Conducting a fair test is important for educational research. Unfair assessments can lead to gender disparities in academic achievement, ultimately resulting in disparities in opportunities, wages, and career choice. Differential Item Function [DIF] analysis is presented to provide evidence of whether the test is truly fair, where it does not harm…

It is a much-lamented fact that research with the potential to inform or influence education policy instead remains policy inert. There are many reasons for this frustrating state of affairs, including a lack of strategic thinking on the part of researchers on how to successfully accomplish outreach--as opposed to communication with peers…

School climate is one of the significant factors determining educational achievement. However, the lack of instruments to measure it has complicated the study of this concept in Russia. We review the history of the study of the concept of "school climate," and we discuss approaches to how it can be defined. We describe the most widely…

The author's commentary focuses more on the quantitative discussion about educational assessment of the original article than on the idea of the assessment for learning, which did not raise any substantial issues. He starts by offering some general comments on the paper. He feels the authors made a number of assumptions about quantitative…

Educational assessments define what aspects of learning will formally be given credit and therefore have a huge impact upon teaching and learning. Although the impact of high-stakes national and international assessments on teaching and learning is considered in the literature, remarkably, there is little research on the connection between…