This book discusses the recent assessment movements in the eastern and western worlds with particular focuses on the policies, implementation, and impacts of assessment reform on education. A new perspective of assessment sees assessment as a means to enhance learning.
This book examines the tensions, challenges and outcomes (intended and unintended) of assessment reform arising at the interface of policy and implementation, and implementation and student learning. The book reviews the experiences insights gained from research, and identifies the facilitators and hindrances to effective change. It reflects current thinking of assessment and provides the readers with ample background information of assessment development in many countries including USA, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

This book addresses the challenges faced by arts organizations, schools, and community-based settings when designing program evaluations and measuring artistic engagement and experience. With contributions from leaders in the field, this volume is an exemplary collection of complete program evaluations that assess music, theater, dance, multimedia, and the visual arts in a variety of contexts.

This edited volume explores questions about 'what works', how, for whom, when, and why in education, and considers how and to what extent such knowledge can be understood and extended across countries and different educational systems. The book starts by presenting an overview of the history of educational effectiveness research and offers examples of current theories of educational effectiveness. Next, it provides exemplars of effectiveness studies that report on educational systems, policies, and practices from across six continents. These studies vary in their research methods and outcomes, illustrating a field of research that is conscious of its origins, its agenda, and its ambition to understand and improve the functioning of schools, networks, and education systems around the world. The book brings these threads together within the final chapter and uses them to signpost directions for future research. 'International Perspectives in Educational Effectiveness Research is an excellent and timely addition to the educational effectiveness literature. It offers a rigorous and insightful range of international perspectives that will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and students of the field.' - Professor Christopher Chapman, University of Glasgow, UK & President-Elect of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement 'This important new volume brings up to date the contributions of educational effectiveness research to the development of policy and practice in the field over the last 50 years. Drawing together the ideas of many of the major researchers in the field, it provides a comprehensive analysis of these earlier contributions, leading to critical commentaries that point to areas for future attention. The editors make use of expertise from a range of disciplines to strengthen the themes that are addressed. Most importantly, the book emphasises the need to pay greater attention to the challenge of equity - arguably the most significant challenge facing education systems internationally. In this respect, a particular strength of the book is the accounts provided from many different parts of the world. These underline the importance of context, a factor often previously overlooked in this field of research. Given all of this, I have no doubt that International Perspectives in Educational Effectiveness Research will become a major source for practitioners, policy-makers and researchers.' - Professor Mel Ainscow, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Manchester & Professor of Education, University of Glasgow, UK

This extremely topical and updated second edition of Assessment of Prior Learning: A Practitioners Guide focuses on the methods of correctly documenting and comprehensively assessing evidence of prior learning at institutions, outside formal education or training or via previous careers which enables students to gain credits on an academic course of study. Fully in-line with the updated Nursing and Midwifery Councils standards, this accessible text provides a wealth of activities to promote reflective study, fully customisable diary and assessment records and new contributors providing an insight to Assessment of Prior Leaning from a wider international context.

Ipsative assessment is a powerful new approach that provokes a radical rethink of the purposes and methods of assessment. This book presents a case for partially replacing competitive assessment with ipsative assessment, and it explores the possibilities and the challenges with research evidence and case studies.

This book by Sheryn Spencer Waterman follows the bestselling Handbook on Differentiated Instruction for Middle and High Schools. With numerous examples and strategies, it is an all-inclusive manual on assessing student readiness, interests, learning and thinking styles. It includes examples of: - Pre-, Formative and Summative assessments - Informal and formal assessments - Oral and written assessments - Project and performance assessments - Highly structured and enrichment assessments for struggling to gifted students - Assessment tools and rubrics

This new edition of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality critically examines the deep and enduring problems within systems of education in the U.S., in order to illuminate what is really at stake for students, teachers, and communities negatively affected by such testing. Updates to the new edition include new chapters that focus on: the role of schools and standardized testing in reproducing social, cultural, and economic inequalities; the way high-stakes testing is used to advance neoliberal, market-based educational schemes that ultimately concentrate wealth and power among elites; how standardized testing became the dominant tool within our educational systems; the numerous technical and ideological problems with using standardized tests to evaluate students, teachers, and schools; the role that high-stakes testing plays in the maintenance of white supremacy; and how school communities have resisted high-stakes testing and used better assessments of student learning. Parents, teachers, university students, and scholars will find Unequal By Design useful for gaining a broad, critical understanding of the issues surrounding our over-reliance on high-stakes, standardized testing in the U.S. through up-to-date research on testing, historical and contemporary examples of the struggles over such tests, and information about how testing has fostered the privatization of public education in the U.S.

