In recent years there has been an intense debate in many countries concerning the best approach to improving schools. The various methods being tried might be reasonably seen as constituting a continuum ranging from strict external control and inspection at one end, to self-evaluation and internal regulation at the other. In practice, most…

A linear structural model was studied to investigate the factors affecting reading literacy and mathematical literacy skills of 15-year-old students in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000 data across different cultural settings. Brazil, Japan, and Norway were selected for the purpose of comparison on the basis of their…

Opportunity to learn is considered an important contributing factor in learning outcomes. In some of the latest international comparative studies of mathematics achievement, such as SIMS and TIMSS, painstaking efforts have been made to find out what the participating students' opportunities to learn mathematics had been. However, there have been…

The Department of Educational Measurement and Evaluation (DEME) of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), New Delhi, India prepared a scheme of assessment for primary classes based on the concept of continuous and comprehensive evaluation. This scheme was finalized by an expert group before actual tryout. Primary…

This study was conducted to provide further information regarding factors associated with educational evaluation, using a qualitative approach. Fifty-five interviews were carried out with school principals. The results of the present study supported the notion that the qualitative methods could provide information that quantitative procedures…

School districts in the U.S. increasingly rely on standardized testing to documentstudent achievement in mathematics, reading, science, and English. Educators and policy-makers have engaged in heated debates as to the effects of such standardized testing practices on actual student achievement. In studying these issues, it is important to examine…

The purpose of the current study was to implement a newly proposed evaluation method (Dimitropoulos, 1999), that is, the dynamic evaluation approach in the field of education. The dynamic approach was applied in order to evaluate the Olympic Education Program in Greece. The results of the present field study were encouraging. Dynamic evaluation…

In this article, we use a dialogue format to explore the possible relevance of ideas in the hermeneutic tradition of social science for examining contemporary issues that lie at the intersection of concerns about validity and ethics in language assessment. Specifically, we focus on language testing as a socio-political-cultural practice and…

History teachers (N=22) and their 11th-grade students (N=451) rated the importanceof four types of questions (verbatim, paraphrase, inference and skill items) by indicating the degree to which these questions were to be expected in an upcoming teacher-made test about a particular textbook chapter. In addition, teachers classified their actual…

This article examines the process of an ongoing, independent evaluation of atransitional Spanish/English bilingual program housed at a large, urban school district in Northern California. The program is designed to enhance Kindergarten through Grade 5 (K-5) students' English language proficiency, as well as their English performance in academic…

The topic of teacher credentials and student performance is revisited in an international setting using the TIMSS-99 data. The lack of consistent positive link between credentials and performance can be explained via three routes: measurement problem of ''teacher quality'' input, measurement problem of ''student outcomes'', and the production…

Research documents that transient students who change schools frequently oftensuffer from low academic achievement. This article investigates standardized group measures by disentangling elementary achievement scores. Located in a highly transient area outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Main Street School had their fifth grade Pennsylvania…

Studied the higher order thinking of 53 Israeli ninth graders in 3 schools using the Web-Based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) learning environment to study about malaria. Findings show that all students used higher order thinking skills and that their English was good enough to use the WISE learning environment in the Israeli setting. (SLD)

Studied the effects of student attitudes toward mathematics, student perception of parental opinion, and student assessment of study time on performance on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study with a U.S. sample of more than 10,000 students. Findings show the complexity of the factors contributing to mathematics performance. (SLD)