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Full-Text Articles in Education
Putting Creative Thinking At The Core Of The English School Curriculum: An Exploratory Study, Sladana Krstic
Putting Creative Thinking At The Core Of The English School Curriculum: An Exploratory Study, Sladana Krstic
Assessment and Reporting
Across much of the world, in more than 20 educational jurisdictions, the ability to think creatively is seen as a core aspect of what it is to be a successful learner today and, consequently, it has been included within various national curricula (Taylor et al., 2020). In England this is not yet the case, despite strong arguments being made for creative thinking being a core part of the curriculum in the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education (2019). In 2023 Rethinking Assessment and ACER UK conducted an exploratory study to examine the feasibility of integrating creative thinking into five subjects …
Pisa Capacity Needs Assessment: Tajikistan, Dushanbe, Ian Teo
Pisa Capacity Needs Assessment: Tajikistan, Dushanbe, Ian Teo
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
This report presents detailed findings of a Capacity Needs Assessment (CNA) for Tajikistan, carried out to gain information about Tajikistan's capacity assets and needs to implement the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 successfully. It focuses on Tajikistan's National Project Manager and key PISA National Centre roles. The capacity assets and needs are structured into three dimensions: the enabling environment, the organisational level, and the individual level. Questionnaires for each level are included.
Pisa Capacity Needs Assessment: Ecuador, Ian Teo
Pisa Capacity Needs Assessment: Ecuador, Ian Teo
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
This report presents detailed findings of a Capacity Needs Assessment (CNA) for Ecuador, carried out to gain information about Ecuador’s capacity assets and needs to implement the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 successfully. The capacity assets and needs are structured into three dimensions: the enabling environment, the organisational level, and the individual level. Questionnaires for each level are included.
Assessment Moderation: Is It Fit For Purpose?, Lenore Adie
Assessment Moderation: Is It Fit For Purpose?, Lenore Adie
2021-2030 ACER Research Conferences
This presentation outlines the different practices and purposes of assessment moderation and analyses the benefits and issues of these. Two projects are presented; each seeks to improve teacher judgement. Both attempt to redefine what we mean by moderation and how moderation can be conducted to reach diverse and dispersed groups. The first draws on a current Australian Research Council project that is exploring the development of scaled exemplars, the use of commentaries of judgement decisions, and the use of digital platforms to support teachers grading student work. The second draws on the work of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA) …
Reimagining Classroom Assessment And Feedback To Meet Learner Needs, Fabienne Van Der Kleij
Reimagining Classroom Assessment And Feedback To Meet Learner Needs, Fabienne Van Der Kleij
2021-2030 ACER Research Conferences
The power of classroom assessment and feedback to improve student learning outcomes has long been recognised. Yet, decades of research have yielded disappointing and often conflicting outcomes. This presentation challenges traditional conceptions of classroom assessment and feedback as teacher-driven practices. To meet learner needs better, it proposes a student-centred perspective in which students are active and have agency. By drawing on an extensive study of feedback reviews, this presentation illustrates how conceptualisations of feedback have changed over recent decades. This paper provides key insights into how classroom assessment and feedback practices can be changed in ways that are sustainable, afford …
Acer Models Of Writing: Changing The Assessment Mindset, Juliette Mendelovits, Judy Nixon
Acer Models Of Writing: Changing The Assessment Mindset, Juliette Mendelovits, Judy Nixon
2021-2030 ACER Research Conferences
This presentation outlines different models of writing assessment that have a proven track record in various programs delivered by ACER. These models include holistic scoring, and partial analytical scoring on a number of criteria. The writing prompts for these models assume extended pieces of writing. The presentation will also introduce a new and alternative model of writing assessment that ACER has implemented in several large-scale assessments. This model is built on shorter pieces of writing from each student, designed to give more accurate and diverse insights into students’ proficiency in writing in a range of text types, within the constraints …
Reimagining The Purpose Of Assessment, Geoff N. Masters
Reimagining The Purpose Of Assessment, Geoff N. Masters
2021-2030 ACER Research Conferences
Assessment is commonly understood as the process of judging how well students have learnt what they have been taught. It comes at the end of a sequence that begins with a curriculum or course syllabus. Teachers are expected to deliver this body of specified content, students are expected to learn it, and assessment is the process of judging and grading students on how well they have learnt what teachers have taught. This is a common view of assessment among students, parents and many teachers. I will argue in this presentation that this traditional understanding of what it means to learn …
Research Conference 2022: Reimagining Assessment: Proceedings And Program, Kylie Burns (Ed.)