In the seventies, countries lauded American education as one of the best systems in the world. Then came the accountability movement. What was measured was what counted. Those who measured low were punished. Those who measured high were rewarded. With measurements came the loss of emphasis on the critical thought so necessary to the preservation of American democracy and improving the American way of life. Where do children learn the skills, practice and habits of democracy? Sharron Goldman Walker s second volume on democracy in education asks educators, especially teachers and principals, to contemplate their roles in education and its connections with the preservation of American democracy. Do we send children to school to learn only how to achieve high scores on high stakes tests? If democracy is not learned by practice in the schoolhouse, how will children recognize it when they leave it? Will they be able to critically reflect upon the issues presented to them? Today s politics have descended into mutual shouting matches, name-calling, hate and fear. Without the ability to critically reflect upon divergent views through reasoned discourse what will be the quality of the democracy? If democracy in education is not practiced in the schoolhouse, democracy in America will vanish.

* Provides a comprehensive examination of the concept of assessment-as identification, as learning, and as evaluation. * Provides practical ideas for identifying gifted and advanced learners, measuring their progress, and evaluating the effectiveness of the assessment system. * Provides examples of actual assessments and protocols. * Uses the NAGC national standards for gifted programs as the basis for recommendations.

This book describes the design, development, delivery and impact of the mathematics assessment for the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). First, the origins of PISA's concept of mathematical literacy are discussed, highlighting the underlying themes of mathematics as preparation for life after school and mathematical modelling of the real world, and clarifying PISA's position within this part of the mathematics education territory. The PISA mathematics framework is introduced as a significant milestone in the development and dissemination of these ideas. The underlying mathematical competencies on which mathematical literacy so strongly depends are described, along with a scheme to use them in item creation and analysis. The development and implementation of the PISA survey and the consequences for the outcomes are thoroughly discussed. Different kinds of items for both paper-based and computer-based PISA surveys are exemplified by many publicly released items along with details of scoring. The novel survey of the opportunity students have had to learn the mathematics promoted through PISA is explained. The book concludes by surveying international impact. It presents viewpoints of mathematics educators on how PISA and its constituent ideas and methods have influenced teaching and learning practices, curriculum arrangements, assessment practices, and the educational debate more generally in fourteen countries.

Advancing Natural Language Processing in Educational Assessment examines the use of natural language technology in educational testing, measurement, and assessment. Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled large-scale educational applications, though scholars and professionals may lack a shared understanding of the strengths and limitations of NLP in assessment as well as the challenges that testing organizations face in implementation. This first-of-its-kind book provides evidence-based practices for the use of NLP-based approaches to automated text and speech scoring, language proficiency assessment, technology-assisted item generation, gamification, learner feedback, and beyond. Spanning historical context, validity and fairness issues, emerging technologies, and implications for feedback and personalization, these chapters represent the most robust treatment yet about NLP for education measurement researchers, psychometricians, testing professionals, and policymakers.

This volume presents an analysis of the Erasmus+ funding process. It examines the first 3 years of the programme to discover if the funds are being distributed homogeneously throughout the regions of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. If it turns out that funds are being unevenly delivered this could result in an inequity situation: students living in specific regions might have greater chances to benefit from KA102 funds, while other students might have fewer opportunities to benefit from these funds. The book looks in detail at the implementation and performance of the various programmes within Erasmus+, the funds and distribution of these funds, and the number of students in the programmes. The book studies these five countries because they contain more than half of all the vocational education and training students in the European Union. Also, these countries had the most students participating in mobilities during the previous Leonardo da Vinci programme. Hence, it is to be expected that the conclusions drawn in this study are representative of the situation of VET mobilities and Erasmus+ funding in Europe. Erasmus+ is the European programme in charge of fostering the development of transnational programmes in the areas of education, training, sports and youth policies. It is focused on the adaptation to a fast changing world, tackling youth unemployment, and preparing workers for highly skilled jobs. Erasmus+ integrates former programmes such as the Lifelong Learning Programme, Youth in Action, and the various international Higher Education and Sports programmes. It started in 2014 and will be active until 2020.

This book makes the case for a revival in interest in the viva. As an oral assessment of a treatise or dissertation or of a student's performance in art or dance the viva has a long history dating back to the time of the Greeks. It can be found today in the form of professional, vocational and academic vivas, where a judgment of oral performance is required to gain entry into a profession or community of scholars. In a time when there are scandals about students selling essays to other students, the viva provides a fertile ground for probing the student to see whether they are in fact the authors of the work being assessed and know its content and how to think cognitively or otherwise. Given that we actually know so little about the viva, the book theorises the viva based on a unique sample of vivas that have been filmed or in which the author himself has been participant, and discusses why its format is so different in Anglo-Saxon languages and Latin and other languages. The book offers educational policy-makers and examiners a trade-off between arguments in support of the viva and the demand for other, ever more cost-effective forms of assessment as the numbers of both undergraduate and postgraduate students threaten to increase. It also argues that with demand in the labour market for qualified graduates who are better equipped with transferable skills, such as the ability to communicate complex ideas verbally in a competent, well-argued fashion and not merely through the use of rhetoric, what appear to be cost-effective forms of assessment in the short run (e.g. written exams with standardised questions or multiple choice) may actually in the long run be of less value if we are investing in a future workforce with so-called 21st century communication skills. If the viva were abandoned, the student would be robbed of the opportunity to stage a defence.

