This collection presents educational assessment research from Latin America, adding to a relatively small but growing body of research considering educational assessment and evaluation issues in this large region. The predominance of Chile reflects its early highly centralized education system, and the fact that it adopted national testing before other Latin American countries. It was also an early participant in international assessment programmes. Other countries have followed the trend of implementing national testing, and to a lesser extent participating in international surveys. The complementary development of technical expertise in quantitative research methods has enabled extensive analysis of the large data sets generated by these testing and assessment programmes. Taken together, the evidence reported provides a means not only of reviewing educational quality issues in Latin America, but also of facilitating comparisons that allow the context specificity of equivalent research conducted in western developed countries to be considered. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

As Brazil is massively investing in a scale-up of in vocational education and training (VET) through the national flagship program, PRONATEC, this report assesses institutions and policies in VET taking an in depth critical view of upcoming opportunities. It shares international best practices on selected operational issues identified as strategic bottlenecks for the delivery of technical education. The report explores multiple sources of information including a desk review of existing reports and papers, inputs/data provided by the Ministry of Education and interviews with multiple stakeholders and practitioners at the federal and state level. The report highlights the need of promoting a better alignment between the supply and demand of skills at the sub national level and of promoting better a solid monitoring and evaluation system, including the monitoring of student learning and of the trajectories into the labor market or into higher educational degrees. Issues of student career guidance and teacher quality also emerge as areas of strategic importance to the Brazilian VET system in the years ahead. We conclude with specific policy recommendations for PRONATEC.

This book is the edition of the Proceedings of the International Colloquium “Rhetoric and Argumentation in the Beginning of the XXIst Century” which was held at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra, in October 2-4, 2008, and was organized by Henrique Jales Ribeiro, Joaquim Neves Vicente and Rui Alexandre Grácio. The main purpose of the Colloquium was to commemorate the publication in 1958 of the books La nouvelle rhétorique: Traité de l’argumentation, and The Uses of Arguments, by, respectively, C. Perelman/L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, and S. Toulmin. But another important goal was to take stock of the state of rhetoric and argumentation theory at the beginning of a new century. It was a unique event, without parallel in Portugal and worldwide - considering its theme and its aims -, which gathered some of the World’s most renowned rhetoric and argumentation theorists: Alan Gross, Douglas Walton, Erik Krabbe, Frans V. Eemeren, F. Snoeck Henkemans, Guy Haarscher, John Anthony Blair, Marianne Doury, Oswald Ducrot, Ruth Amossy. The book includes a variety of very important contributions to rhetoric and argumentation theory, ranging from those that naturally fall within the subject matter, to the areas of philosophy, linguistics, communication theory, education theory and law theory. The “art”, as it was called in the Medieval curricula, is no longer a discipline amongst others and has became, according to the view of some specialists and largely owing to Perelman and Toulmin influences, a “new paradigm” of rationality for our age, which auspiciously encompasses all fields of knowledge and culture. The book is divided into five parts: I- Historical and philosophical studies on the influences of Perelman and Toulmin; II- Studies in argumentation theory; III- Linguistic approaches to argumentation theory; IV- Rhetoric; and communication theory / education theory approaches to argumentation; and V- Law theory approaches to argumentation.

Viewing current developments in materials development through the eyes of developers, users and researchers from all over the world, this book applies principles to practice. It provides a comprehensive coverage of the main aspects and issues in the field as well as critical overviews of recent developments in materials development, and acts as a stimulus for innovation. Now revised and updated to take account of developments over the last decade, this 3rd edition features: - 8 new chapters, covering materials use, blended learning, multimodality, intercultural competence, communicative competence, the practical realisation of theoretical principles in the development of digital materials, the teaching of right to left languages and the commodification of grammar. - Fully updated chapters with contemporary examples and considering teaching second and foreign languages other than English. - New pedagogical resources, with the addition of tasks and further readings for each chapter. - New online resources, 2 new chapters on producing videos on teacher development courses and materials development on teacher training courses and 2 updated chapters on development courses for teachers and simulations in teacher development, alongside a range of additional tasks and further reading suggestions.