This study considered middle school mathematics teachers use of rubrics to score non-traditional tasks. A group of eighth-grade teachers attended a two-day workshop where they evaluated assessment tasks and discussed the use of an associated scoring rubric. Scored samples of student work submitted by the teachers indicated that they had difficulty…

The paper examines the rationale and the uses of portfolios in initial teacher education. This rationale is then applied to explore the development and implementation of the Professional Development Portfolio (PDP) as an integral part of the initial teacher education programme offered by the Faculty of Education, University of Malta. The paper…

Performance assessment in the UK science General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) currently relies on pupil reports of their investigations. These are widely criticized. Written tests of procedural understanding could be used as an alternative, but what exactly do they measure? This paper describes small-scale research in which there was…

Education and assessment in Swedish schools have been affected by several reforms during the last two decades. The educational system has moved from centralization to decentralization and a goal-oriented approach has been introduced on all educational levels. This paper provides an historical overview of the Swedish educational system, educational…

The validity of the Norwegian university grading standard has been called into serious question. The implicit standards used for assessing exams and the reliability of that understanding among examiners and psychology students were investigated in three studies. Studies 1 and 2 investigated the implicit standards that examiners used when assessing…

Driven largely by calls for accountability, the use of large-scale testing is expanding in terms of the number and purposes of testing programmes. At the same time, financial constraints have resulted in attempts to reduce the lengths of such examinations. An examination of the 1994/1995 and 1995/1996 British Columbia Scholarship programme…

The island of Ireland is the most westerly point of the European Union, and is divided into the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland and the 6 counties of Northern Ireland, the latter under the governance of the United Kingdom. This article presents a brief history and a brief description of the economic profile of the Republic of Ireland. This…

The pedagogical potential of classroom assessment to support student learning has increasingly been evidenced in research over the past decade. Constructive classroom assessment has been championed by assessment specialists, and endorsed by professional organizations. In practice, however, the process of changing classroom assessment from its…

The article focuses on the planning and implementation of interim assessment tasks in Key Stage 3 Geography. This research identifies three key dimensions which impact on the planning of assessment in the medium and long term. These are: teachers' emerging conceptualization of "formative assessment"; the statutory requirements for assessing…

In this paper, I will argue that it is possible to use data from large-scale international and national mathematics assessment programmes, whose attention is on summative achievement, to provide formative information that informs teachers about the effects of their classroom practice. However, to have impact on, and be useful for, classroom…

In this theoretical paper the informal assessment practices of two experienced teachers are used as cases for generating questions about future developments in formative assessment practice. Both teachers maintain a consistent formative assessment focus on the development of their students as enquirers, and one of them supplements this with…

In 1997, the Ontario government, like many other jurisdictions, undertook systemic reform of their elementary school mathematics programme, developing a new mathematics curriculum, report card, and province-wide assessment. The curricular reform embodied a new vision of mathematics learning and instruction that emphasized instruction using…

This article describes the background and findings of a research project on school effectiveness and evaluation in one regional education authority in China. The study was the outcome of a China/UK academic link aiming to improve research capacity and the evaluation of educational quality in China, funded by the British Council in Beijing, on…

This review essay describes in detail two recent publications: "Formative Assessment: Improving Learning in Secondary Classrooms" (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation [CERI], 2005, Paris, OECD) and "Towards Coherence Between Classroom Assessment and Accountability" ("The 103rd Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education,…

This paper focuses on reconfiguring assessment processes so that they support a learning function, in addition to the more traditional measurement function. In the first half of the paper we discuss a framework for "learning-oriented assessment" derived from a project carried out in Hong Kong. We conceptualize learning-oriented assessment as…