Anxiety has an important role in teaching and learning. If teachers can recognize which kind of tests create high anxiety then they will be able to omit these kinds of tests. Then, the results of test can probably show the students' knowledge more carefully. The subjects of the present study were sixty Iranian female junior university students.…

It is one thing to produce an innovative, construct-based assessment task; it's another to produce 10 a year that are comparable in difficulty, measure the same competencies, are free of differential item functioning, and can be scaled and equated. These challenges contributed to the failure of the performance (or authentic) assessment movement of…

This study explores difficulties in the conceptual positioning of the higher education performance indicator of qualification completion within a standard logic model taken from the public sector performance literature, involving inputs, processes, impacts and outcomes. Organisations are held to be more accountable for the delivery of outputs than…

The purpose for this study was to develop a descriptive account of one large Virginia school district's plan for implementation of alternative, locally developed assessments designed to supplant standardized measures. As policy reform with alternative assessments has been under-researched for the past 30 years, there is a need for studies…

This article synthesises the role of evaluation at the municipal, school, classroom and parental levels of governance, and discusses the results of the articles appearing in this special issue. The discussion concerns the role of evaluation in school governance, the value of evaluation for local school development, the constitutive effects of…

In this paper the authors argue that a confluence of powerful interests has descended upon the work of teacher education from all possible points of entry via the edTPA. The paper uses Actor Network Theory to trace one particular set of complex social associations created and acted upon in the adoption and implementation of a single national…

This study takes a fine-grained look at the inaugural implementation of a high-stakes teacher performance assessment (the edTPA) from multiple perspectives and chronicles how participants used the reading, writing, and discussion of poetry to cope with and sometimes critique the edTPA. Teacher researchers sought to understand multiple perspectives…

K-12 teachers of science have been digging into the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") (NGSS Lead States 2013) to begin creating plans and processes for translating them for classroom instruction. As teachers learn about the NGSS, they have asked about the general structure of the standards document and how to read…

K-12 teachers of science have been digging into the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) (NGSS Lead States 2013) to begin creating plans and processes for translating them for classroom instruction. As teachers learn about the "NGSS," they have asked about the general structure of the standards document and how to read…

This study investigates the effect of proficiency- vs. performance-based elicited imitation (EI) assessment. EI requires test-takers to repeat sentences in the target language. The accuracy at which test-takers are able to repeat sentences highly correlates with test-takers' language proficiency. However, in EI, the factors that render an item…

A striking feature of contemporary Australian higher education governance is the strong emphasis on centralized, template style, metric-based, and consequential forms of performance measurement. Such emphasis is indicative of a low degree of political trust among the central authorities in Australia in the intrinsic capacity of universities and…

This study compared the direct, indirect, and total effects of information, communication, and technology (ICT) variables on math achievement for second-generation immigrant, first-generation immigrant, and nonimmigrant students. A path model was used to analyze U.S. nationally representative data from the Program for International Student…

The current study aimed at investigating how different types of embodied learnings influence elementary school students' English as a foreign language (EFL) listening performance. Two kinds of embodied learnings: real and physical body versus the 3D avatar, were compared with non-embodied learning. 69 fifth graders from two elementary schools…

Worldwide there is a growing reliance on sessional teachers in universities. This has impacted all disciplines in higher education including medical anatomy programs. The objective of this review was to define the role and support needs of sessional anatomy teachers by reporting on the (1) qualifications, (2) teaching role, (3) training, and (4)…

Understanding the factors that contribute to an effective teacher has the potential to influence selection and preparation of pre-service teachers and may influence student outcomes. Prior research suggests a relationship between teacher characteristics (academic achievement, verbal ability, gender) and teacher effectiveness, however, these…