This paper argues that Ofsted's initial approach to the use of criteria encouraged a misguided view of how inspection judgements should be made and, at worst, militated against the professional discussion between inspectors and schools that should always have been at the heart of the process.

In the realm of education, there has been an increasing emphasis on developing analytical thinking (AT) in the past few years. This systematic review focuses on an analysis of journal publications that have explored AT within the context of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. This analysis investigated four primary…

In this conceptual article, we discuss the idea of students' epistemic agency as an overlooked link between assessment, knowledge and society. We transcend the contemporary discourses around assessment that focus on its authenticity and student-centredness and instead investigate assessment from the viewpoints of knowledge and knowing. This…

Predicting what we will remember and forget is crucial for daily functioning. We were interested in whether evaluating something as likely to be remembered or forgotten leads to enhanced memory for "both" forms of information relative to information that was not judged for memorability. We presented participants with lists of words to…

Young children tend to deny the possibility of events that violate their expectations, including events that are merely improbable, like making onion-flavored ice cream or owning a crocodile as a pet. Could this tendency be countered by teaching children more valid strategies for judging possibility? We explored this question by training children…

Emotional information pervades experiences in daily life. Numerous studies have established that emotional materials and information are easier to remember than neutral ones, a phenomenon known as the emotional salience effect on memory. In recent years, an emerging body of research has begun to explore the effect of emotion on metamemory.…

The consensus-based assessment has long been a prevalent methodology employed in "panel crit" settings in design education and professional design awards. Acknowledging the subjective nature of design evaluation and its importance to the design development process, we report two studies investigating the effect of three levels of design…

Summative assessment is often considered a motivator that drives students' learning. Higher education has a responsibility in promoting lifelong learning and assessment plays an important role in supporting students' capability to make evaluative judgements about their work and that of others. However, as research often focuses on formal…

This activity aims to assist students with persuasive tactics for argumentative speeches. The activity involves students creating an argumentative speech to defend a hot-take assertion chosen from a list provided by the instructor. In small groups, students will craft an argument supporting their hot-take assertion and present it to the class.…

This experimental study examined whether the uninformative anchoring effect, which should be ignored, on judgments of learning (JOLs) was eliminated through the learning experience. In the experiments, the participants were asked to predict whether their performance on an upcoming test would be higher or lower than the anchor value (80% in the…

"Integrative evaluation" is an approach with two main phases: identification of plausible rival hypotheses and integration of rival hypotheses. The first phase may correspond to traditional adversary evaluation, whereas the second phase, that is not included in adversary evaluation, requires integrative thinking which can be applied when…

Activities can have substantial impacts on temporal experience. We investigated how the impact of being active develops dynamically over the course of long waiting times. Participants waited in a library building, either sitting passively or walking around actively, for between 60 and 100 minutes. Retrospectively, they reported how different…

In this study, we investigated the impact of prompting on young students' source consideration when watching videos with conflicting information. 262 French 7th graders were shown a series of videos in which two speakers (varying in credibility) took opposite stances on the topic of organic farming. The students were either given no prompts…

In this column, the author revisits who we are as assessment professionals, how we are trained, what our role is, and what our responsibilities are--to ourselves as a community, to our colleagues in education, at our institution, and to those we serve-- especially from an equity lens. They also share a few strategies to address the gaps they see.

Mike accidentally knocked against a bottle. Seeing that the bottle was about to fall, Jack was just about to catch it when Peter accidentally knocked against him, making Jack unable to catch it. Jack did not grab the bottle, and it fell to the ground and spilled. In double-prevention cases like these, philosophers and nonphilosophers alike tend to…