In this thesis, quantum estimation theory is applied to investigate uncertainty relations between error and disturbance in quantum measurement. The author argues that the best solution for clarifying the attainable bound of the error and disturbance is to invoke the estimation process from the measurement outcomes such as signals from a photodetector in a quantum optical system. The error and disturbance in terms of the Fisher information content have been successfully formulated and provide the upper bound of the accuracy of the estimation. Moreover, the attainable bound of the error and disturbance in quantum measurement has been derived. The obtained bound is determined for the first time by the quantum fluctuations and correlation functions of the observables, which characterize the non-classical fluctuation of the observables. The result provides the upper bound of our knowledge obtained by quantum measurements. The method developed in this thesis will be applied to a broad class of problems related to quantum measurement to build a next-generation clock standard and to successfully detect gravitational waves.

This book explores how best to invest in and nurture teachers. It examines deprofessionalisation and reprofessionalisation in the recent developments in the understanding of teaching and learning, including the effects of standardizing teaching, education shaped by student satisfaction data and basic skills tests. The book focuses on Australian context and takes on an international perspective. It investigates fundamental issues affecting teacher quality, morale, attrition and retention, learner and teacher autonomy, and assessment and evaluation. It encourages teachers and teacher educators to assert centrality to teachers and question and challenge outside forces that suppress teacher autonomy and associated agency and creativity. It challenges administrators and educational jurisdictions to rethink their assumptions on their own capacities and limitations and teachers' capabilities to shape education in optimal ways and the impact of outcomes of the decisions they make.

A volume in Research on Sociocultural Influences on Motivation and Learning Series Editor: Dennis M. McInerney, The Hong Kong Institute of Education Assessment for learning is meant to engage, motivate, and enable students to do better in their learning. However, how students themselves perceive assessments (both high-stakes qualifications and low-stakes monitoring) is not well understood. This volume collects research studies from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and New Zealand that have deliberately focused on how students in primary, secondary, and tertiary education conceive of, experience, understand, and evaluate assessments. Assessment for learning has assumed that formative assessments and classroom practices would be an unqualified success in terms of student learning outcomes. Making use of a variety of qualitatively interpreted focus groups, observations, and interviews and factor-analytic survey methods, the studies collected in this volume raise doubts as to the validity of this formulation. We commend this volume to readers hoping to stimulate their own thinking and research in the area of student assessment. We believe the chapters will challenge researchers, policy makers, teacher educators, and instructors as to how assessment for learning can be implemented.

Too often teachers and schools operate with grading systems that are vestiges of an antiquated educational model with little fresh thinking as to how grades affect student learning. In On Grades and Grading, Timothy Quinn addresses this problem head on, offering an in-depth and nuanced analysis of the purposes grades can serve, as well as their impact on student learning. Quinn takes a hard look at the three pedagogical purposes for grades - providing data about students, motivating students, and providing students with feedback on their work. He then goes on to address a number of specific and, at times, controversial grading related issues, including grade inflation, grading collaborative work, grading and failure, the grading of behaviors and dispositions, and the use of technology in grading. Educators will find both concrete strategies for improving their grading systems and policies and, perhaps most importantly, a rich resource for improving student learning. Ultimately, Quinn hopes to create a world in which students, parents, and teachers all pay more attention to learning and less to grades themselves.

This book introduces the design and implementation of an assessment model for a new university-level English curriculum in China that aims at developing digital literacy skills. The assessment approach, embedded in the curriculum of an online modular course at Peking University, requires the students to conduct semester-long digital research projects in English in their major fields of study. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, evaluation rubrics built around Content, Clarity, and Creative/Critical Thinking were developed, evaluated, and refined over three implementation cycles (eight semesters). The book presents a systematic assessment design framework, a set of effective rubrics for evaluating the digital research project, and authentic examples of written and multimedia presentations by Chinese students. Integrating assessment with instruction and technology, the book provides a valuable practical guide to digital literacy assessment for English education in the Outer and Expanding Circle contexts.

Our revision resources are the smart choice for those revising for the external assessment for the Enterprise BTEC Tech Award. This book will help you to: Revise all the essential content and key skills Organise your revision with the one-topic-per-page format Speed up your revision with the helpful hints on how to tackle questions and tasks Track your revision progress with at-a-glance check boxes Check your understanding with annotated example responses Practise with revision questions and answers. Revision is more than just this Guide! Our student textbook supports your learning throughout your BTEC Tech Award in Enterprise . It contains all the content you need to progress through your course and includes: Activities that will help you apply the new skills you have learned Clear explanations of topics and plenty of examples to put the learning into context 'Check my Learning' activities to help you review your understanding Opportunities to practise your skills for assessment.

