The present report documents the pilot's influence on teachers' job satisfaction; attachment to the teaching profession, their school, and the district; data use practices; teaching efficacy; collegial experiences; and requests for transfer.

The start of a new school year is a challenging and exciting time for any teacher--and a time when beginning teachers particularly need our support. Working with new science teachers in the New Science Teachers' Support Network (NSTSN) has shown the authors that veteran teachers have the greatest impact on beginning teacher's success. The NSTSN is…

We observed 17 graduate and advanced-undergraduate piano majors practicing a difficult, three-measure keyboard passage from a Shostakovich concerto. Participants' instructions were to practice until they were confident they could play the passage accurately at a prescribed tempo in a retention test session the following day. We analyzed the…

Background: There is an absence of research concerning the assessment of housing support worker job performance, particularly in the development of job performance measures that reflect the priorities of people with intellectual disabilities and their families. Method: A worker-oriented job analysis method was used to develop four short job…

Over the past few decades, educators in general, and language teachers in specific, were more inclined towards using testing techniques that resembled real-life language performance. Unlike traditional paper-and-pencil language tests that required test-takers to attempt tests that were based on artificial and contrived language content,…

Sixty undergraduate students who had completed at least one semester of jazz improvisation were assigned to either: (a) physical practice (PP); (b) mental practice (MP); (c) combined 66 percent PP and 33 percent MP (66%PP:33%MP); and (d) combined 33 percent PP and 66 percent MP (33%PP:66%MP) groups. Subjects were to perform a 3-1-7-5 tonal pattern…

Research on rater effects in language performance assessments has provided ample evidence for a considerable degree of variability among raters. Building on this research, I advance the hypothesis that experienced raters fall into types or classes that are clearly distinguishable from one another with respect to the importance they attach to…

The purpose of this article is to discuss some concerns with the Game Performance Assessment Instrument (GPAI). This review of the GPAI includes five perceived problems with the GPAI scoring and coding system: (1) calculation of individual and overall game performance indices, (2) use of game involvement versus game performance index to analyze…

Using an argument-based approach to validation, this study examines the quality of teacher judgments in the context of a standards-based classroom assessment of English proficiency. Using Bachman's (2005) assessment use argument (AUA) as a framework for the investigation, this paper first articulates the claims, warrants, rebuttals, and backing…

Introduction: Receiving negative performance feedback can elicit negative emotional reactions which can interfere with feedback acceptance and use. This study investigated emotional responses of family physicians' participating in a multi-source feedback (MSF) program, sources of these emotions, and their influence upon feedback acceptance and…

Teaching researchers can assess learning outcome effectiveness as a function of students' graded performance or changes in knowledge, skills and behaviors, or attitudes. We meta-analyzed 197 studies to determine the effectiveness of teaching activities in "Teaching of Psychology (ToP)" both overall and also as a function of type of learning…

Communication skills training is an accepted part of undergraduate medical programs nowadays. In addition to learning experiences its importance should be emphasised by performance-based assessment. As detailed checklists have been shown to be not well suited for the assessment of communication skills for different reasons, this study aimed to…

This article describes how competence-based learning (CBL) can be organised in vocational education by integrating elements from a holistic instructional design model with recent ideas on assessment. A curriculum based on this model is pre-eminently suitable for an assessment approach emphasising that proof of competence is gathered by having…

Although the theoretical benefits of feedback are generally well established, in practice those benefits can be less than clear. This is particularly the case on shorter courses, where students have limited scope to integrate feedback into future assessment performance. If we accept that one of the key purposes of feedback is to encourage students…

Corporate universities have emerged as a mechanism for providing companies with a wide variety of training and development activities. They are a recent but under-researched phenomenon, and given their substantial budgets, it might be expected that they would wish to evaluate what they do. The authors explore the evaluation practices of six…