This groundbreaking report provides examples of best practices in value-added modelling for measuring school performance.

This groundbreaking report provides examples of best practices in value-added modelling for measuring school performance.

This collection presents educational assessment research from Latin America, adding to a relatively small but growing body of research considering educational assessment and evaluation issues in this large region. The predominance of Chile reflects its early highly centralized education system, and the fact that it adopted national testing before other Latin American countries. It was also an early participant in international assessment programmes. Other countries have followed the trend of implementing national testing, and to a lesser extent participating in international surveys. The complementary development of technical expertise in quantitative research methods has enabled extensive analysis of the large data sets generated by these testing and assessment programmes. Taken together, the evidence reported provides a means not only of reviewing educational quality issues in Latin America, but also of facilitating comparisons that allow the context specificity of equivalent research conducted in western developed countries to be considered. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

This review report for the Netherlands provides, from an international perspective, an independent analysis of major issues facing the Dutch evaluation and assessment framework in education, current policy initiatives and possible future approaches.

On records, the evolution of human development pays a considerable tribute to the relentless efforts made by generations of teacher educators set out to train academic leaders and teachers committed to the implementation of educational policies parallel to the mental edification of young students. Teacher educators, faced the challenges, overcame the obstacles, and refined the pedagogies of our educational system with many innovative approaches. As the world faces increasing uncertainties and adamant shifts of knowledge economy, it is apparent that education plays an ultimate role in creating adept and geared up citizens, to lead the way to the future. Designing and managing learning school organizations that can sustain a competitive advantage in this fast-changing environment demands transformative leaders primed and ready to the building or our intellectual capital for the future. Many books on teacher education, educational management and leadership have been written in the past, but most of them do not keep up with the fast-changing educational scene and only a few include future scenarios. This book presents the anticipated trends and demands of the new knowledge economy, and it aims to achieve its goals with the use of various tools, generative and collaborative efforts, increasing leadership capability in dynamic and complex contexts, enculturation of cutting edge knowledge for educational advancement and creation of teams that focus learning organizations. This book brings together prominent and leading teacher educators and researchers from around the world to present their scholarship, theories and practice, case studies, state-of-the- art approaches and upshot predictions. This book embodies collective knowledge inquiry and represents professional conversations. The chapters provides information on recent trends and development in teacher education, the important role of educational management and leadership in educational transformations and promising practices for desired outcomes. The book is a critical and specialized resource that describes how transformative leadership can play an important role in achieving excellence in education. The topics covered are: Educational Leadership and Effective Teaching, Research in Transformational Leadership, and Professional Development and Social Capital Building in Schools.

This publication is the first report from the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). It provides quantitative, policy-relevant information on the teaching and learning environment in schools in 23 countries.

Over the years, researchers have developed statistical methods to help them investigate and interpret issues of interest in many discipline areas. These methods range from descriptive to inferential to multivariate statistics. As the psychometrics measures in education become more complex, vigorous and robust methods were needed in order to represent research data efficiently. One such method is Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). SEM is a statistical technique that allows the simultaneous analysis of a series of structural equations. It also allows a dependent variable in one equation to become an independent variable in another equation. It is a comprehensive statistical approach to testing hypotheses about relations among observed and latent variables. SEM is commonly known as causal modeling, or path analysis, which hypothesizes causal relationships among variables and tests the causal models with a linear equation system. As educational research questions become more complex, they need to be evaluated with more sophisticated tools. The pervasive use of SEM in the literature has shown that SEM has a potential to be of assistance to modern educational researchers. This book will bring together prominent educators and researchers from around the world to share their contemporary research on structural equation modeling in educational settings. The chapters provide information on recent trends and developments and effective applications of the different models to answer various educational research questions. This book is a critical and specialized source that describes recent advances in SEM in international academia.

This report provides an international comparative analysis and policy advice to countries on how evaluation and assessment arrangements can be embedded within a consistent framework to improve the quality, equity and efficiency of school education.

Value-added methods refer to efforts to estimate the relative contributions of specific teachers, schools, or programs to student test performance. In recent years, these methods have attracted considerable attention because of their potential applicability for educational accountability, teacher pay-for-performance systems, school and teacher improvement, program evaluation, and research. Value-added methods involve complex statistical models applied to test data of varying quality. Accordingly, there are many technical challenges to ascertaining the degree to which the output of these models provides the desired estimates. Despite a substantial amount of research over the last decade and a half, overcoming these challenges has proven to be very difficult, and many questions remain unanswered-at a time when there is strong interest in implementing value-added models in a variety of settings. The National Research Council and the National Academy of Education held a workshop, summarized in this volume, to help identify areas of emerging consensus and areas of disagreement regarding appropriate uses of value-added methods, in an effort to provide research-based guidance to policy makers who are facing decisions about whether to proceed in this direction.