Section archive - Assessment & Evaluation

Education accountability and its building components has been the focal point and yet a convoluted issue. The current study aims to give a comprehensive account of indicators of education accountability in e-learning. To this end, this two-phase study was conducted on Iranian English as Foreign Language context. The first phase was qualitative in nature and aimed at identifying the indicators through conversation analysis of stored interviews with 9 distinguished English as foreign language teachers who hold online EFL teacher training courses in three different language centers in Tehran, Iran. Open coding and thematic analysis via Nvivo software on the interviews made the building blocks of the second phase of this study which was designing and validating a questionnaire for assessing educational accountability in e-learning. The researcher-made questionnaire was subject to reliability and validity issues. Therefore, the researcher-made questionnaire was piloted with 122 EFL teachers. The results of factor analysis indicated that factors loaded on accountability to teaching profession, to society, to student teacher, to teacher educators, to leadership, and to learning outcomes. The results also indicated that the present questionnaire enjoys sound and acceptable psychometric properties. The results have significant implications for teaching practitioners.

Key competencies straddle an educational reform that has taken on a central role within the European Union. However, there is a lack of empirical instruments aimed at assessing preservice teachers’ opinion of competency-based policies, their self-evaluation regarding such policies, and their understanding of the intended rationale behind competency mandates. Instruments with similar aims in other contexts suffer psychometric shortcomings. Therefore, the authors’ aim was to design an instrument to examine primary preservice teachers’ beliefs about the role of key competencies in education, self-evaluate their understanding of the concept of key competencies, and determine if they understood the intended interdisciplinary focus. A three-phase pilot (n = 295, n = 277, n = 263) was carried out with each phase aimed at progressively improving the instrument’s psychometric soundness. Drawing from data obtained from the third pilot, the psychometric scale properties are reported for a much-needed assessment tool.

This collaborative self-study explored three graduate students’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of viewing, editing, and sharing lesson demonstrations based on Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP). The researchers also examined how university instructors could promote reflection through the lesson demonstration process. The study consisted of four qualitative forms of data collection. First, the researchers interviewed participants regarding their experiences viewing, editing, and sharing their videos. Then, they examined participants’ written reflections of their lesson demonstration, focusing on best practices for teaching English learners (ELs). Using the constant comparative method, they coded the interview transcripts, participant reflections, and instructor feedback. Researchers performed a document analysis of course materials (e.g., instructions, rubrics, lesson plan templates) to better understand and contextualize participants’ perceptions of the lesson demonstration process within the course. The findings indicated that participants benefited from the process in a variety of ways, while experiencing minimal or no challenges. In reviewing and editing the footage, participants expressed how they were able to view their teaching from a new vantage point and identify unique opportunities for future growth from other professional development strategies. Due to participants’ limited sharing of the video, this stage of the process was not fully explored.

As part of a larger mixed-method study on teacher evaluation, this paper explores how cultural and socio-political contexts of the Israeli Arab public schools inform principals’ high-stakes evaluation processes for attaining tenure. Concepts from micropolitical theory were used to analyse data from in-depth semi-structured interviews with twenty novice teachers and twenty principals. Findings from the qualitative data suggest that power relations and contextual features of Israeli-Arab society such as collectivism and face-keeping direct how decisions are made and limit the work of the actors involved. The study provides insights into how principals exercise their power to attain what they interpret as teacher quality while evaluating teachers, and how the latter interpret such power relations in their local contexts. It also suggests the need for substantive groundwork in preparing prospective teachers for the high-stakes teacher evaluation processes that characterise the Israeli-Arab education system and the efforts to maintain teacher quality.