The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's (IEA) mission is to enhance knowledge about education systems worldwide, and to provide high-quality data that will support education reform and lead to better teaching and learning in schools. In pursuit of this aim, it conducts, and reports on, major studies of student…

This study used data from the Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning project, which involved data on the academic performance of more than 90,000 New Zealand students in six subjects (i.e. reading, writing and mathematics in two languages). Two sub-samples of this dataset were included for detailed re-analysis to test the general applicability…

As China continues to involve teachers in the implementation of an assessment for learning or formative assessment policy, a clearer understanding of how they conceive of the purposes and functions of assessment is necessary. This paper synthesises eight interview and survey studies, which have examined how diverse samples of practicing teachers…

Teachers' understandings of feedback probably influence the type and quality of feedback that they provide. The beliefs of 518 New Zealand practicing teachers about feedback were evaluated with the "Teachers' Conceptions of Feedback" (TCoF) inventory and related to practices these teachers considered to be feedback. Nine feedback factors…

Hong Kong is seeking to increase the use of "assessment for learning" rather than rely on "assessment of learning" through summative examinations. Nearly 300 teachers from 14 primary and secondary schools answered a Chinese translation of the Teachers' Conceptions of Assessment inventory and a new Practices of Assessment…

The conceptions Queensland teachers have about assessment purposes were surveyed in 2003 with an abridged version of the Teacher Conceptions of Assessment Inventory. Multi-group analysis found that a model with four factors, somewhat different in structure to previous studies, was statistically different between Queensland primary and (lower)…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Self Assessment of Leadership of Teaching and Learning (SALTAL) inventory, in conditions of repeated administration. Design/methodology/approach: In 2006 and 2007, nearly all of New Zealand's newly-appointed school principals participated in an 18 month induction…

Accuracy in the scoring of writing is critical if standardized tasks are to be used in a national assessment scheme. Three approaches to establishing accuracy (i.e., consensus, consistency, and measurement) exist and commonly large-scale assessment programs of primary school writing demonstrate adjacent agreement consensus rates of between 80% and…