As part of an undergraduate course, 147 preservice teachers graded components of an imaginary eighth grader's language-arts portfolio over a 10-week period. Subsequent participant interviews revealed that grading was influenced by the prescribed grading policy, but also by the perceived appropriateness of assessment instruments and the holistic…

An account of three researchers' efforts to make sense of preservice teachers' assessment practices reveals how methodologically diverse investigations emanated from the context of a single study. Developments, findings, and warrants that characterize this inquiry are presented, as well as arguments describing this study as exploratory,…

Describes an ongoing study in which 60 beginning elementary teachers have access to an online community that integrates many Internet communication tools. The study seeks to identify specific determinants of successful use of computer technology as professional development and collaborative learning tools and to describe the interaction between…

Concept mapping is a participant-based methodology that involves three processes: participant generation of ideas or experiences about a specific question, grouping together responses through an unstructured card sort by participants, and statistical analysis of card-sort results using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. A research…

Suggests that no socially meaningful educational changes have resulted, nor should have been expected, from institutional-reform efforts in the settings in which they have been studied. Uses regulation theory to reanalyze data from evaluations of educational change initiatives. Progressive education change in the interests of social transformation…

Asked 19 Finnish children, aged 6 and 7, on three occasions in a school year, to group their classmates according to ability. Results suggest that the impact of school and its differential concept of ability changes children's perceptions, lessening social reasons for appraisal and increasing the use of performance-based criteria. (SLD)

Describes the main lines of research in behavioral creativity and comments on approaches that have concentrated on personality-related or cognitive aspects of creativity or that have studied attempts to stimulate creativity. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the human capacity for producing new and original ideas in a social…

Analyzed Norwegian party platforms from 1945 to 1997 for their content related to education. Findings indicate that the basic ideas of social democratic progessivism have been carried forward, but that there has been a shift to the right emphasizing freedom, competition, different alternatives, and more consideration of the interests of business…

Examined the shift in the educational-research paradigm in Finland as seen in 335 doctoral dissertations. Early in the century, educational history was the dominant topic, but by the 1950s the experimental paradigm took over. By the 1980s, factor analysis was a very common research method. In the 1990s, qualitative analyses account for one-third…

Discusses conflicts and tensions related to teacher autonomy in the context of the Swedish comprehensive school system. Presents two models for strengthening the relative autonomy of teachers that can help them meet the challenges inherent in change. (SLD)

Contributors to this special issue present information that has accrued within specific subfields of self-regulated learning. Essays discuss key issues of self-regulated learning, providing suggestions on how the modeling, scaffolding, and fading of self-regulatory skills can be done. (SLD)

Examines the validity of large-scale educational assessment, suggesting that construct validity is insufficient for assuming an achievement measure's internal validity and that the uses of assessment results affect external validity. Discusses the role of learning theory in large-scale assessment, purposes of large-scale assessment, item types and…

Explores the consequences of using complex test-and-item analysis in a large-scale testing situation that historically has used simple number-right scoring. When the two types of scoring were used with high school graduation exams in British Columbia, results were similar in terms of mean, standard deviation, error of estimation, and correlation…

Evaluates the equivalence of translated achievement tests administered to 4,400 English- and French-speaking sixth-graders. Items displaying differential item functioning were flagged using three statistical methods; results were relatively consistent across methods, but not identical. Substantive review of French items via back-translation to…

Ontario third-grade mathematics assessment results were analyzed on three knowledge/skill dimensions and five content strands. Seventy percent of students had the same subscores on the dimensions (flat profile); 30 percent differed on only one dimension (contoured profile); 69 percent had flat or contoured content profiles. Profiles were used to…