Research Conference 2022: Reimagining Assessment: Proceedings And Program, Kylie Burns (Ed.)
2021-2030 ACER Research Conferences
The focus of this year’s Research Conference is on the use of assessment to support improved teaching and learning. The conference is titled ‘reimagining assessment’ because we believe there is a need to transform the essential purposes of educational assessment to provide better information about the deep conceptual learning, skills, competencies, and personal attributes that teachers and schools now have as objectives for student learning and development. Reimagined assessments must now be focused on monitoring learning across this broader range of intended outcomes and provide quality information about the points individuals have reached in their long-term development.
Reflections On The Development Of The Iea Civic And Citizenship Education Studies, Wolfram Schulz
Reflections On The Development Of The Iea Civic And Citizenship Education Studies, Wolfram Schulz
Civics and Citizenship Assessment
This chapter discusses the content, design, and methods of the three IEA studies of civic and citizenship education. It focuses on the changes made between each of these studies and the contexts for this learning area. The IEA Civic Education Study (CIVED) in 1999 was developed soon after the transition to democracy in many participating countries; threats to civil society in the early 2000s such as terrorism influenced the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) in 2009. The design of ICCS in 2016 responded to the increasing importance of social media in civic engagement, the growth in awareness of …
Improving Learning: Reconsidering Student Assessment Globally, Amit Kaushik
Improving Learning: Reconsidering Student Assessment Globally, Amit Kaushik
Assessment and Reporting
Learning assessment plays a critical role in helping to improve learning under different conditions and in varying situations, as an integral part not just of the teaching–learning process, but also of the larger policy environment. While the objective of each type of assessment may differ, its fundamental purpose remains that of helping to determine progress made by each learner in their individual learning path so as to be able to guide and support further development (Masters 2013). Most importantly, utilizing the data emerging from an assessment is critical to its success. The effort of undertaking an assessment is lost when …
Learning Through Play Experience Tool: Contextual Data Tools, Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)
Learning Through Play Experience Tool: Contextual Data Tools, Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)
Monitoring Learning
The Learning through Play (LtP) Experience Tool was developed for use at LEGO House to observe and measure the quality of children’s play experiences. The LtP Experience Tool includes a set of Contextual Data Tools. The primary purpose of the Contextual Data Tools: "is to put the LtP Experience Tool into ‘context’, by emphasising that we are not assessing the individual child assuming that there is something wrong with the child’s performance or behaviour. But that we are measuring the child to understand whether anything should be changed in the context/environment/facilitation around the child". The Contextual Data Tools …
The Science Behind The Art Of Teaching: Evaluation As Inspiration, Michele Bruniges Am
The Science Behind The Art Of Teaching: Evaluation As Inspiration, Michele Bruniges Am
2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences
Teachers across Australia inspire students to love learning. Our best teachers are constantly evaluating their impact on learning outcomes and adapting their practice – balancing the art and science of teaching. As we move rapidly towards the third decade of the 21st century, there is more pressure than ever for all teachers to deliver both deep discipline knowledge and the skills students need to survive and thrive in the workplace of the future. We need to use technology and data to support teachers to maximise learning outcomes for their students. This has to be done in a way that helps …
Measures Of Characteristics And Skills Associated With Learning Through Play: Findings From The Literature, Rachel Parker, Lisa Van Beeck, Janine Callanan
Measures Of Characteristics And Skills Associated With Learning Through Play: Findings From The Literature, Rachel Parker, Lisa Van Beeck, Janine Callanan
Monitoring Learning
This literature review was commissioned by the LEGO Foundation to inform the revision of the Learning through Play (LtP) Experience Tool, which was developed for use at LEGO House to observe and measure the quality of children’s play experiences. This review aims to determine the extent to which the LEGO Foundation’s tool reflects good practice regarding instrument design and administration, and whether tools that measure similar characteristics using similar methods already exist
Equipping Teachers With Tools To Assess And Teach General Capabilities, Claire Scoular
Equipping Teachers With Tools To Assess And Teach General Capabilities, Claire Scoular
2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences
There is wide recognition that students need to be equipped with appropriate social and cognitive skills demanded by society and the workforce. The unresolved question is how to do this. Many education systems globally are addressing this demand by including skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and creativity into curriculum documents or supplementary materials. However, there is little research to guide educators in teaching such skills at school level. The need to develop practical solutions for assessing and teaching social and cognitive skills, broadly classified under the umbrella ‘21st-century skills’ or ‘general capabilities’, is ever increasing. An integrated approach …
Monitoring Learning Against The Sustainable Development Goals, Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)
Monitoring Learning Against The Sustainable Development Goals, Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)
Monitoring Learning
The Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML) is an international collaboration to improve learning around the world, led by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). The Australian Council for Educational Research Centre for Global Education Monitoring (ACER-GEM) has a major role in supporting GAML, as the UIS’s technical partner. This publication outlines ACER’s role in the work plan of the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning.