The focus on smart education has become a new trend in the global educational field. Some countries have already developed smart education systems and there is increasing pressure coming from business and tech communities to continue this development. Simultaneously, there are only fragmented studies on the didactic aspects of technology usage. Thus, pedagogy as a science must engage in a new research direction-smart pedagogy. This book seeks to engage in a new research direction, that of smart pedagogy. It launches discussions on how to use all sorts of smart education solutions in the context of existing learning theories and on how to apply innovative solutions in order to reduce the marginalization of groups in educational contexts. It also explores transformations of pedagogical science, the role of the educator, applicable teaching methods, learning outcomes, and research and assessment of acquired knowledge in an effort to make the smart education process meaningful to a wide audience of international educators, researchers, and administrators working within and tangential to TEL.

Constructing Measures introduces a way to understand the advantages and disadvantages of measurement instruments. It explains the ways to use such instruments, and how to apply these methods to develop new instruments or adapt old ones, based on item response modeling and construct references. Now in its second edition, this book focuses on the steps taken while constructing an instrument, and breaks down the "building blocks" that make up an instrument-the construct map, the design plan for the items, the outcome space, and the statistical measurement model. The material covers a variety of item formats, including multiple-choice, open-ended, and performance items, projects, portfolios, Likert and Guttman items, behavioral observations, and interview protocols. Each chapter includes an overview of the key concepts, related resources for further investigation, and exercises and activities. A variety of examples from the behavioral and social sciences and education-including achievement and performance testing, attitude measures, health measures, and general sociological scales-demonstrate the application of the material. Accompanying downloadable resources feature control files, output, and a data set to allow readers to compute the text's exercises and create new analyses and case archives based on the book's examples so the reader can work through the entire development of an instrument. New to this edition are additional example contexts including a cognitive/achievement example, an attitude example, and a behavioral example; new concentrations on specific measurement issues and practices such as standard-setting, computer-delivery and reporting, and going beyond the Likert response format; and updated online resource with new materials, such as selected research articles with data sets and teaching resources like a syllabus and PowerPoint slides. Constructing Measures is an invaluable text for undergraduate and graduate courses on item, test, or instrument development; measurement; item response theory; or Rasch analysis taught in a variety of departments including education, statistics, and psychology. The book also appeals to practitioners who develop instruments, including industrial/organizational, educational, and school psychologists; health outcomes researchers; program evaluators; and sociological measurers.

This book combines insights from language assessment literacy and critical language testing through critical analyses and research about challenges in language assessment around the world. It investigates problematic practices in language testing which are relevant to language test users such as language program directors, testing centers, and language teachers, as well as teachers-in-training in Graduate Diploma and Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics programs. These issues involve aspects of language testing such as test development, test administration, scoring, and interpretation/use of test results. Chapters in this volume discuss insights about language testing policy, testing world languages, developing program-level language tests and tests of specific language skills, and language assessment literacy. In addition, this book identifies two needs in language testing for further examination: the need for collaboration between language test developers, language test users, and language users, and the need to base language tests on real-world language use.

This book deals with the development of New Zealand's standards system for primary school achievement, 'Kiwi Standards', which took effect from 2010 onwards and is becoming increasingly embedded over time. The approach, where teachers make 'Overall Teacher Judgements' based on a range of assessment tools and their own observations rather than using any particular national test, has created predictable problems with moderation within and across schools. It has been claimed that this 'bold' Kiwi Standards approach avoids the narrowed curriculum and mediocre outcomes of high-stakes assessment in other countries. Yet this book suggests it just produces another variant of the same problems and demonstrates that even a relatively weak high-stakes assessment approach still produces performative effects. The book provides a blow by blow account of the development of a policy including the continuous repositioning of New Zealand's Government as it has sought to justify the policy in the face of opposition from educators. Indeed the Kiwi Standards tale provides a world-class example of teachers fighting back against policy, with the help of academics. There is an indigenous Maori aspect to the story as well. Finally, this book also provides comparative international perspectives including responses from well-known US, English and Australian academics.

