This chapter illustrates the value of formative assessment as the key to better understand students who struggle with classroom learning. The authors present ways in which professional development, classroom assessment, and student services can come together with the common goal of building a community focused on the student learning experience…

In spite of the rising tide of metrics in UK higher education, there has been scant attention paid to assessment loads, when evidence demonstrates that heavy demands lead to surface learning. Our study seeks to redress the situation by defining assessment loads and comparing them across research and teaching intensive universities. We clarify the…

Context: The standards-based movement in U.S. public education has reached as far as kindergarten. Early primary teachers are increasingly required to teach academic standards in core subject areas, while engaging in increased levels of student assessment. In kindergarten, this growing emphasis on academic standards and student assessment is…

This paper reports on a study that was conducted to examine formative assessment as a form of assessment that promotes critical pedagogy in teaching and learning. Using Freire's notion of critical pedagogy as an analytic framework, the argument is that formative assessment should transcend grading, selection and accountability for learning and…

Art teachers may find student assessment stressful when they fear that the rigid criteria might stifle creativity (Gruber & Hobbs, 2002), while others will see assessment as a valuable tool that sparks possibilities for future projects (Schönau, 2012). In September 2016, the author decided to focus for an entire year on developing new…

This paper examines preservice teachers' perspectives on assessment feedback developed in a teacher education course during the first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As initially negotiated with students, feedback was learner-centred and involved a formative intervention approach applied iteratively by the teacher educator over the course…

This paper reports a study investigating business English teachers' belief about online assessment using Q methodology. To address the common practice that teachers had to conduct online assessment during COVID-19 period and with performance assessment as theoretical foundation, this paper studied 22 Chinese business English teachers' belief when…

This paper examines the impact of assessment and instructional practices in a compressed-format physics abroad program for life science students from a large U.S. university system. Using qualitative case study methodology, the study investigated the major pedagogical functions of assessments and their implications on student learning across three…

Although research provides ample evidence of teaching methods that facilitate students' learning of specific word meanings, the potential of instruction to impact students' general vocabulary knowledge has remained an unanswered question. This article reports on a three-year formative experiment that developed, implemented, and tested a long-term,…

The introduction of new assessment policy can reverberate throughout all levels of schooling. This paper presents an in-depth investigation into one school's response in the Junior years of secondary education to the introduction of a new Senior years' assessment system. The investigation focuses on the educational context of a high-performing…

This case study examined teachers' on-the-fly formative assessment conversations, that is, how teachers collect information from students' thinking and use that information to support their learning during teacher-student interactions. Previous studies have typically analysed whole-class discussions on the level of speaking turns, and have…

This paper provides both a summary and plenary paper for a Special Issue of papers that build on the findings of a research project that investigated formative and summative assessment methods to support and to improve inquiry-based science teaching and learning. The paper aims to unravel some of the complexity that underpins classroom assessment…

This study was developed in the context of a course in higher education and in a blended learning environment--online, distance, and face-to-face (b-learning). The aim was to identify and characterize the meanings and effects that students and teachers attribute to the use of digital portfolios as an assessment and learning strategy. The…

Universities have made a compulsory shift to distance education due to the Covid-19 pandemic. All of the higher education institutions in Turkey have completed 2019-2020 Spring semester using online tools. However, most of these institutions were not fully-prepared to have all of their courses online. Technical inadequacies, lack of qualified…

The fast global spread of COVID-19 has resulted in the mass disruption of teaching, learning, as well as assessment, in mainstream schools in Singapore. Teachers were caught unprepared and this jeopardised the quality of classroom delivery and assessment. The Ministry of Education has since shifted to an online asynchronous mode of teaching whilst…