Physical activity habits are established in early childhood. Increasing a child's fundamental movement skill confidence and competence may result in a trajectory of increased physical activity and a lower risk of becoming overweight. The evidence upon which the promotion of physical activity in early childhood settings is based is tenuous. This…

Professional schools prepare students to become competent professionals. Consequently, there is a need for assessments that can determine the acquisition of the relevant professional competencies. Although using performance assessment to replace traditional paper-and-pencil tests might provide one way to move forward, the use of performance…

Approved in 1999 by the Swiss Parliament, the Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC) project debuted in 2000 with the goal of promoting an information society in Switzerland. The University of Geneva has been actively involved with building the SVC and the European virtual campus e-LERU, a two-year project in which eight European countries partnered to…

The CourseMarker system has been used to assess free-response computer based assessment (CBA) exercises since 1998. The aim of the studies reported here was to evaluate the feasibility and usefulness of developing and deploying diagram-based exercises using DATsys, an authoring environment for diagram-based CBA, together with CourseMarker.…

Objective: The complexity and scale of health promotion interventions present challenges for the standardization of delivery. Furthermore, health promotion practice favours adapting interventions according to perceived client need. This paper examines the fidelity of intervention delivery within A Stop Smoking in Schools Trial (ASSIST),…

Formative assessment, or assessment for learning, has been championed by assessment specialists and increasingly endorsed by professional organizations. Although it may be particularly beneficial for secondary students, the implementation of formative assessment at the secondary level has met with some resistance. To take stock of the research…

D. Howell, E. Breivik, and J. B. Wilcox (2007) have presented an important and interesting analysis of formative measurement and have recommended that researchers abandon such an approach in favor of reflective measurement. The author agrees with their recommendations but disagrees with some of the bases for their conclusions. He suggests that…

The purpose of the conference presentation upon which this paper is inspired was to present an innovative approach to motivate students to write in a second language during a first-year Spanish class. Usually, students comply with writing exercises that convey basic thoughts, due to constrained vocabulary and limited knowledge of grammatical…

The relationship between teaching and learning requires a coordinated effort between teachers and students that depends upon common goals aligned to the teachers' expertise and the students' academic needs. Without a systematic approach to teaching, instructional practice can neglect learning targets. Formative practices afford teachers a…

The purpose of this study was to describe secondary teachers' formative assessment practices and to examine the relationship of these practices to student motivation. The sample included 3,242 students and 161 grade 6-12 teachers. Teachers and students completed self-report questionnaires that focused on both formative assessment and motivation…

The research presented in this manuscript was focused on the development of assessments for engineering design outcomes. The primary goal was to support efforts by the Transferrable Integrated Design Engineering Education (TIDEE) consortium in developing assessment instruments for multidisciplinary engineering capstone courses. Research conducted…

easyCBM[R] is an online benchmark and progress monitoring assessment system designed for use within a response to intervention (RTI) framework. Part of the purpose of easyCBM[R] is to help educators identify students who may be at risk for failure. Often, students deemed at-risk are those who would be predicted to not pass the state test. Previous…

This study was carried out in the context of formative assessment where assessment and learning were integrated to enhance both teaching and learning. The purpose of the study was to: (a) identify pupils' ideas about biological inheritance through the use of a concept cartoon, pupils' drawings and talk, and (b) devise scaffolding structures that…

Although interim assessments are currently promoted as a mechanism for improving teaching and student learning, we know little about how teachers use this data to modify instruction. This article presents findings from a larger study on teachers' use of interim assessment information in elementary mathematics. We address the following questions:…

Data-driven instructional improvement relies on developing coherent systems that allow school staff to generate, interpret, and act upon quality formative information on students and school programs. This article offers a formative feedback system model that captures how school leaders and teachers structure artifacts and practices to create…