The goals for this quantitative study were to examine principals' perceptions regarding supervision and evaluation within their own evaluations. Three research questions guided the inquiry: (1) What are the perceptions of principals' regarding their own supervision?; (2) What are the perceptions of principals' regarding their own evaluation?; and…

In Pennsylvania, Act 82 of 2012 introduced the Educator Effectiveness system and its foundational belief that student achievement is the result of teachers' high quality instruction and principals' high quality school leadership. With the heightened expectations of principal and teacher accountability for student achievement, principals positively…

Our featured leaders saw big gains when their teachers began using formative assessment practice to guide student growth minute-by-minute. Read the fourth article in our five-part series for the scoop on how committing to this high-impact instructional practice paid off for a regional agency, district, and school. Learn: (1) why our featured…

Associations between scale scores obtained from a teacher observation-based authentic assessment measure, the "Teaching Strategies GOLD®", and (a) teacher ratings of children's social functioning and learning behaviors, and (b) child performance on external, individually administered direct assessments of academic skills are presented.…

Formative Assessment Collaborative Team (FACT) meetings provide educators with a structured time each week to engage in peer collaboration focused on students' mathematical thinking. In these meetings, educators work together to analyze their students' mathematical thinking and make purposeful adaptations to instructional plans based on the…

This study examines the use of gamification as an innovative assessment approach to foreign language learning with 12-14-year-old students. A mixed methodology has been applied. Quantitative data have been collected from formative non-gamified and gamified assessments. Qualitative data was collected from a student questionnaire. The results were…

Students' self-assessment of language features in their oral explanations of a mathematics task was supported by language learning progressions. Learning progressions map a continuum of knowledge or skills development as they increase in sophistication over time. Learning progressions can be a framework to support formative assessment by both…

The case study presented in this paper investigates the roles that the Moodle workshop activity module and peer feedback screencast training have on the development of formative peer feedback practices in low level English academic writing classes. The development of 26 first-year Japanese students' peer feedback practices were tracked over 6…

Portfolios are widely used in New Zealand for documenting children's learning; there is now an increasing move to online ePortfolios. This article presents findings from a doctoral study which investigated the impact of the introduction of ePortfolios in an early childhood education setting where traditional paper-based portfolios were previously…

London dispersion forces (LDFs) are the most fundamental of the noncovalent interactions in that they are interactions that act between all molecular species and require only that students can use the "electron cloud" model of atomic structure. In this longitudinal study we investigate how students respond to prompts, designed to elicit…

This paper presents a step-by-step conversion of a face-to-face (F2F) entry level social work research methods course to a computer-mediated format. An overview of teaching practices and the important pedagogical foundations associated with this curricular effort are discussed followed by an introduction to the electronic platform utilized in the…

A very important element of formative assessment is giving and receiving feedback. However, most teachers face difficulty in giving students feedback due to various reasons, such as the large number of students in class that makes it time consuming for them to do so. Fortunately, students themselves can be excellent sources of feedback through…

This article describes a study undertaken in New Zealand, England and Sweden and is based on the use of a tool developed by the researcher as a professional development and teaching tool in technology education for teachers of students between four and six years of age. The aim of the research was to investigate teachers' views of the…

As scientific models of student thinking, learning progressions (LPs) have been evaluated in terms of one important, but limited, criterion: fit to empirical data. We argue that LPs are not empirically adequate, largely because they rely on problematic assumptions of theory-like coherence in students' thinking. Through an empirical investigation…

What do students stand to gain from high-stakes, standardized testing? We consider answers to this question from the perspective of urban district leaders tasked with designing and overseeing the implementation of standardized testing policies. Results revealed variation in leaders' framing of and rationale for standardized testing with respect to…