In some institutions of higher learning, one of the approaches to successful governance is through student assessment of teachers, dubbed Student Assessment of Faculty or Student Evaluation of Teaching and extensively used in the United States of America (USA). In schools and colleges, the usual largest bloc and primary stakeholders are the…

Advocacy outcomes are not self-evident. Identifying advocacy outcomes is extremely difficult because they are often intangible, arising from (personal) interactions, and they are not always traceable. This challenges conventional evaluation methods, which is recognized in the advocacy evaluation literature. However, current evaluation methods…

The quality assurance and evaluation of primary schools requires early risk detection. This is a daunting task, not only because risks are typically rare and their origins complex, but also because governing institutions have limited resources and capacity and desire efficiency and proportionality. Many countries, including most Organisation for…

The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on…

This article discusses the science-based diagnostic observation in a Dutch girls' reformatory in the 1950s. Scientisation of the observation implied that to the medical examination upon entry and observation of a child's behaviour were added a psychological assessment, a psychiatric examination, and an inquiry into the family of origin. Inspired…

Romania's education system has made impressive strides over the past two decades, with an increasing share of students mastering the basic competencies that they need for life and work. But these average improvements mask significant disparities in learning outcomes and attainment, with an increasing share of students leaving education early…

There is considerable rhetoric internationally around the need for national curricula to reflect the changes that are taking place in the world outside school. This raises questions about what a quality curriculum in a technological era should look like, and equally challenging issues about how to achieve the necessary changes in schooling in…

Widespread school closures affected over one billion students during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The vocational education and training (VET) sector has faced particular challenges during the crisis, most notably the fact that the digital learning environments that most education institutions had to rely on during closures don't work…

The CEFR encourages teachers to resort to task-based activities in the language classroom. However, some resistance has been offered to this approach, due to lack of appropriate training and difficulty in meeting some basic practical conditions, as well as in finding resources and examples of good practices, as shown in a survey conducted within…

Some pre-service teaching activities can contribute much to the learning of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and subsequent teaching as these activities are "generating" PCK within the pre-service teacher's own classroom. Three examples are described: preparing exhibitions of science experiments, assessing preconceptions, and teaching…

For learners, it can be difficult to imagine how to perform a complex skill based on textual information from solely a text-based analytic rubric. Rubrics lack (1) the contextual information needed to convey real-world attributes (2) the dynamic information (such as gesturing in the complex skill of presenting) (3) the procedural information…

In this paper, I argue for more and better learning metrics in higher education, eventually through an international, comparative assessment of students' learning outcomes. Better learning measures may help to improve transparency in the system by addressing the information asymmetry problem. If not addressed adequately, the lack of transparency…

The concepts of differentiation and profiling are cornerstones in discussions about the organisation of contemporary higher education systems, following the trends of massification and global competition. This contribution provides a system-level description and comparison of the German and Dutch higher education systems regarding these topics,…

One of the goals of current education is to ensure that graduates can act as independent lifelong learners. Graduates need to be able to assess their own learning and interpret assessment results. The central question in this article is how to acquire sustainable assessment skills, enabling students to assess their performance and learning…

This article presents the principles and findings of developing a new participatory assessment of development (PADev) evaluation approach that was codesigned with Dutch nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and northern and southern research institutes over a period of 4 years in the context of rural development in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Although…