This Tutor Delivery Pack for AQA GCSE (9-1) Grades 5-9 Tutor Delivery Pack for English Language contains everything you need for a whole academic year of private tutoring: 38 complete lessons, complete with plans, activities and homework Detailed explanation on the use of the pack Information for parents Specification guidance Advice on preparing for the exam Needs analysis for the parents and the students Mapping guide to the Revise GCSE Series Progress and End-of-Lesson Report templates Differentiation and extension ideas Customisable certificates in the digital version of the pack

Before today's teachers are ready to instruct the intellectual leaders of tomorrow, they must first be trained themselves. Every teacher experiences an induction process that can make their early years as an educator nerve-racking. Focusing on this period of time in a teacher's career can lead to greater teacher retention and success. Examining the Teacher Induction Process in Contemporary Education Systems addresses the construct of teacher induction through theoretical and empirical research. It also provides an in-depth conceptualization of being a novice teacher through micro-political realities of teaching in different geographical and cultural regions. While highlighting topics including adaptation challenges, mentor-mentee interaction, and teacher retention, this book is ideally designed for school administrators, early career teachers, educational researchers, educational professionals, and academicians seeking current research on early career educator adaptation and practices.

This book offers aninsight into the research and practices of science teaching and learning in the Singapore classroom, with particular attention paid to how they map on to science as inquiry. It provides a spectrum of Singapore's science educational practices through all levels of its education system, detailing both successes and shortcomings.

The book features a collection of research and discourse by science educators in Singapore, organized around four themes that are essential components of approaching science as inquiry: teachers' ideas and their practices, opportunities and constraintsfrom a systemic level, students' competencies and readiness to learn through inquiry and the need for greater awareness of the role of informal learning avenues in science education. In addition, the discourse within each theme is enriched by commentary from a leading international academic, which helps to consolidate ideas as well as position the issues within a wider theoretical and international context.

Overall, the papers set out important contexts for readers to understand the current state of science education in Singapore. They also highlight strengths andgaps in practices of science as inquiry as well as provide suggestions about how the system can be improved. These research findings are therefore helpful as they provide honest and evidence-based feedback as well as tangible and doable ideas that policy makers, teachers, students and school administrators can adopt, adapt and enhance."

This Tutor Delivery Pack for GCSE (9-1) Edexcel Mathematics Foundation is curriculum matched and contains everything needed for a whole academic year of private tutoring: 38 complete lessons, complete with plans, activities and homework Detailed explanation on the use of the pack Information for parents Specification guidance Needs analysis for the parents and the students Mapping guide to the Revise GCSE Series Progress and End-of-Lesson Report templates Differentiation and extension ideas Customisable certificates in the digital version of the pack

The contributions to this volume aim to stimulate discussion about the role of assessment in the learning experiences of students in music and other creative and performing arts settings. The articles offer insights on how assessment can be employed in the learning setting to enhance outcomes for students both during their studies at higher education institutions and after graduation. An international group of leading researchers offers an exciting array of papers that focus on the practice of assessment in music, particularly in higher education settings. Contributions reflect on self-, peer- and alternative assessment practices in this environment. There is a particular emphasis on the alignment between assessment, curriculum structure and pedagogy.

Assessment innovation tied to technology is greatly needed in a wide variety of assessment applications. This book adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to learn from advances in developing technology enhanced innovative assessments from multiple fields. The book chapters address the development of virtual assessments including game?based assessment, simulation?based assessment, and narrative based assessment as well as how simulation and game based assessments serve both formative and summative purposes. Further, chapters address the critical challenge of integrating assessment directly into the learning process so that teacher effectiveness and student learning can be enhanced. Two chapters specifically address the psychometric challenges related to innovative items. One chapter talks about evaluating the psychometric properties of innovative items while the other chapter presents a new psychometric model for calibrating innovative items embedded in multiple contexts. In addition, validity issues are addressed related to technologyenhanced innovative assessment. It is hoped that the book provides readers with rich and useful information about the development of several types of virtual assessments from multiple perspectives. The authors include experts from industry where innovative items have been used for many years and experts from research institutes and universities who have done pioneering work related to developing innovative items with formative applications to facilitate learning. In addition, expert advice has been provided on validating such work.

El presente libro denominado MANUAL PARA LA ELABORACION E IMPLEMENTACION DE UN MODELO DE EVALUACION POR COMPETENCIAS, es el resultado de once anos de trabajo, asesoria y acompanamiento a tres grandes instituciones publicas, en donde he sido Rector y de las cuales me siento muy orgulloso. Este manual parte primero desde lo que es la fundamentacion, es decir el manejo de conceptos claves como: competencias, evaluacion ensenar y aprender desde la perspectiva de procesos. De modo que el lector tenga una clara concepcion de lo que debe saber sobre el tema y asi poder plantear un modelo y los pasos que se deben seguir para su implementacion. Este manual le permite a los docentes crear un modelo practico de evaluacion que facilita la promocion y el exito de los estudiantes. En la mayoria de paises latinoamericanos se habla mucho de competencias, pero no se tiene bien claro que son y como aplicarlas en el contexto de la escuela y mas complicado aun el como volverlas un elemento base para el proceso de evaluacion. Este manual pretende ofrecer un enfoque o concepcion basica de competencia en donde el docente en un lenguaje sencillo pueda entenderla en toda su esencia y aplicacion. Otro aspecto importante de este manual esta en ofrecer procedimientos que faciliten el proceso de evaluacion en las instituciones educativas, acompanado de una serie de instrumentos que le permitan a las instituciones contar con herramientas que evidencien los avances de la evaluacion en las instituciones, herramientas que le daran mayor forma al diseno curricular.

