This paper reports the evaluation of a unique three-year program designed to support teachers new to a school district. The emphasis of the evaluation process was on the participation of the stakeholders in the evaluation process and the development of their abilities in evaluation. There is educational significance to this study on two levels.…

Research shows that technology makes a difference in student motivation, engagement, and active learning. It also helps students develop critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. Providing each student with his or her own computing device such as a Palm handheld computer and appropriate software can have a great impact. This…

This study utilised a qualitative research methodology known as formative research to improve the process guidelines that are described in the Guidance System for Transforming Education (GSTE). This study took place in a small (5447 students), partly urban and partly rural school district in Indiana. The researchers, also serving as change…

Research shows that formative assessment can exert a powerful effect on student learning, yet the complexity of formative assessment is not well understood and some curricular structures and practices do not fully exploit its potential. This article outlines the background to the political promotion of employability and shows that institutional…

Part one of this article described the first two stages that schools move through as they learn to link data to higher student achievement. In stage one, schools make initial efforts to contextualize the many data sources available, but their data analysis is mostly for its own sake. In stage two--using data to improve educational efficiency--the…

The author intends to add one particular national point of view to a previous comparative reflection done by Black and Wiliam (2005), whose thesis is the need to study particular cases before making general proposals addressing the implementation of formative assessment practices. Teachers' conceptions about assessment are considered to be one…

Over the last decade, larger student numbers, reduced resources and increasing use of new technologies have led to the increased use of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) as a method of assessment in higher education courses. This paper identifies some limitations associated with MCQs from a pedagogical standpoint. It then provides an assessment…

R. D. Howell, E. Breivik, and J. B. Wilcox (2007) have argued that causal (formative) indicators are inherently subject to interpretational confounding. That is, they have argued that using causal (formative) indicators leads the empirical meaning of a latent variable to be other than that assigned to it by a researcher. Their critique of causal…

Broadly defined, digital moviemaking integrates a variety of media (images, sound, text, video, narration) to communicate with an audience. There is near-ubiquitous access to the necessary software (MovieMaker and iMovie are bundled free with their respective operating systems) and hardware (computers with Internet access, digital cameras, etc.).…

In an attempt to ensure students had a positive experience in their first semester, and to encourage future effective use of tutors' feedback comments, a post-1992 university used a module in the school of education to develop an innovative feedback process. The process involved four stages: a first submission of written work, written feedback on…

One potentially feasible tool for use in the formative assessment of social behavior is the direct behavior rating, yet empirical support for the reliability of its use is limited. In this study, generalizability theory was used to provide preliminary psychometric data regarding the generalizability and dependability of the direct behavior rating…

This paper reports the development of innovative assessment sessions within two core technical courses in Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland. Peer Assessment Learning Sessions (PALS) facilitate a student's peer assessment of a colleague's problem-based learning assignment or tutorial within a "traditional" whole-class…

This article is concerned with the meanings that employees in industry attribute to representations of data and the contingencies of these meanings in context. Our primary concern is to more precisely characterize how the context of the industrial process is constitutive of the meaning of graphs of data derived from this process. We draw on data…

A study of New Zealand secondary school students using four self-report inventories of conceptions of assessment found four robust independent measurement models. Four structural models mapped the conceptions of assessment to mathematics achievement taking into account student ethnicity and student sex. The conceptions that assessment makes…

SSLI test protocol data revealed the dominance of "central" literacy measures and "local" subject-specific measures aligned to institutional requirements, curriculum and national examination content. These measures initiate secondary students into a pervasive culture of assessment that generally fails to support further learning; a culture…