policies and related assessment practices have myriad implications for school districts, specifically in the areas of…

The key practices that improve struggling schools, writes Chenoweth--a researcher who's studied successful high-poverty schools and their leaders--aren't a mystery. From both decades of research and the craft knowledge of educators who've jumped in and turned around schools, we know these practices generally yield improvement: (1) a…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was designed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to evaluate the quality, equity, and efficiency of school systems around the world. Specifically, the PISA has assessed 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy on a 3-year cycle, since…

Data-based decision making is all the rage. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2009) has emphatically declared, "I am a deep believer in the power of data to drive our decisions. Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells us where we are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk." In the past few years, all 50 states have adopted most or…

The importance of higher education has never been clearer. Educational attainment--the number of years a person spends in school--strongly predicts adult earnings, as well as health and civic engagement. Yet relative to other developed nations, educational attainment in the United States is lagging, with young Americans who heretofore led the…

At the end of secondary education in The Netherlands, students have to pass a final examination, consisting of an internal school-based assessment and an external national assessment. According to the Dutch inspectorate, to ensure the quality of final examinations, the discrepancy between both assessments must be less than 0.5 points (on a scale…

School quality care has become important in many Western countries and a number of high quality school self-evaluation instruments has been developed and implemented to support this activity. However, little is known on the critical success factors for the use of school self-evaluation instruments. From this longitudinal study into the use of a…

A long-held ambition for many educators and assessment experts has been to integrate summative and formative assessments so that data from external assessments used for system monitoring may also be used to shape teaching and learning in classrooms. In turn, classroom-based assessments may provide valuable data for decision makers at school and…

Assessments labeled as formative have been offered as a means to improve student achievement. But labels can be a powerful way to miscommunicate. For an assessment use to be appropriately labeled "formative," both empirical evidence and reasoned arguments must be offered to support the claim that improvements in student achievement can be linked…

This report describes the purposes of benchmark assessments and provides recommendations for selecting and using benchmark assessments--addressing validity, alignment, reliability, fairness and bias and accessibility, instructional sensitivity, utility, and reporting issues. We also present recommendations on building capacity to support schools'…

This case study offers an in-depth look at how one school achieved change in its culture and in its approach to curriculum and instruction. The unit of analysis for this single case study is South Loop Elementary School (SLES) and the time period is from August 2002 to June of 2007, during which SLES students demonstrated sharply improved…

In many school districts, the pressure to raise test scores has created overnight celebrity status for formative assessment. Its powers to raise student achievement have been touted, however, without attending to the research on which these claims were based. Sociocultural learning theory provides theoretical grounding for understanding how…

This case study of one middle school focuses on improving teachers' skills in data-driven decision making through analysis of student work and their own professional practice. The expectation that schools will make adequate yearly progress has pushed evaluation practice down to the teacher level, where teachers are asked to analyze and…