In New Zealand, as in many other countries, recent curriculum revisions have seen a change in focus in science education. There is an increased emphasis on students knowing about how the discipline of science works, with the aim of equipping them to become more critical users of science. In the New Zealand Curriculum document (Ministry of…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the introduction of a new experience-based learning process in the learning and teaching of human resource development (HRD) within a professionally accredited curriculum in a UK University. Design/methodology/approach: An action enquiry approach is taken, and qualitative data gathered over a full academic year…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the effects of rater training in an L2 performance assessment and to examine the eligibility of L2 users of English as raters in L2 performance assessment. Rater training was conducted in order for raters to clearly understand the criteria, the evaluation items, and the evaluation procedure. In this…

Generic competency is an instrument to assess and measure personal trait of students using 13 constructs with 102 items. Students' abilities to master each of the 13 constructs are very important in order for them to improve their marketability values. This is because nowadays employer is not only looking at the academic intellectual but the most…

We join the authors in this special issue in their call to embrace a culture of evaluation. Obstacles to change are formidable. Educators debate their purpose--provide knowledge or achieve environmental goals--and we have limited evidence of the effectiveness of environmental programs and policies. Change requires collaboration across…

Initial validation data are presented for the Risky Situation (RS), a 20-minute observational procedure designed to assess the father-child activation relationship with children aged 12-18 months. The coding grid, which is simple and easy to use, allows parent-child dyads to be classified into three categories and provides an activation score. By…

The aim of this study was to investigate students' and teachers' point of views about preparing measurement tools used in mathematics classes, the level of learning that these tools are intended to measure, how often they are used and how they are scored in terms of assessing 5th grade primary school mathematic courses. The population of the study…

Effective and efficient measurement of the development of skill and knowledge, especially in domains of human activity that involve complex and challenging problems, is important with regard to workplace and academic performance. However, there has been little progress in the area of practical measurement and assessment, due in part to the lack of…

Research Findings: An effective quality rating system will lead to quality assurance and improvement of early childhood education programs. Many studies have been conducted to examine the validity of quality rating instruments in Western countries, but few have been done in China. The present study investigated the effectiveness of the Beijing…

The role of assessment in higher education is gaining importance as accountability requirements intensify and as assessments are increasingly recognized as having potential to improve teaching and learning. During the last two decades, educators have begun implementing a wider variety of assessment types including alternative and student-centered…

The purpose of the recently proposed "p[subscript rep]" statistic is to estimate the probability of concurrence, that is, the probability that a replicate experiment yields an effect of the same sign (Killeen, 2005a). The influential journal "Psychological Science" endorses "p[subscript rep]" and recommends its use…

The sense that replicability is an important aspect of empirical science led Killeen (2005a) to define "p[subscript rep]," the probability that a replication will result in an outcome in the same direction as that found in a current experiment. Since then, several authors have praised and criticized 'p[subscript rep]," culminating…

This comment offers three descriptions of "p[subscript rep]" that start with a frequentist account of confidence intervals, draw on R. A. Fisher's fiducial argument, and do not make Bayesian assumptions. Links are described among "p[subscript rep]," "p" values, and the probability a confidence interval will capture…

The use of eligibility for a free lunch as a measure of a student's socioeconomic status continues to be a fixture of quantitative education research. Despite its popularity, it is unclear that education researchers are familiar with what student eligibility for a free lunch does (and does not) represent. The authors examine the National School…

The International Reading Association's Position Statement on Young Adolescents' Literacy Learning states, "It is during the middle years of schooling that most students refine their reading preferences, become sophisticated readers of informational text, and lay the groundwork for the lifelong reading habit." As the National Assessment of…