This book discusses national school policy reforms in a number of key European countries and shows how these are framed in transnational collaborations that meet with national particularities and contestations. It gives an overview of school policy developments that represents the diversity of Europe within a comparative framework. It takes point…

The diffusion of national standardized testing, large-scale survey assessments and the promotion of policies of self-evaluation are making large amounts of data on education systems available and transforming schools into collecting units for a notable range of educational, institutional and socioeconomic indicators. The datafication and related…

Nowadays, educational research points how teaching-learning quality is interwoven with teachers' conceptions of teaching, learning, curriculum, and assessment. Given this assumption, the present papers reports a study aimed to analyse teacher trainees' conceptions of assessment. On the backdrop of review of main international studies on teachers'…

The interest in formative assessment, which is highly valued in current conceptualisations of teacher assessment literacy, has led to a renewed focus on initial teacher education (ITE) programmes, as well as on the assessment education domain. The conceptual understanding of the theory and practice of formative assessment has been long advocated…

This article explores the link between the OECD TALIS 2013 survey's framework for defining the ideal teacher and national educational goals by focusing on the teacher self-efficacy items, using cross-country comparisons. Surprisingly, cross-country analysis of the TALIS 2013 data combined with World Value Survey data about Desired Child Qualities…

This article describes the characteristics of mentoring higher education students in companies which is a field the least researched, particularly when evaluateing effects of mentoring. This qualitative study is a response to this concern. The purpose of the study is to determine what mentors working with students in companies in certain European…

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's (IEA) mission is to enhance knowledge about education systems worldwide, and to provide high-quality data that will support education reform and lead to better teaching and learning in schools. In pursuit of this aim, it conducts, and reports on, major studies of student…

The article explores the changing patterns of disciplinary orientation in European public administration (PA) education. The study builds on an earlier research, which defined three distinct clusters of countries, based on their specific PA education tradition. It asks whether countries' movement away from the Legalist paradigm has continued since…

Since the start of the new millennium, international comparative large-scale studies have become one of the most well-known areas in the field of education. However, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has already been conducting international comparative studies for about half a century. The present…

This report identifies effective strategies to tackle skills imbalances in Italy. It provides an assessment of practices and policies in the following areas: the collection and use of information on skill needs to foster a better alignment of skills acquisitions with labour market needs; the design of education and training systems and their…

On signing the Bologna declaration in 1999, European countries committed themselves to addressing the reforms necessary for adapting their university education to the European Higher Education Area. This modification process culminated in 2010, and this research aims to analyse the degree of divergence that currently exists in each course subject…

How do the constituencies in higher education re-interpret Bologna's function with regard to the European Higher Education Area? This research examines how institutional actors re-construct the policy framework in the light of their own institutional agendas. Drawing on empirical data from a survey of academics, students and administrative and…

This article focuses on the interaction between the European dimension driven by the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the development of national reforms to fulfil that objective. On the basis of data gathered in eight countries involved in EuroHESC project TRUE (Transforming European Universities), the curricular and the…

In these difficult financial times, it is more important than ever to manage money carefully. Educators who don't do so are vulnerable, for despite a thirty-year history of increasing authority and status within and without the museum, education departments are still more expendable than curatorial or collections departments in some museums. This…

This 2010 edition of the "Focus" report has been prepared for the European Ministerial Conference in Budapest/Vienna, 11-12 March 2010, that officially launches the European Higher Education Area. The report has been developed as a fully collaborative exercise between the Eurydice Network and the Bologna Follow-up Group (BFUG), with the…