In this book, internationally migrant families invite us to listen to the storylines of their mostly muted voices as they navigate the local schools in their new cultural context. They call us to hear them as they grapple with issues they encounter. They implore us to feel like an outsider and see the school as a foreign culture with language and communication barriers. The book is organized to enhance this carework. Each chapter begins with a vignette that includes the voices of one or more members of international migrating families, while introducing the context of the chapter. At the end of each chapter readers will find specific implications to consider. These are constructed with preservice teachers, practicing teachers, and educational administrators in mind. As you read each chapter, there is the call for school transformation. The families in this book entreat school personnel to engage with international migrant families and to embrace a risk and resilience model as we strive together for success. These storylines challenge us to examine our personal storylines for biases and deficit understandings and call us all to purposefully rewrite these in the spirit of possibilities as the families in this book have embodied for us.

This book examines the challenges of cross-professional comparisons and proposes new forms of performance assessment to be used in professions education. It addresses how complex issues are learned and assessed across and within different disciplines and professions in order to move the process of "performance assessment for learning" to the next level. In order to be better equipped to cope with increasing complexity, change and diversity in professional education and performance assessment, administrators and educators will engage in crucial systems thinking. The main question discussed by the book is how the required competence in the performance of students can be assessed during their professional education at both undergraduate and graduate levels. To answer this question, the book identifies unresolved issues and clarifies conceptual elements for performance assessment. It reviews the development of constructs that cross disciplines and professions such as critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and problem solving. It discusses what it means to instruct and assess students within their own domain of study and across various roles in multiple contexts, but also what it means to instruct and assess students across domains of study in order to judge integration and transfer of learning outcomes. Finally, the book examines what it takes for administrators and educators to develop competence in assessment, such as reliably judging student work in relation to criteria from multiple sources. "... the co-editors of this volume, Marcia Mentkowski and Paul F. Wimmers, are associated with two institutions whose characters are so intimately associated with the insight that assessment must be integrated with curriculum and instructional program if it is to become a powerful influence on the educational process ..." Lee Shulman, Stanford University

The 2015 TIMSS Grade 5 study was administered for the first time in South Africa in August 2015. The study was led by a team of researchers at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in collaboration with the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). Providing the first, nationally representative, internationally comparative compendium of data on Grade 5 learners in South Africa, the report is a new indicator of the health of our educational system. The analyses describe in detail the current picture of achievement for learners in the country, highlighting key individual, family, school and provincial differences. The results also include key developments concerning preschool attendance, early learning environments, as well as the importance of educational expectations and academic beliefs, and the damaging effects of bullying. The findings highlight the importance of early achievement and the need to understand the multiple layers of influence on educational pathways, with the conclusions and recommendations highlighting an unequal, yet treatable system. The Grade 5 study sits alongside the Grade 9 study which has been carried out in South Africa since 1995, recently completing its fifth round.

The 2015 TIMSS Grade 9 study was administered in August 2015 by a team of researchers at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in collaboration with the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). This was the fifth time that South Africa has participated in TIMSS since 1995. In addition to the learner assessment data, the study also collected contextual information from learners, teachers and school principals, making it possible to explore the factors that are related to Grade 9 mathematics and science achievement. This report was written to provide some perspective about how the results of international assessments can be used to provide meaningful national insights. Sections of the report bring together the main findings based on descriptive, inferential and psychometric analysis of the data. The report concludes with recommendations of how the results relate to policy and practice for improving educational quality.

Based on a large-scale international study of teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Ontario, and New York, this book illustrates the ways increased use of high-stakes standardized testing is fundamentally changing education in the US and Canada with a negative overall impact on the way teachers teach and students learn. Standardized testing makes understanding students' strengths and weaknesses more difficult, and class time spent on testing consumes scarce time and attention needed to support the success of all students-further disadvantaging ELLs, students with exceptionalities, low income, and racially minoritized students.