For postsecondary institutions, organisational change is an inevitable and ongoing process. Institutions face a growing need to assess student learning assessment as part of an institution's comprehensive assessment plan. While a growing body of literature suggests that learner-centred assessment is a best practice in higher education pedagogy, it…

This paper engages with debates about whether comprehensive prior specification of criteria and standards is sufficient for informed professional judgement. A preoccupation has emerged with the specificity and explication of criteria intended to regulate judgement. This has resulted in criteria compliance in the use of defined standards to…

Theory on student learning provides that students are able to direct their learning when they have metacognitive knowledge about their own learning processes. In this article, a preliminary attempt to assess untrained high-school students’ metacognitive knowledge of learning processes as an ability through multiple-choice questions is reported. In…

The process by which an assessor evaluates a piece of student work against a set of marking criteria is somewhat hidden and potentially complex. This judgement process is under-researched, particularly in contexts where teachers (rather than trained examiners) conduct the assessment and in contexts involving extended pieces of work. This paper…

This paper presents a study of teachers' professional judgement in the area of summative assessment. It adopts a situated perspective on assessment practices in classroom and school settings. The study is based on interviews with 10 sixth-grade teachers and on the assessment documents they used when determining end-of-term grades in students'…

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability promotes equal and full participation by children in education. Equity of educational access for all students, including students with disability, free from discrimination, is the first-stated national goal of Australian education. Australian federal disability discrimination law, the…

Scotland, in common with many other countries internationally, has paid considerable attention to the development of assessment for learning. Currently, schools in Scotland are engaged in a major programme of curriculum and assessment reform, entitled Curriculum for Excellence. As part of the reform process, there is concern amongst practitioners,…

Long-standing concerns within the field of educational assessment consider the impact of assessment policy and practice as matters of equity, inequality and social justice. Yet educational assessment policy and practice continues to have powerful social consequences for key users such as children and young people. This paper re-positions these…

High-stakes placement testing at eleven plus remains a central and constant feature of education systems in the Anglophone Caribbean. In the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, the Eleven Plus has been retained well into the era of universal secondary education, with a perceived legitimacy founded on the belief that examinations provide the fairest…

The Jomtien conference in 1990 on Education for All is seen by many as a turning point for the introduction of increased monitoring and evaluation of the quality of education systems around the world. Internationally, debates have arisen about the nature and frequency of assessment and its impact on education systems with its intended and…

Since the break up of the USSR, its former republics have seen the emergence and rapid expansion of an examinations industry that was, to all intents and purposes, unknown in Soviet times. New national assessment agencies have been established and been charged with, amongst other things, developing high-stakes exams to replace the diverse and…

In this article we rethink validation within the complex contexts of high-stakes assessment. We begin by considering the utility of existing models for validation and argue that these models tend to overlook some of the complexities inherent to assessment use, including the multiple interpretations of assessment purposes and the potential…

High stakes testing in Australia was introduced in 2008 by way of the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). Currently, every year all students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are assessed on the same days using national tests in Reading, Writing, Language Conventions (Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation) and Numeracy. In 2010 the…

This article describes briefly the education system of Cyprus and elaborates on the recent changes in its large-scale assessment (LSA) programme. Until 2005, two independent LSA programmes existed: one for school-graduation purposes and one for gaining entrance to higher education. The introduction of a dual-purpose LSA program in 2006, due to…

While measurement precision is relatively easy to establish for single tests and assessments, it is much more difficult to determine for decision making with multiple tests on different subjects. This latter is the situation in the system of final examinations for secondary education in the Netherlands and is used as an example in this paper. This…