Discusses the findings of a two-year research project on formative assessment in New Zealand among science teachers. The characteristics of formative assessment include responsiveness, sources of evidence, a tacit process, use of professional knowledge and experiences, and an integral part of teaching and learning. (Author/MM)

University students, asked to judge criteria for their own quality, rated a commitment to learning most important of 25 criteria. They considered most criteria of student quality to be more important at graduation than at entry, supporting a talent development approach to assessment rather than a resource approach. (Author)

Presents seven basic assumptions to help 17-year-olds distinguish themselves in today's highly competitive college selection process: the student is in charge, students must make a friend of their advocates, choose eight first choices, SATs and ACTs don't get you in, the college market is not a tight market, personalize the process, and be…

The author discusses five key issues related to the adequacy of tests of children's language. Within each key issue, she asks test adequacy questions, accompanied by criteria for determining adequacy. The author also reviews the information found in the manuals for four norm-referenced, standardized tests of language development to illustrate…

This article describes and proposes an unrestricted factor analytic procedure to: (a) assess the dimensionality and structure of a balanced personality scale taking into account the potential effects of acquiescent responding, and (b) correct the individual trait estimates for acquiescence. The procedure can be considered as an extension of ten…

Post-graduate courses are periodically evaluated in accordance with not always very clear criteria by CAPES (Co-ordinating Committee for Teaching Staff Improvement). These criteria try to measure, among other things, academic productivity (including quantity and quality of scientific production), number of classes given by teachers, time to…

At some point in an educator's professional life, he may be asked to serve on an awards committee for current publications in his field. An educator's concern then is on how to do it without bias, and more importantly, how to do it when the texts may be very different from each other. One text may be theory-based; one may be a textbook; and…

Confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) procedures can be used to provide evidence of measurement invariance. However, empirical evaluation has not focused on the accuracy of common CFA steps used to detect a lack of invariance across groups. This investigation examined procedures for detection of test structure differences across groups under several…

This study is a partial replication of L. Hu and P. M. Bentler's (1999) fit criteria work. The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to determine whether cut-off values vary according to which model is the true population model for a dataset and (b) to identify which of 13 fit indexes behave optimally by retaining all of the correct models while…

This article describes part of an investigation into the reliability and potential benefits of incorporating peer assessment into English language programmes. Undergraduate Engineering students attending a university in Hong Kong were asked to assess the English language proficiency of their peers - among other assessment criteria, such as…

In this article, I present a study in which 12 pairs of 8th-grade students solved problems about a physical device with algebra. The device, called a winch, instantiates motions that can be modeled by pairs of simultaneous linear functions. The following question motivated the study: How can students generate algebraic models without direct…

The descriptive phenomenological categorical psychiatric diagnostic systems that are currently being used in the field of intellectual disability do not adequately provide for the special needs of persons with intellectual disability. Many relevant diagnostic questions are left unanswered or are only partially accounted for. This is particularly…

The Faculty of Architecture of Delft University of Technology considers valid and reliable assessment of designing an important issue. A project called Bottom-up was started to address this issue, using the experiences and practice of design teachers as a starting point. The goals of this project were to enlarge inter-subjective reliability and to…

This article reiterates the view that belief and knowledge can be conflated based on having a common form. The pedagogical advantage is that teachers are less likely to close off student discussions needed to help students develop an understanding of the characteristics and limitations of scientific knowledge. It is also less likely that a…

In this paper we discuss the potential for using systematic reviews of research to inform policy in education against the background of severe criticisms of the quality and relevance of individual research studies, most recently by the Commission on the Social Sciences. The potential is set against the reality of conducting systematic reviews of…