The relationship of expected and actual difficulty of items on six mathematics question papers designed for 16-year olds in England was investigated through paired comparison using experts and testing with students. A variant of the Rasch model was applied to the comparison data to establish a scale of expected difficulty. In testing, the papers…

There has been considerable criticism of assessment methods because of inconsistencies across modules and a focus on the measurement of learning rather than assessment for learning. The aim of the current study was to formalise the process of assessment feedback to feed-forward, and assess the impact on student learning. A cohort of undergraduate…

This paper describes a randomised controlled trial conducted with 10 secondary schools in England to evaluate the impact and feasibility of Fresh Start as an intervention to help new entrants with low prior literacy. Fresh Start is a synthetic phonics programme for small groups of pupils, here implemented three times per week over 22 weeks. The…

The Young Readers Programme (YRP) motivates children to read for enjoyment by running a series of three literacy-focused events, teaching children strategies to choose books that are right for them, and showing them that reading can be enjoyable. One of the most effective ways of developing children's literacy skills is to engage them in reading…

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a targeted programme that uses a tiered approach to identify the needs of low achieving pupils. The approach begins with whole class teaching (Tier 1), followed by small group tuition (Tier 2) for those who need more attention, and one to one tutoring (Tier 3) for those who do not respond to the small group…

The laboratory component of undergraduate engineering education poses challenges in resource constrained engineering faculties. The cost, time, space and physical presence requirements of the traditional (real) laboratory approach are the contributory factors. These resource constraints may mitigate the acquisition of meaningful laboratory…

Reviews and analyzes criticisms of the design of media evaluation studies; suggests guidelines for future evaluation studies, including analyses of learning theories and desired learning outcomes; and describes the application of the evaluative guidelines to an interactive video in an English comprehensive school with 14-year-olds. (Contains 26…