System-Wide Analysis Of Assessment Practices (Swaap): Concept Note, Australian Council For Educational Research
System-Wide Analysis Of Assessment Practices (Swaap): Concept Note, Australian Council For Educational Research
Global education monitoring
This note is concerned with the development of a process to analyse how assessment practices are integrated into education systems in order for assessment outcomes to be useful for evidence based decision making throughout the system. It examines the quality of learning assessment and the extent to which it is embedded into an education system and acts as an effective contributor to the improvement of learning outcomes. The process is referred to as the System-Wide Analysis of Assessment Practices (SWAAP). The primary objective of SWAAP is to support education systems to develop national assessment strategies that generate meaningful data and …
Developing A Global Health Assessment Collaboration: Ancillary Report, Daniel Edwards, Jacob Pearce, David Wilkinson
Developing A Global Health Assessment Collaboration: Ancillary Report, Daniel Edwards, Jacob Pearce, David Wilkinson
Higher education research
This document reports on a project designed to develop an assessment collaboration between medical schools in both Australia and the United Kingdom. The project was funded by the Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT), utilising surplus funding from a broader assessment collaboration project – the Australian Medical Assessment Collaboration (OLT ID12-2482). The Global Health Assessment Collaboration (GHAC) involved five universities in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). It developed an assessment framework and item specifications, undertook assessment item drafting workshops, built in a process of review and resulted in the development of a focused suite of assessment items. This report …
Assessment In Interactive Learning Environments, Michael Timms, Jason Lodge
Assessment In Interactive Learning Environments, Michael Timms, Jason Lodge
2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences
There is an increasing interest in using digital technologies to create interactive learning environments (ILEs) that both teach and assess student skills that are hard or impossible to assess using ‘static’ items such as traditional, multiple-choice questions. These interactive learning environments try to do two things simultaneously: firstly, to monitor the learning of the student in real time, providing feedback to help the student progress through the learning task; and secondly, to use the information gathered during the learning to make judgements about where the student is in learning of the topic. Essentially, ILEs draw upon the same source of …
A Review Of International Large-Scale Assessments In Education: Assessing Component Skills And Collecting Contextual Data, John Cresswell, Ursula Schwantner, Charlotte Waters
A Review Of International Large-Scale Assessments In Education: Assessing Component Skills And Collecting Contextual Data, John Cresswell, Ursula Schwantner, Charlotte Waters
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
The OECD has initiated PISA for Development (PISA-D) in response to the rising need of developing countries to collect data about their education systems and the capacity of their student bodies. This report aims to compare and contrast approaches regarding the instruments that are used to collect data on (a) component skills and cognitive instruments, (b) contextual frameworks, and (c) the implementation of the different international assessments, as well as approaches to include children who are not at school, and the ways in which data are used. It then seeks to identify assessment practices in these three areas that will …
Indigenous Languages Programmes In Australian Schools - A Way Forward, Nola Purdie, Tracey Frigo, Clare Ozolins, Geoff Noblett, Nick Thieberger, Janet Sharp
Indigenous Languages Programmes In Australian Schools - A Way Forward, Nola Purdie, Tracey Frigo, Clare Ozolins, Geoff Noblett, Nick Thieberger, Janet Sharp
Indigenous Education Research
Currently, over 16,000 Indigenous students and 13,000 non-Indigenous students located in 260 Australian schools are involved in an Indigenous language program. More than 80 different Indigenous languages are taught. This project sought to present practice which would strengthen the quality of Indigenous language programs in schools. The report consists of a literature review, a mapping exercise to document current practices relating to Indigenous languages in Australian schools, an analysis of existing models of teacher preparation, and six case studies of good practice examples.
