Teacher evaluation has evolved from a task used for administrative decisions to an activity whose main goal is the enhancement of student learning and well-being through the improvement of instruction. The actual implementation of teacher evaluation by school principals will determine greatly the extent to which it can achieve this goal. An…

In Sweden, grades are used for selection to upper-secondary school and higher education, even though agreement in teachers' grading is low and the selection therefore potentially unfair. Furthermore, measures taken to increase the agreement have not been successful. This study has explored how to increase agreement in teachers' grading by…

The role of the academic discipline is a major factor in the assessment design and implementation in higher education. Unfortunately, a clear understanding of how teachers from different disciplines approach assessment is still missing; this information can lead to teacher training programmes that are better designed and more focussed. The present…

The last two decades have seen fast-moving and wholescale changes in the ways that education is now provided in French schools, in the nature of learner assessment, and in the form and scale of system evaluation. Innovation and reform have in part followed international trends, themselves triggered by the global impact of the international…

The issue of connecting research evidence with practice referred to as evidence-informed practice (EIP) has received considerable critical attention in the field of education. However, assessment literature has failed to fully acknowledge the significance of this issue. This conceptual paper concentrates on the process of informing classroom…

The study at the heart of this paper was conducted in 2017 to gather data on Irish post-primary teachers' conceptions of assessment at the time immediately following the introduction of a revised policy for assessment by the Department of Education and Skills (DES). Central to the reform policy was an increased emphasis on formative assessment and…

This paper details a two-stage process for standard setting using an extended pairwise comparison method. It describes the application of a new process of establishing a set of scaled and ordered performances as a basis for exemplifying standards. In stage one, the method of pairwise comparison was used to generate data from pairwise judgements…

This study investigates the relationship between students' attitudes towards formative assessment and summative assessment and aims to enrich the understanding of formative and summative assessment from the students' perspective. A total of 3,019 Hong Kong primary school students responded to a newly developed instrument. Overall, students…

In this article, we examine how assessment is enacted and negotiated in a school project that involves multimodal composition. The case is a project on advertisement in which lower secondary students collaboratively composed multimodal commercials about various products and topics. The theoretical framework is based on sociocultural perspectives…

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…

The more recent discussion in Ireland around post-primary teachers being responsible for assessing their own students' work continues. The new junior cycle reform (covering the first three years of post-primary education) is concerned with making fundamental changes in approaches to learning, teaching, curriculum and assessment, with school-based…

The Teachers Conceptions of Assessment Inventory was used to investigate New Zealand teachers' beliefs about assessment. The participating sample comprised teachers who work almost exclusively at the senior level of high school and are responsible for school-based assessment programmes that contribute at least 50% of students' final grades towards…

Since our 1998 review of research on classroom assessment and learning was published, we have contributed to theorising formative assessment, but recognise that this work is incomplete. In this paper, we take up a suggestion by Perrenoud that any theory of formative assessment must be embedded within a wider theoretical field, specifically, within…

Teachers require specialised assessment knowledge and skills in order to effectively assess student learning. These knowledge and skills develop over time through ongoing teacher learning and experiences. The first part of this paper presents a Summative Assessment Literacy Rubric (SALRubric) constructed to track the development of secondary…

This article describes two collaborative research projects whose common goal was to explore the potential role of professional controversies in building teachers' summative assessment capacity. In the first project, upper primary teachers were encouraged to compare their practices through a form of social moderation, without prior instructor input…