Cases On Assessment And Evaluation In Education

With the demand to maintain a competitive advantage, the assessment and evaluation of education is vital in measuring the knowledge and skills of the students, community, and educational system as a whole by providing educators with the facts needed to enhance and improve the learning process. Cases on Assessment and Evaluation in Education presents a collection of case studies describing the methods used to assess an education course, what factors to assess, as well as which factors determine the success of these factors. This casebook aims to bring together different research perspectives on the questions surrounding the issues of educational assessment and evaluation.

"This book explores the development of online assessment and the way practitioners of online learning can modify their methodologies in the design, development, and delivery of their instruction to best accommodate their participants"--Provided by publisher.

There are two common purposes in educational evaluation which are, at times, in conflict with one another. Educational institutions usually require evaluation data to demonstrate effectiveness to funders and other stakeholders, and to provide a measure of performance for marketing purposes. Educational evaluation is also a professional activity that individual educators need to undertake if they intend to continuously review and enhance the learning they are endeavouring to facilitate. This book presents new research on issues of vital importance to this field.

Assessment has provided educational institutions with information about student learning outcomes and the quality of education for many decades. But has it informed practice and been fully incorporated into the learning cycle? Conrad and Openo argue that the potential inherent in many of the new learning environments being explored by educators and students has not been fully realized. In this investigation of a variety of assessment methods and learning approaches, the authors aim to discover the tools that engage learners and authentically evaluate education. They insist that moving to new learning environments, specifically those online and at a distance, afford opportunities for educators to adopt only the best practices of traditional face-to-face assessment while exploring evaluation tools made available by a digital learning environment in the hopes of arriving at methods that capture the widest set of learner skills and attributes.

Test-based accountability systems that attach high stakes to standardized test results have raised a number of issues on educational assessment and accountability. Do these high-stakes tests measure student achievement accurately? How can policymakers and educators attach the right consequences to the results of these tests? And what kinds of tradeoffs do these testing policies introduce? This book responds to the growing emphasis on high-stakes testing and offers recommendations for more-effective test-based accountability systems.

This book is about the practice of decision making by school principals and about ways to improve this practice by capitalizing on evaluation dimensions. Much has been written on decision making but surprisingly little on decision making in the school principalship. Much has been also written on evaluation as well as on evaluation and decision making, but not much has been written on evaluation in decision making, especially decision making in the principalship. This book presents two messages. One is that decision making in the principalship can be studied and improved and not only talked about in abstract terms. The other message is that evaluation can contribute to the understanding of decision making in the principalship and to the improvement of its practice. In this book we call for the conception of an evaluation-minded principal, a principal who has a wide perspective on the nature of evaluation and its potential benefits, a principal who is also inclined to use evaluation perceptions and techniques as part of his/her decision-making process. This book was conceived in 1985 with the idea to combine thoughts about educational administration with thoughts about educational evaluation. Studies of decision making in the principalship had already been on their way. We decided to await the findings, and in the meantime we wrote a first conceptual version of evaluation in decision making. As the studies were completed we wrote a first empirical version of same.

Large-scale assessments (LSAs) play a growing role in education policy decisions, accountability, and education planning worldwide. This book focuses on central issues that are key components of successful planning, development and implementation of LSAs. The book’s main distinction is its focus on practice- based, cutting-edge research. This is achieved by having chapters co-authored by world-class researchers in collaboration with measurement practitioners. The result is a how-to book whose language is accessible to practitioners and graduate students as well as academics. No other book so thoroughly covers current issues in the field of large-scale assessment. An introductory chapter is followed by sixteen chapters that each focus on a specific issue. The content is prescriptive and didactic in nature but based on the most recent scientific research. It includes successful experiences, exemplary practices, training modules, interesting breakthroughs or alternatives, and promising innovations regarding large-scale assessments. Finally, it covers meaningful topics that are currently taking center stage such as motivating students, background questionnaires, comparability of different linguistic versions of assessments, and cognitive modeling of learning and assessment.