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…

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…

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 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…

A prerequisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom is the teachers' assessment practice. In many contexts, including the Norwegian, AfL has not been successfully dealt with during initial teacher education, and there is a need for qualified teachers to engage in professional development in AfL. This article first discusses…

The interest in "assessment for learning" (AfL) has resulted in a search for new modes of assessment that are better aligned to students' learning how to learn. However, with the introduction of new assessment tools, also questions arose with respect to the quality of its measurement. On the one hand, the appropriateness of traditional,…

Assessment-led reform is now one of the most widely favored strategies to promote higher standards of teaching, more powerful learning and more credible forms of public accountability. Within this context of change, higher education in many countries is increasingly subjected to demands to implement alternative assessment strategies that provide…

This paper reported results from a generalizability study that examined the process of developing classroom practice indicators used to evaluate the impact of a school district's mathematics reform initiative. The study utilized classroom observational data from 32 second, fourth, eighth, and tenth grade teachers. The study addresses important…

Notwithstanding significant efforts by international aid agencies, aid ineffectiveness became apparent in 1990s as the impact of continued development intervention did not endure the expected outcomes. Conventional monitoring and evaluation by those agencies is critiqued for focusing on measuring project outcomes and giving little attention to…

This study examines how different stakeholders experience the quality of a nationally developed assessment framework for summative, competence-based assessment (CBA) in AVET, which aims to reflect theoretical characteristics of high quality CBAs. The quality of two summative CBAs, based on this national framework, is evaluated along an extensive,…

The paper gives an overview of multidimensional adaptive testing (MAT) and evaluates its applicability in educational and psychological testing. The approach of Segall (1996) is described as a general framework for MAT. The main advantage of MAT is its capability to increase measurement efficiency. In simulation studies conceptualizing situations…

When multiple education projects operate in an overlapping or rear-ended manner, it is always a challenge to separate unique project effects on schooling outcomes. Our analysis represents a first attempt to address this challenge. A three-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) was presented as a general analytical framework to separate program…

The paper reports results of three studies that used a formative assessment (FA) framework to compare schools that vary in their level of functioning as professional learning communities with respect to three processes: classroom assessment (study 1), development and implementation of school-based curriculum (study 2), and pedagogical…

This chapter describes evaluator behaviors revealed by the case analysis of a participatory and developmental evaluation. The analysis revealed that the evaluator paid specific attention to individual stakeholder cues. These cues were related to three elements of the evaluation: negotiating the design, monitoring individual stakeholder needs, and…