This article concludes the special issue of "Studies in Educational Evaluation" concerned with "Evaluating learning pattern development in higher education" by discussing research issues that have emerged from the previous contributions. The article considers in turn: stability versus variability in learning patterns; old versus new analytic…

The article focuses on the realisation of participatory evaluation (PE) in national educational evaluation activity. The realisation of PE is examined by adapting the Daigneault and Jacob model (2009; originally Cousins & Whitmore, 1998) to five national-level educational evaluations carried out in Finland. According to the chosen frame of…

This article describes an evaluation method based on collaboration between the higher education, a care home and university, in a R&D project. The aim of the project was to elaborate modelling as a tool of developmental evaluation for innovation and competence in project cooperation. The approach was based on activity theory. Modelling enabled a…

The present study focuses; firstly, on analysing academics' conceptions of the purpose of assessment; secondly, on their assessment practices; and thirdly, on the relationship between their conceptions and practices. The data consisted of interviews with 28 pharmacy teachers. The analysis resulted in a continuum of categories of conceptions, from…

Statewide exit examinations play an important role in discussions on school effectiveness. Referring to educational governance concepts, this paper presumes a relation between varying organizational structures of statewide examinations across states, and heterogeneous effects on school actors. It is assumed that their ability to affect work in…

This paper compares and contrasts the program theory of the reenacted Supervision Act to the Supervision Act of 2003. We describe how the expectations about how schools should be inspected, the effect such inspections are expected to have, and how these effects should be realized have changed over the past years as a result of changing paradigms…

This paper is meant to highlight the occurrence of Simpson's Paradox when using aggregated data obtained from two IEA studies in Israel, while ignoring the effect of a powerful intervening variable in the local context--the ethnicity factor. It will demonstrate faulty conclusions regarding either the absence of relationships between a contextual…

A sample of educational evaluators was asked to design an outcomes-focused evaluation of a school program that aims to improve the academic achievement and self-esteem of students. Evaluators provided detailed descriptions of their evaluation design and methodology in their responses. These descriptions were coded and analyzed to determine the…

An abundance of comprehensive school reform (CSR) literature exists illustrating CSRs are effective in improving student outcomes. However, much of this research reports on top-down reforms, focuses on academic outcomes, and uses quantitative methods alone. Many educational researchers have argued for the use of mixed methods for providing a…

School inspections are fundamental to quality assurance and improvement in many countries. Yet the question of the validity of these inspections has not yet been comprehensively addressed. This paper proposes a systematic approach to assessing the validity of school inspections, based on Messick's multifaceted concept of validity. We apply each…

The purpose of this study was to examine physiotherapy students' perceptions of current education content of entry-level physiotherapy programmes in terms of physical activity (PA) and exercise promotion and prescription (EPP). Sixty-two physiotherapy students from three Irish Universities participated. Three Structured Group Feedback Sessions…

This study reports on the development and usefulness of an assessment procedure for teachers' coaching competence. We examined the usefulness of the developed procedure with respect to making reliable judgments. Video portfolios were constructed by researchers, which consisted of deliberately planned video recordings of teachers' coaching…

The idea that assessment is intrinsic to effective instruction is traced from early experiments in the individualization of learning through the work of Benjamin Bloom to reviews of the impact of feedback on learners in classrooms. While many of these reviews detailed the adverse impact of assessment on learning, they also indicated that under…

This paper focuses on an unceremonious type of formative assessment--"informal formative assessment"--in which much of what teachers and students do in the classroom can be described as potential assessments that can provide evidence about the students' level of understanding. More specifically, the paper focuses on assessment conversations, or…

The study investigated the relationships between assessment for learning (AfL) and attributes of two school-related contexts--the classroom assessment culture (CAC) in which AfL is embedded, and the larger context in which CAC is nested, namely the school-based professional learning community (SBPLC). The research design comprised two…