Educational Assessment Evaluation and Accountability最新文献

Using a case-study approach, we aim to understand how teachers interact with both analogue and digital resources in the science classroom for formative assessment (FA) purposes and their justifications for such interactions. The study was conducted in the context of a European Union project on FA in science and mathematics education. The case involved two Norwegian primary school teachers teaching their grades 5 and 7 students a series of science lessons on the topic "how to prevent microorganisms from spreading." The data set consisted of lesson plans, classroom observations, pre- and post-interviews conducted with teachers, student tasks, post-interviews with students, and student work. We identified eight analogue and digital resources, which were used to employ five FA strategies. The strategies that were most commonly used related to "engineering effective classroom discussions" that elicited evidence of student understanding and "activating students" as autonomous learners and peer instructors. The teachers' rationales for using the selected resources were mainly connected to their effectiveness, practicality, and relevance. Teacher interactions with the selected resources are described, and educational implications are discussed.

There is no final consensus regarding which covariates should be used (in addition to prior achievement) when estimating value-added (VA) scores to evaluate a school's effectiveness. Therefore, we examined the sensitivity of evaluations of schools' effectiveness in math and language achievement to covariate selection in the applied VA model. Four covariate sets were systematically combined, including prior achievement from the same or different domain, sociodemographic and sociocultural background characteristics, and domain-specific achievement motivation. School VA scores were estimated using longitudinal data from the Luxembourg School Monitoring Programme with some 3600 students attending 153 primary schools in Grades 1 and 3. VA scores varied considerably, despite high correlations between VA scores based on the different sets of covariates (.66 < r < 1.00). The explained variance and consistency of school VA scores substantially improved when including prior math and prior language achievement in VA models for math and prior language achievement with sociodemographic and sociocultural background characteristics in VA models for language. These findings suggest that prior achievement in the same subject, the most commonly used covariate to date, may be insufficient to control for between-school differences in student intake when estimating school VA scores. We thus recommend using VA models with caution and applying VA scores for informative purposes rather than as a mean to base accountability decisions upon.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11092-022-09386-y.

Academic resilience captures academic success despite adversity and thus is an important concept for promoting equity within education. However, our understanding of how and why rates of academic resilience differ between contexts is currently limited by variation in the ways that the construct has been operationalised in quantitative research. Similarly, comparing the strength of protective factors that promote academic resilience is hindered by differing approaches to the measurement of academic resilience. This methodological variation has complicated attempts to reconcile disparate findings about academic resilience. The current study applied six commonly used operationalisations of academic resilience that combined different thresholds of high risk and high achievement, to three international large-scale assessments, to explore how these different operationalisations impacted the findings produced. The context of Aotearoa New Zealand was chosen as a case study to further academic resilience research within this context and investigate how academic resilience manifests in an education system with relatively high levels of average achievement alongside low levels of educational equity. Within international large-scale assessment datasets, prevalence rates differed markedly across subject areas, grade levels, and collection cycles, as a function of the measure of academic resilience employed, while the strength of protective factors was more consistent. Thresholds that were norm-referenced produced more consistent findings across the different datasets compared to thresholds that were criterion-referenced. High levels of missing data prevented the analysis of some datasets, and differences in the way that key constructs were measured undermined the comparability of findings across international large-scale assessments. The findings emphasise the strengths and limitations of utilising international large-scale assessment data for the study of academic resilience, particularly within the Aotearoa New Zealand context. Furthermore, the study highlights that researchers' methodological decisions have important impacts on the conclusions drawn about academic resilience.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11092-022-09384-0.