In an era of test-based accountability, school inspections can offer a more nuanced understanding of why schools fail. Yet, we have limited knowledge of how inspectors arrive at their decisions on school quality. Analyzing inspectors' decision-making can reveal the underlying views regarding school accountability and open opportunities for school…

Prior research has evaluated the reliability and validity of structured visual inspection (SVI) criteria for interpreting functional analysis (FA) outcomes (Hagopian et al., 1997; Roane et al., 2013). We adapted these criteria to meet the unique needs of interpreting latency-based FA outcomes and examined the reliability and validity of applying…

Creativity research crucially relies on creativity evaluations by external raters, but it is not clear what properties characterize good raters. In the present study, we investigated whether rater personality and rater creativity are related to discernment (i.e., the ability to distinguish creative from uncreative responses) when evaluating…

This research aimed to develop an instructional coaching model to enhance early childhood educators' abilities in designing learning experiences for brain management. This research employed a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methods and consisted of two phases: 1) developing an instructional coaching framework, and 2)…

Using item-response theory to model rater effects provides an alternative solution for rater monitoring and diagnosis, compared to using standard performance metrics. In order to fit such models, the ratings data must be sufficiently connected in order to estimate rater effects. Due to popular rating designs used in large-scale testing scenarios,…

Maintaining the quality and comparability of qualifications has become a major priority for vocational education and training (VET) systems world-wide, especially for those countries which have decentralised assessment and reporting systems. In the absence of external examinations, one policy solution to align the assessment standards of different…

Australia has recently implemented Teaching Performance Assessments (TPAs) as a national accreditation requirement to assess final year preservice teachers' classroom readiness. In 2019, an Australian university developed a TPA to meet this requirement, comprising three written components and one oral component. This exploratory study investigated…

TESOL practitioners, especially in Asia, tend to believe that reliable assessment of students' L2 English speech can be done solely by L1 English native speakers with sufficient teaching and assessment experiences. Such a belief, however, may need to be reconsidered from a new perspective of "diversity and inclusivity." This study used…

Rater comments tend to be qualitatively analyzed to indicate raters' application of rating scales. This study applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques to quantify meaningful, behavioral information from a corpus of rater comments and triangulated that information with a many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) analysis of rater scores. The…

Human raters' assessment of interpreting is a complex process. Previous researchers have mainly relied on verbal reports to examine this process. To advance our understanding, we conducted an empirical study, collecting raters' eye-movement and retrospection data in a computerised interpreting assessment in which three groups of raters (n = 35)…

The current study examines the contribution of racial congruence on young children's speech and language production to determine if African American children produce more or different language with an African American assessor, as opposed to a White assessor. Participants for the current study were selected from a larger group of children…

For the first time in the history of the high stakes Leaving Certificate Established examination in Ireland, teachers graded and ranked their own students due to COVID-19 restrictions. In the wake of the process, a questionnaire and focus group interviews explored how teachers engaged with the Leaving Certificate Calculated Grades 2020 (CG2020)…

There is growing interest in the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist in various educational tasks, including writing assessment. However, the comparative efficacy of human and AI-powered systems in this domain remains a subject of ongoing exploration. This study aimed to compare the accuracy of human raters (teachers and…

AI-enabled assessment of student papers has the potential to provide both summative and formative feedback and reduce the time spent on grading. Using auto-ethnography, this study compares AI-enabled and human assessment of business student examination papers in a law module based on previously established rubrics. Examination papers were…

The effectiveness of an organization depends highly on the performance of its employees. Performance appraisal is an instrument used to evaluate and enhance employee performance. This study aimed to compare performance appraisal practices in private and public secondary schools, focusing on aspects like appraiser's attitude, motivation, feedback,…