Optimism And Pessimism In Children, Shirley M. Yates
Optimism And Pessimism In Children, Shirley M. Yates
Shannon Research Press
Areas of learning where performance is measured through systematic and responsible assessment can contribute to the conceptualisation and valuing of art education through the provision of evidence of learning and development of artistic skills. There is a need for measurement to be undertaken in assessment in art production, on the basis of a shared symbol system, that allows for detailed classifications of visual art works. The aim of this study was to improve validity, reliability and credibility in measuring student performance in art production, and thereby increase the positive impact of assessment in the visual arts discipline.
Workshop Manual: Implementing Developmental Assessment., Margaret Forster, Geoff N. Masters
Workshop Manual: Implementing Developmental Assessment., Margaret Forster, Geoff N. Masters
Assessment Resource Kit
This workshop manual has been developed as a resource for curriculum coordinators in schools, staff in curriculum and assessment support roles in regional and central offices, and others interested in the professional development of teachers in the areas of assessment and reporting. The manual provides resources for a single workshop Implementing developmental assessment. It is part of the Assessment Resource Kit (ARK), a series of magazines on assessment and reporting issues and methods. Workshop contents: Implementing developmental assessment: workshop overview. Section 1: Progress maps Section 2: Assessment methods Section 3: Judging and recording Section 4: Estimating attainment Section 5: Reporting.
Developmental Assessment: Assessment Resource Kit, Geoff N. Masters, Margaret Forster
Developmental Assessment: Assessment Resource Kit, Geoff N. Masters, Margaret Forster
Assessment Resource Kit
Developmental assessment is the process of monitoring a student's progress through an area of learning so that decisions can be made about the best ways to facilitate further learning. Developmental assessment uses a progress map or continuum that describes the nature of development or progress or growth in an area of learning and so provides a frame of reference for monitoring individual development. Progress is monitored in much the same way as a child's physical growth is monitored: from time to time an estimate is made of a student's location on a developmental continuum, and changes in location provide measures …
Performances: Assessment Resource Kit, Margaret Forster, Geoff N. Masters
Performances: Assessment Resource Kit, Margaret Forster, Geoff N. Masters
Assessment Resource Kit
The assessment of some kinds of learning requires the observation of student performances. Examples include playing a musical instrument, dancing, using scientific apparatus, operating equipment, performing gymnastics routines, diving, problem-solving in a group, applying ball-handling skills, and participating in small group discussions. 'Performance assessment' is the assessment of students as they engage in an activity. It is the on-the-spot evaluation of performance, behaviour or interaction. This issue on the assessment of performances in the Assessment Resource Kit (ARK) magazine series contains five articles: 1. What is performance assessment? 2. Informal classroom observations; 3. Classroom performance assessment 'events'; 4. When comparability …
Projects: Assessment Resource Kit, Margaret Forster, Geoff N. Masters
Projects: Assessment Resource Kit, Margaret Forster, Geoff N. Masters
Assessment Resource Kit
Projects are extended pieces of work completed over a period of time. They are investigations which involve the collection, organisation, evaluation, and presentation of material or data. Projects are usually completed by individuals or small groups of students with the teacher acting as supervisor. This issue of the Assessment Resource Kit (ARK) magazine series is intended to give teachers a deeper understanding of how to assess student projects. Topics covered in the five articles include: what is project assessment, ways of assessing the process of project work, ways of assessing the end products of project work, comparing student projects and …
Competency Based Assessment In The Professions, Geoff N. Masters, Doug Mccurry
Competency Based Assessment In The Professions, Geoff N. Masters, Doug Mccurry
Vocational, adult and professional education research
The purpose of this paper is to assist professions to develop, in conjunction with National Office of Overseas Skills Recognition, the most suitable methods of assessing individuals against national competency standards; to provide advice on assessment methods likely to be practical and useful for the professions generally; and to provide advice on assessment methods consistent with the Commonwealth government's principles for the reform of the overseas skills recognition process. The authors consider alternative ways of conceptualising occupational competence and show how different conceptualisations can have very different implications for assessment. They briefly review the notion of competency based assessment. What …