This paper developed a Democratic Classroom Survey to measure students' perceived democratic environment of the classroom. Perceived democratic environment is one of the most important variables for understanding classroom activity and indeed any type of group activity, but actually measuring perceptions in an objective manner has been…

Over the previous two decades, the era of accountability has amplified efforts to measure educational effectiveness more than Edward Thorndike, the father of educational measurement, likely would have imagined. Expressly, the measurement structure for evaluating educational effectiveness continues to rely increasingly on one sole…

Value-added measures can be used to allocate funding to schools, to identify those institutions in need of special attention and to underpin government guidance on targets. In England, there has been a tendency to include in these measures an ever-greater number of contextualising variables and to develop ever-more complex models that encourage…

In this paper we described how we mixed research approaches in a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) of a school principal professional development program. Using examples from our study we illustrate how combining qualitative and quantitative data can address some key challenges from validating instruments and measures of mediator variables to…

Evaluation is required for almost all educational activities or programs, particularly for federal- and state-funded programs. Such a requirement is quite understandable given that we need to know what has been done actually produces its intended purposes. However, it is almost impossible that bad data can provide justified conclusions, and there…

Since Norway introduced tests and other types of measurements the press, with a negative bias, has placed the spotlight on those schools which performed badly in attainment measurements. The press reconstructs from public sources "league tables" of aggregated student achievements but at present the official position opposes the public ranking of…

Teacher appraisal is never an easy task, especially of teachers experiencing difficulties and failures. Nevertheless it is a requirement for good management, in our schools no less than our corporations. Forty elementary school principals in Israel described the informal methods they use to appraise teachers who are performing poorly. Most…

In this paper I argue that there is a need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education, particularly in the light of a recent tendency to focus discussions about education almost exclusively on the measurement and comparison of educational outcomes. I first discuss why the question of purpose should always have a place in our…