Research reveals that a positive attitude towards self-evaluation is a pre-condition which favours successful school self-evaluation. This article describes how self-evaluation is regarded in schools and investigates whether school characteristics can explain differences in the attitude of individuals. We report on a survey study conducted among…

Extensive research has been done on student ratings of instruction on closed-ended questionnaires, but little research has examined students' written responses to open-ended questions. This study investigated the written comments of students in 198 classes, focusing on their frequency, content, direction, and consistency with quantitative ratings…

Over the past 10 years, public criticism of student achievement has been accompanied by a multitude of educational reforms, most of which emphasized the importance of setting national standards for student achievement and for the level and quality of teaching. The demand for frameworks to assess the extent to which students and teachers met the…

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 study illustrates the development and validation of an admission test, labeled as Performance Samples on Academic Tasks in Educational Sciences (PSAT-Ed), designed to assess samples of performance on academic tasks characteristic of those that would eventually be encountered by examinees in an Educational Sciences program. The test was based…

This study illustrated the use of the Rule Space Method to diagnose students' proficiencies in, skills and knowledge of statistical hypothesis testing. Participants included 96 undergraduate and, graduate students, of whom 94 were classified into one or more of the knowledge states identified by, the rule space analysis. Analysis at the level of…

Using a cross-case analysis of three distinct participatory program evaluations, this paper contributes to current discourse on how evaluators create opportunities for learning. Although each team of evaluators intended to promote planned process use, post-evaluation discussions amongst them identified evidence where use emerged throughout the…

School quality care has become important in many Western countries and a number of high quality school self-evaluation instruments has been developed and implemented to support this activity. However, little is known on the critical success factors for the use of school self-evaluation instruments. From this longitudinal study into the use of a…

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of different standard setting methods on the size and composition of the borderline group, on the discrimination between different types of students and on the types of students passing with one method but failing with another. A total of 107 university students were classified into 4 different types…

Kahneman and Tversky's (1979, 2000; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981) work in decision-making was applied to student preferences for grading practices. Undergraduate psychology students (n = 240) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 framing conditions related to how a university course might be graded: a 100 point system, a percentage system, and an open…

Students in Germany are tracked into different forms of secondary schooling based on teachers' recommendations. The literature shows that school tracking is largely affected by academic achievement levels, but neglects the influence of individual achievement growth. The authors used data from the Berlin study ELEMENT (N = 2242) to characterize…

This article presents the results of an exploratory study into the effects of School Self-Evaluation (SSE) used by eight Education Inspectorates in seven European countries. This study reveals that in the countries where SSE is strongly incorporated into the school inspection system, there is a rather substantial degree of steering by the…

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) study is the largest and most ambitious study undertaken to date by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. TIMSS provides a tool for investigating student achievement and school effectiveness, taking into account the varying influences of…

This article examines the complex task of designing a large-scale assessment to align with a reform-oriented view of mathematics teaching and learning. Specifically, we address this issue through the case of the province of Ontario that has a reform-oriented curriculum and support for its implementation. The province also has a mandate to assess…