This article outlines the main assessment traditions in four countries -- England, France, Germany and the United States -- in order to explore the prospects for the integration of summative and formative functions of assessment during compulsory schooling. In England, teachers' judgments do feed into national assessments, at 7, 11, 14 and 16, but…

In this issue, M. James, Pollard, Rees and Taylor consider what research must do in order that 'practitioners and policy-makers will want to feel confident that the adoption of new research-based practices will repay their change efforts'. In responding to this collection of papers, it is suggested that users are a wider and more complex group…

In 1999 the issue of grammar and its teaching re-emerged in Singapore as a topic of great intensity in a government-managed media debate. As studies in other educational contexts have shown, debates about grammar in political discussions and in the media typically proceed in terms of a discourse of crisis and falling standards. More specifically,…

This article investigates the policy of setting that is commonly being seen as an organizational tool for effective delivery of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). It is suggested that teachers are finding the increased amount of whole-class teaching to a diverse range of abilities, as prescribed by the NLS, problematic. This case-study…