We developed a criterion-referenced student rating of instruction (SRI) to facilitate formative assessment of teaching. It involves four dimensions of teaching quality that are grounded in current instructional design principles: Organization and structure, Assessment and feedback, Personal interactions, and Academic rigor. Using item response…

Service-learning courses provide students with practical opportunities to enhance their learning and development in the field, along with getting students engaged in different communities and settings. However, there are still many challenges to designing and offering effective service-learning courses, such as requiring all students to…

Technological tools have permeated higher education programs. However, their mere introduction does not guarantee instructional quality. This article presents the results of an innovation project aimed at fostering autonomous learning among students at a Pre-School and Primary Teacher degree. For one semester all freshmen students used a system…

Background: Researchers have indicated that assessment practices and methods should support learners' construction of meaningful understanding of knowledge. Understanding students' conceptions of assessment will enable us to construct more realistic, valid and fair assessments. Learners' conceptualization of assessment would be imperative to serve…

Teaching speaking is one of the challenging dimensions of teaching English as a foreign language. In the Turkish educational setting, students are exposed to English from second grade at the primary level until the first grade at tertiary level. Although the exposure to English is intensive, it is observed that students are unable to solve…

Despite the rising interest in the practice of formative assessment (FA) in language classrooms, research has rarely examined the factors that contribute to differential use of FA. The present study adopts an explanatory sequential mixed-method design to examine differences in FA use among Japanese junior and senior high school EFL (English as a…

Unconditional cash transfer programs are a form of structural intervention to address poverty, a "fundamental cause" of disease. Such programs increasingly aim to build resilience to sustain improved outcomes and provide a solid foundation for longer term transformations. As such, there is a need to understand what resilience means in…

Context-based science courses stimulate students to reconstruct the information presented by connecting to their prior knowledge and experiences. However, students need support. Formative assessments inform both teacher and students about students' knowledge deficiencies and misconceptions and how students can be supported. Research on formative…

This article describes the theory, key components, and empirical support for the Classroom Strategies Coaching (CSC) Model, a data-driven coaching approach that systematically integrates data from multiple observations to identify teacher practice needs and goals, design practice plans, and evaluate progress towards goals. The primary aim of the…

This qualitative study used action research to provide an insight into how pupils experience and perceive assessment in music education. In collaboration with pupils we constructed an assessment for learning model aimed at involving pupils in the co-development of assessment criteria and in the processes of self and peer assessment. In addition we…

This study employed a mixed methods approach to evaluate the meaning and value of grades within a traditional grading system. Teachers' grading and assessment practices were examined in terms of clarity, consistency, and to what extent assessment guided instruction. Teachers from a high-performing suburban high school in the Northeast responded to…

Continuous Assessment (CA) systems are externally directed, curriculum-based assessment schemes used for both summative and formative purposes within classrooms. CA has been implemented as national policy in several postcolonial developing countries and is believed to hold great promise for improving education outcomes. This theory-driven…

This study was carried out in order to identify to what extent the Turkish students' English classroom anxiety affects their academic achievement in English language. In this quantitative descriptive study, a correlational survey model was employed, and the convenience sampling was done. In order to collect data, the Foreign Language Classroom…

Novice members of a Norwegian national rater panel tasked with assessing Year 8 pupils' written texts were studied during three successive preparation sessions (2011-2012). The purpose was to investigate how the raters successfully make use of different decision-making strategies in an assessment situation where pre-set criteria and standards give…

In many mathematics classrooms, the teacher provides "worked examples" to demonstrate how students should perform certain algorithms or processes. Some students find it difficult to generalize from the examples that teachers provide and cannot apply what they have learned in new situations (Watson and Mason 2002). Instead, teachers might…