This article revolves around the educational policy introduced in Swedish schools that has extended national testing to younger pupils. The policy is intended to support equal assessment and grading. With the exception of short-term preparations for the tests focused on here, the testing routines are regulated by the state. The paper aims to…

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of technology use and teacher professional development on students' mathematics academic achievement. The U.S. Department of Education National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) published results for mathematics assessments for Grade 4 from the years 2005-2015 served as the dependent…

This article describes a secondary analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress 2008 eighth-grade visual arts data (N = 3,912). These assessments occur under government mandate on a periodic schedule and data on the arts were collected in 1997 and again in 2008. The purpose of this study was to predict students' visual art response…

There are sound educational and examining reasons for the use of coursework assessment and practical assessment of student work by teachers in schools for purposes of reporting examination grades. Coursework and practical work test a range of different curriculum goals to final papers and increase the validity and reliability of the result.…

Leveraging achievement data measured in the fall and spring of kindergarten through eighth grade for 840,000 students attending 8,800 public schools, we report novel evidence on how achievement and growth patterns differ between rural and nonrural schools. Rural students start kindergarten slightly ahead of nonrural students but fall behind by…

This qualitative study investigates the gap between curricular intentions, teacher perspectives, and practices in a primary school bilingual program in central Mozambique. It aims to provide new data regarding bilingual education program implementation in an understudied and underrepresented country in the literature. Drawing on original interview…

Privatisation and commercialisation in education encompass a range of interrelated practices, including the outsourcing of educational services as well as increased reliance on commercially produced resources for the delivery of learning and assessment. An increase in these practices has accompanied the shift from centralised systemic management…

This article reveals the multiple ways in which data are constituted as a vehicle for governing teachers' work and learning. Drawing on the concept of governance, including in relation to the sociology of numbers, and data from one school in Queensland, Australia, the research reveals how teachers' work and learning were constituted through…

School choice programs such as vouchers and charter schools expand lower cost schooling options for families. We examine how these expansions affect the prevalence of homeschooling. School choice programs may reduce homeschooling if parents that otherwise would have homeschooled their children instead use a school choice program. Homeschooling may…

As the title suggests, the author provides a description of an international effort to develop an understanding of the present depth and priority of arts policies. As arts policy is not limited to education but formulated at all levels of community, including unions, individuals, philanthropic organizations, and government agencies, policy often…

Through a synthesis of test publisher norms and national longitudinal data sets, this study provides new national norms of academic growth in K-12 reading and math to help reinterpret conventional effect sizes in time units. We propose "d'," a time-indexed-effect-size metric to estimate how long it would take for an "untreated"…

Algorithmic practices are becoming increasingly more central within educational governance. By focusing on the mechanisms of a particular algorithmic testing system in Denmark, this paper highlights how such practices are implicated in the emergence of new accountability infrastructures. It adopts an STS approach drawing specifically upon Michel…

Mounting criticism suggests that the recent introduction of a 'gatekeeping' test to improve the quality of teachers in Australia--the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE)--has had limited success in achieving its aim. Shaped by a discourse of inputs on how teacher quality might be achieved ('quality in, quality out'),…

In response to accountability systems dominated by external inspections and achievement data, calls are being made for "intelligent" accountability or a new accountability paradigm that focuses on "meaningful" learning, enabled by professionally skilled and committed educators within the system. In such systems, the actors are…

The purpose of this study was to proffer the idea to "gaze" past gender and racial achievement gaps by providing a growth-based assessment of the achievement of Black girls. The study aims to elucidate how alternatives to traditional achievement gap analyses can yield information relevant to addressing classroom challenges. This…