The future of online assessment and measurement is in the hands of the early adopters and hardy pioneers who are determined to overcome the challenges and help push forward and out the learning and assessment paradigm. Each of these pioneers knows that teaching, training, operational, learning, and assessment advances can only be realized when online assessment and measurement is better understood. ""Online Assessment and Measurement: Case Studies from Higher Education, K-12 and Corporate"" features a number of case studies detailing online applications and uses of assessment and measurement methodologies, systems, and practices across three broad educational or training areas: elementary and secondary (K - 12), higher education, and corporate. The pioneers' stories of migrating from old and introducing new assessments to the online environment have been challenging, exhilarating and rewarding.

Routledge Applied Linguistics is a series of comprehensive textbooks, providing students and researchers with the support they need for advanced study in the core areas of English language and Applied Linguistics. Each book in the series guides readers through three main sections, enabling them to explore and develop major themes within the discipline. Section A, Introduction, establishes the key terms and concepts and extends readers' techniques of analysis through practical application. Section B, Extension, brings together influential articles, sets them in context, and discusses their contribution to the field. Section C, Exploration, builds on knowledge gained in the first two sections, setting thoughtful tasks around further illustrative material. This enables readers to engage more actively with the subject matter and encourages them to develop their own research responses. Throughout the book, topics are revisited, extended, interwoven and deconstructed, with the reader's understanding strengthened by tasks and follow-up questions. Language Testing and Assessment: introduces students to the key methods and debates surrounding language testing and assessment explores the testing of linguistic competence of children, students, asylum seekers and many others in context of the uses to which such research can be put presents influential and seminal readings in testing and assessment by names such as Michael Canale and Merrill Swain, Michael Kane, Alan Davies, Lee Cronbach and Paul Meehl, and Pamela Moss. The accompanying website to this book can be found at http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415339476/

This volume is the result of a 2016 research symposium sponsored by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) focused on the growing theoretical areas of integrating story and narrative into educational design. Narrative, or storytelling, is often used as a means for understanding, conveying, and remembering the events of our lives. Our lives become a series of stories as we use narrative to structure our thinking; stories that teach, train, socialize, and create value. The contributions in this volume examine stories and narrative in instructional design and offer a diverse exploration of instructional design and learning environments. Among the topics discussed: The narrative imperative: creating a story telling culture in the classroom. Narrative qualities of design argumentation. Scenario-based workplace training as storytelling. Designing for adult learners' metacognitive development & narrative identity. Using activity theory in designing science inquiry games . Changing the narrative of school: toward a neurocognitive redefinition of learning. Educational Technology and Narrative is an invaluable resource offering application-ready ideas to students of instructional design, instructional design practitioners, and teachers seeking to utilize theories of story and narrative to the ways that they convey and express ideas of instructional design and educational technology.

Located within the global changing contexts of higher education in the 21st century, this book examines the reform of the teaching and learning practices in Vietnamese universities under the Higher Education Reform Agenda and the influence of internationalization on the higher education sector. Specifically, it analyses the motives, current implementation, effectiveness, and challenges of these reforms, especially from student perspectives. Analyzing approximately 4300 survey responses and interviews with students, the book covers a range of key issues related to teaching and learning in higher education which have attracted attention in recent years, including: The learning environment Student support and first-year transition Student-centred teaching The use of credit-based curricula The use of information and communication technology At-home internationalization of higher education Assessment and feedback Work placements Informal learning via extra curricular activities Students' perception of the values of university education.

Movement in Citiesa describes and analyses urban travel in terms ofa purpose, distance and frequency of journeys and modes and routes used, concentrating mainly on British towns with many references to the United States and Australia.

The authors elucidate the all-important interrelations between location of activities and the patterns of transport supply and use within towns. The issues they raise are of pressing practical and intellectual importance.

This book was first published in 1980.

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This book was first published in it's current form in 1974.

This book was first published in 1977.

This book was first published in 1977.

As part of the American school reform movement, administrators are searching for ways of measuring students' skills and progress within the system. Courts and McInerney focus on the qualitative assessment possible through the use of student portfolios, particularly at the college level. The authors are concerned that the teaching and learning process will be subsumed by assessment and will become even more test-driven than it now is. A critical look at multiple-choice, standardized examinations shows how unmindful our educational testing is of psychosocial diversity. The authors warn that in upgrading American education nationwide, more effective and self-confirming measures should be faculty developed and locally controlled. The authors propose a new compact among teachers and students as they take mutual responsibility for the learning process and changing curriculum.

Fairness in educational assessment has become a major talking point and allegations that assessments are unfair are commonplace on social media and in the press. But what does fairness mean in practice and how can we evaluate it? This book offers a timely and necessary investigation, exploring the concept through the lenses of: measurement theory, social justice, the law and philosophy in order to put forward a template for fairness in educational assessment. Drawing on international examples from the UK, US, Australia and South East Asia, this book offers a commentary on fairness that is highly relevant to the changing context of assessment today. If you have a professional or academic interest in educational assessment, are a education policymakers or are just interested in working to make assessment fair, then this book is for you!

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.