Using Examinations To Improve Education

This indispensable handbook provides helpful strategies for dealing with both the everyday challenges of university teaching and those that arise in efforts to maximize learning for every student. The suggested strategies are supported by research and adaptable to specific classroom situations. Rather than suggest a “set of recipes” to be followed mechanically, the book gives instructors the tools they need to deal with the ever-changing dynamics of teaching and learning. Available with InfoTrac Student Collections http://gocengage.com/infotrac. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Amplify your assessment literacy. Formative, data-driven, high-stakes—we all know the buzzwords surrounding educational testing. But we often shelve our understanding of these because they are overwhelmingly complex. Those who care about our schools and students—teachers, administrators, policymakers, parents, citizens—will discover how and why testing should be taken upon ourselves to advance. Using a nontechnical approach, this book offers fundamental knowledge to free you from testing fogginess—all framed around practical actions you can take to strengthen your assessment literacy. Inappropriate tests are leading to mistaken decisions, and this book provides everything you need to know to change that, including Reasons for tests Reliability/validity Fairness Test-building

High-stakes educational testing is a global phenomenon which is increasing in both scale and importance. Assessments are high-stakes when there are serious consequences for one or more stakeholders. Historically, tests have largely been used for selection or for providing a ‘licence to practise’, making them high-stakes for the test takers. Testing is now also used for the purposes of improving standards of teaching and learning and of holding schools accountable for their students’ results. These tests then become high-stakes for teachers and schools, especially when they have to meet externally imposed targets. More recent has been the emergence of international comparative testing, which has become high-stakes for governments and policy makers as their education systems are judged in relation to the performances of other countries. In this book we draw on research which examines each of these uses of high-stakes testing. The articles evaluate the impact of such assessments and explore the issues of value and fairness which they raise. To underline the international appeal of high-stakes testing the studies are drawn from Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, former Soviet republics and North America. Collectively they illustrate the power of high-stakes assessment in shaping, for better or for worse, policy making and schooling. This book was originally published as a special issue of Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice.

High-stakes public examinations exert a dominant influence in most education systems. They affect both teacher and student behavior, especially at the middle and upper levels of secondary education. The content of past examinations tends to dictate what is taught and how it is taught and, more important, what is learned and how it is learned. By changing aspects of these examinations, especially their content and format, education systems can have a strong positive impact on teacher behavior and student learning, help raise student achievement levels, and better prepare students for tertiary-level education and for employment. Examination agencies, many of which have followed the same procedures over decades, can learn from the successes and failures of other systems. This book addresses current issues related to the development, administration, scoring, and usage of these high-stakes public examinations, identifying key issues and problems related to examinations in many emerging market economies as well as in advanced economies. The book's primary audience consists of public examination officials on national, regional, and state examination boards, but the book should also be of interest to senior education policy makers concerned with certification and learning achievement standards, to academics and researchers interested in educational assessment, to governmental and education agencies responsible for student selection, and to professionals at development organizations. "This extremely well-written and comprehensive book offers a timely review of the diversity of public examination practices worldwide; of the tensions between examinations and learning; and of the technical expertise involved in the creation of valid, reliable, and fair assessments. It reminds us that as "the diploma disease+? takes hold with an ever-greater intensity at every stage of education worldwide, and the commercial business of testing flourishes, those concerned with educational quality and meaningful learning must be on guard to prevent the assessment tail wagging the educational dog.+? Angela W. Little, Professor Emerita, Institute of Education, University College London "This book is very well structured and written and draws on the authors' remarkable global knowledge across countries and histories. It will be a great asset both to administrators responsible for examinations and to academics and other professionals who seek to understand the nature and impact of examinations of different types and in different settings.+? Mark Bray, UNESCO Chair Professor of Comparative Education, University of Hong Kong; and former Director, UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning "I am sure that Public Examinations Examined, which thoroughly analyzes the practice of public examinations in different countries and makes profound and well-grounded conclusions, will arouse very great interest and will serve to further improve public examinations.+? Victor Bolotov, Distinguished Professor, Higher School of Economics, National Research University, Moscow; member, Russian Academy of Education; and former Deputy Minister of Education, Russian Federation

Summative assessment has been a contentious issue in educational circles for several decades, particularly high-stakes assessment events which arise at various junctures of the school cycle, especially those at the end of it. The French Baccalaureat and English A-Levels and their numerous clones throughout the francophone and anglophone worlds are household names and represent milestone events in people's lives, as their outcomes are principal determinants of young people's future prospects. These examinations are external--they are devised, conducted and processed by agencies outside the schools, usually ministerial examination units. As such, they act as 'blind' arbiters of student achievement, providing the proverbial 'level playing field' which ensures the comparability of outcomes. In the pyramidal school structures of yesteryear, examinations acted as filters, regulating the progression of pupils to subsequent tiers of formal education. Exit points occurred from primary school level up, from where unsuccessful candidates could enter the labour force and/or embark on occupationally specific further education and training. With the modernisation of the labour market and an ever-higher social demand for access to higher levels of formal education, the filtering function of examinations at lower levels of schooling has been gradually eroded, while burgeoning numbers of students at the upper secondary level have brought about reforms that include curricular diversification and sometimes radical overhauls of terminating assessment systems (including the modification and, in some instances, abandonment of external examinations). This edited volume brings together the experiences of twenty examination systems from around the world to show how these dynamic entities have adapted over time to the changing context of schooling. Following an introduction by Stephen P. Heyneman of World Bank repute, there are sixteen chapters presenting Country Case Studies, which have been written up under common subheadings, thereby highlighting the comparative nature of the work and facilitating cross-referencing. The subsequent four chapters elaborate on the theme of 'external examinations beyond national borders', including a contribution by the International Baccalaureate Organisation. A defining feature of the work is the attention it pays to what it calls the 'nuts and bolts' of external examinations, from question-setting to grading procedures. These are, it is argued, instrumental in nurturing and maintaining public confidence in external examinations. The book will be of immense value to people involved in educational policy studies, especially strategic educational planning, as well as those directly concerned with formal assessment. The work has been written to appeal to a wide audience of informed persons--it is accessible to teachers and interested laypeople, as well as to academics."

Educational Assessment in a Time of Reform provides background information on large-scale examination systems more generally and the South African examination specifically. It traces the reforms in the education system of South Africa since 1994 and provides a description of the advances in modern test theory that could be considered for future standard setting endeavours. At the heart of the book is the debate on whether the current standard of education in Africa is good enough . If not, then how can it be improved? The aim of this book is to provide a point of departure for discussions on standard-setting, quality assurance, equating of examinations and assessment approaches. From this point of departure recommendations for practices in general and the exit-level (Grade 12) examination results in particular can be made. This book is ideal reading for principals, teachers, academics and researchers in the fields of educational assessment, measurement, and evaluation.