Peer assessment can be a valuable learning tool in teacher education because it supports student teachers to acquire skills that are essential in their professional working life. This article presents a conceptual framework in which the training of peer assessment skills by means of peer assessment tasks is integrated in teacher education courses.…

Inquiry learning requires the ability to understand that theory and evidence have to be distinguished and co-ordinated. Moreover, learners have to be able to control two or more independent variables when formulating hypotheses, designing experiments and interpreting outcomes. Can sixth-grade (9-10 years) children be trained to acquire these…

A procedure to assess the interpersonal competence of teachers was developed and validated. The procedure includes the use of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI), an observation instrument and a self-evaluation instrument. The concepts of construct-irrelevant variance and construct under-representation were used to explore the validity…

Current preschool assessments lack the ability to capture performance variance and complex thinking skills. This study examined the relationship among student performance, student feelings, and teacher perceptions as they apply to using a formal performance assessment in a preschool setting. A formal performance assessment was administered to 71…

This research examined component processes that contribute to performance on one of the new, standards-based reading tests that have become a staple in many states. Participants were 60 Grade 4 students randomly sampled from 7 classrooms in a rural school district. The particular test we studied employed a mixture of traditional (multiple-choice)…

Examinations greatly influence course structures and student study strategies. A course for students in the civil and environmental engineering programme at Lulea University of Technology was reconstructed with the aim of increasing levels of understanding. A simple written test was designed to assess low levels of understanding (definitions,…

Neuroimaging studies have frequently observed relatively high activity in medial rostral prefrontal cortex (PFC) during rest or baseline conditions. Some accounts have attributed this high activity to the occurrence of unconstrained stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thought processes during baseline conditions. Here, the authors investigated…

Authenticity is an important element of new modes of assessment. The problem is that what authentic assessment really is, is unspecified. In this article, we first review the literature on authenticity of assessments, along with a five-dimensional framework for designing authentic assessments with professional practice as the starting point. Then,…

The relative effectiveness of explicit instruction, guided discovery, and discovery learning techniques in enhancing anticipation skill in young, intermediate-level tennis players was examined. Performance was assessed pre- and postintervention, during acquisition, and under transfer conditions designed to elicit anxiety through the use of…

Two experiments examined possible negative transfer in nonexperts from the use of pictorial examples in a laboratory design problem-solving situation. In Experiment 1, 89 participants were instructed to "think aloud" and were assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: (a) control (standard instructions), (b) fixation (inclusion of a problematic…

This article reviews changes in the accountability landscape that have occurred for foundations in recent years and several precedents for foundation performance assessment. The authors then present a model of portfolio assessment that is used for organizational accountability and learning. This model, which was piloted in 2002 and 2003 for the…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the level of observed performance on the feedback strategy selected by a performance evaluator. One hundred and twenty-three actual performance evaluators from 15 different organizations and 123 college students reviewed, in groups which ranged from 2 to 20, a job description for…

Heartland Area Education Agency in Iowa illustrates how it has sustained a problem-solving service delivery system for 15 years and adapted to changing state and federal requirements while remaining consistent with its guiding principles that emphasize direct assessment, intervention, progress monitoring, and the evaluation of student results. The…

How speaking turns are taken and allocated in the language classroom, who takes them, and in what sequence (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974), allows mundane talk to be heard as "intellectual quality" and "connectedness" within the "productive pedagogies" framework adopted over the past five years by Education Queensland (2001). This paper…

The calendar was creeping into June. It was late spring, a time when many students' thoughts were sliding toward summer vacation. But it wasn't a problem in Lori Lowe's classroom. Her students had bigger things on their minds--like whether or not the Civil War would turn out the way they hoped. For many weeks, these fourth graders had been…