Aim/Purpose: To encourage students' engagement in peer assessments and provide students with better-quality feedback, this paper describes a technique for author-reviewer matching in peer assessment systems -- a Balanced Allocation algorithm. Background: Peer assessment concerns evaluating the work of colleagues and providing feedback on their…

Writing assessment is a key feature of most education systems, yet there are limitations with traditional methods of assessing writing involving rubrics. In contrast, comparative judgement appears to overcome the reliability issues that beset the assessment of performance assessment tasks. The approach presented here extends previous work on…

It is not uncommon for randomised trials in education to have the performance of sample members in national examinations as their primary outcome. In many cases, examination results are available as summary measures only. Taking the example of GCSE examination results in England, this paper shows that using summary measures of an underlying score…

This paper aims to assess the impact of using GCSE grades as a primary outcome in educational evaluations and trials, compared to using marks. The choice of grades or marks is relevant as many evaluations use GCSE performance as an outcome measure. For such evaluations, the National Pupil Database (NPD) is used as a source of data by the vast…

This article presents a systematic instructional design procedure to develop a Computer-Assisted Vocabulary Acquisition (CAVA) software in a consistent and reliable way. The design process involves ADDIE fundamental elements: Analyse, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. This article will describe in detail each of the five ADDIE…

School accountability systems increasingly hold schools to account for their performances using value-added models purporting to measure the effects of schools on student learning. The most common approach is to fit a linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, where the school effects are the school means of the…

This paper reports improvements in teacher job performance, as measured by student test scores, resulting from a program of (zero-) low-stakes peer evaluation. Teachers working at the same school observed and scored each other's teaching. Students in randomly-assigned treatment schools scored 0.07[sigma] higher on math and English exams…

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…

Online instructional videos are becoming increasingly common within education. This study adopts a quasi-experimental 2 × 2 crossover design (control and experimental groups) to evaluate the efficacy of instructional videos to teach practical rehabilitation skills. The students performed practical sessions in class and were formatively assessed by…

The Teacher Observation intervention aimed to improve teacher effectiveness through structured peer observation. Teachers observe and are observed by their peers a number of times over the course of two years. It was delivered by the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO) at the University of Bristol. CMPO researchers trained lead…

This paper focuses on the effect of merger on university efficiency. In a first stage analysis, efficiency scores of English universities are derived for a 17-year period using the frontier estimation method data envelopment analysis. A second stage analysis explores the effect of merger and other factors on efficiency. We find that mean…

Despite profound influence of selection-by-ability on children's educational opportunities, empirical evidence for the validity of 11-plus tests is scarce. This study focused on secondary selection in Kent, the largest grammar school area in England. We analysed scores from the 'Kent Test' (the 11-plus test used in Kent), Cognitive Assessment…

This study sought to assess the level of secondary students' scientific literacy in suburban schools in Malaysia and England, a research area which to date has not been fully explored in the literature. The study analyzed the data using the OECD's three domain-specific competencies of scientific literacy, namely: (i) explain phenomena…

In order to evaluate the impact of "The Imagineerium" a 10-week educational project, teachers were asked to observe and rate the behaviour of a pilot sample of 135 participating students both at the beginning and at the end of the 10-week period. Scores recorded on the seven-item Trowsdale Index of Teacher Observation of Student…

This study draws on teacher perception data gathered from 65 secondary school modern languages (L2) teachers in South-East England. Data were collected via four iterations of an online questionnaire and follow-up interviews with six heads of department. This paper reports respondents' perceived strengths and development needs in relation to their…