This article addresses written feedback to students' drafts and provides insight into teachers' formative assessment practices. Data are taken from a large cross-disciplinary project on writing and assessment in Norway and comprises a sample of 7th graders' writing processes from 11 schools. Teachers' comments are categorised according to…

This article promulgates a conceptual framework for researching various roles of educational assessment emphasised in governments' assessment policies as a basis for comparing policy-making related to national testing in primary and lower secondary education in Norway and Sweden from 2000-2017. The study analyses policy documents and expert…

While it is generally assumed that the aim of teacher evaluation is to "formatively" support teachers' professional development, research finds that teacher evaluation practices are predominantly "summative". This paper describes a Norwegian governmental policy experiment aiming to overcome this fallacy through a bargaining…

In this study, we aim to understand the forces driving assessment for learning (AfL) in primary school teaching. By applying a case study design, including the two cases of Norway and Portugal and using mathematics teaching as an example, available policy documents and research reports are analysed to identify the differences and similarities that…

Novice members of a Norwegian national rater panel tasked with assessing Year 8 pupils' written texts were studied during three successive preparation sessions (2011-2012). The purpose was to investigate how the raters successfully make use of different decision-making strategies in an assessment situation where pre-set criteria and standards give…

Norway has seen major changes in the field of educational assessment over the past decade, following the 2001 '"PISA shock" that stimulated reform of the entire primary and secondary education systems: new outcome-based curricula with cross-disciplinary basic skills were accompanied by major revision of assessment regulations,…

In this paper, I will argue that it is possible to use data from large-scale international and national mathematics assessment programmes, whose attention is on summative achievement, to provide formative information that informs teachers about the effects of their classroom practice. However, to have impact on, and be useful for, classroom…