Because of an increasing quality concern for higher education, additional attention is being paid to new educational principles with a more student- and competence-centred vision. Project-based education is one of the learning environments congruent with these principles. Ideally, the students in this learning environment are assessed by suitable…

This article examines the relationships between perceptions of authenticity and alignment on study approach and learning outcome. Senior students of a vocational training program performed an authentic assessment and filled in a questionnaire about the authenticity of various assessment characteristics and the alignment between the assessment and…

This paper investigates the usefulness of a verbal protocol approach in examining the underlying construct of a cloze test, i e. the reasons that a test writer had for deleting some lexical items from a passage to construct a cloze test. The informants were asked to ''think aloud'' while they were doing the cloze test. Observation of the…

Portfolios are frequently used to assess teachers' competences. In portfolio assessment, the issue of rater reliability is a notorious problem. To improve the quality of assessments insight into raters' judgment processes is crucial. Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach we studied cognitive processes underlying raters' judgments and…

During the 1990s, Spain experienced a phenomenon that is slightly unusual in educational systems: the coexistence of two secondary education models and one single tertiary education model. The overall purpose of this article has been to study the possible differences in the academic performance of students in university education in terms of the…

The purpose of the present study was to improve a multivariate multilevel model in the research literature which estimates the consistency in the rates of growth between mathematics and science achievement among students and schools. We introduced a new multivariate multilevel model via a latent variable approach. Data from the Longitudinal Study…

This article traces the evolution of a quest for solving the problems involved in the analysis of multilevel data and the estimation of the value added effects of schools in influencing educational outcomes. The authors report the findings of two studies that followed several cohorts of students that were tested at two grade levels (Grade 3 and…

For five years, from 1995 until 2000, a group of eight educators and researchers met twice annually in Syracuse, NY, for the purpose of revising Bloom's Taxonomy. Based in part on the structure of educational objectives, in part on advances in cognitive psychology, and in part on numerous other attempts to classify educational objectives that were…

In large-scale assessment programs such as NAEP, TIMSS and PISA, students' achievement data sets provided for secondary analysts contain so-called "plausible values." Plausible values are multiple imputations of the unobservable latent achievement for each student. In this article it has been shown how plausible values are used to: (1) address…

Large scale surveys in education have to face non-response issues that might bias the results. Non-response can occur at three levels: (i) a school refuses to participate, (ii) a sample student fails to participate and (iii) a participating student refuses to answer a particular question. Until now schools and student non-response have been…

In international large-scale surveys, constructed response (CR) items are increasingly being used and multiple-choice (MC) items are being used less frequently. In this article the two item types will be compared in terms of any differences they have on national mean scores. TIMSS 1995 and TIMSS 1999 data have been used. Are there different…

Test reliability is a concept central to classical test theory and it is commonly stated as a requirement that a test attain a certain level of reliability before it be considered of sufficient quality for practical use. This article discusses the role of reliability in item response theory, and in particular the role of reliability in contexts…

Data from international comparative studies in education are generally derived from complex, multi-stage sample designs and rotated assessments. Consequently, care must be taken not only in estimating variance components but also in interpreting them. Target population definitions, the nature of the sampling stages and their sampling units, and…

This article compares the invariance properties of two methods of psychometric instrument calibration for the development of a measure of wealth among families of Grade 5 pupils in five provinces in Vietnam. The measure is based on self-reported lists of possessions in the home. Its stability has been measured over two time periods. The concept of…

In this article, school characteristics linked with educational effectiveness in 14 sub-Saharan African countries are identified. Effectiveness has been defined in terms of students' literacy achievement at the end of Grade 6, after taking their social and academic backgrounds into account. The data used are from the second major educational…