Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly frequent to come across the co-existence of multiple large-scale assessment surveys within national, subnational, or local settings. Despite the overlapping of tests, time, efforts, and economic resources invested in these “assessment assemblages”, much remains to be learned about their origins, development, tensions, frictions, outcomes, and challenges. Harmony and Cacophony in Large-scale Assessments in Education delves into these issues via a critical lens and offers a case in point against which readers can place their own situations. In other words, it serves as an empirically grounded thinking toolbox to help readers problematize emerging, ongoing, or upcoming challenges related to their large-scale assessment settings.

This edited collection documents and deconstructs the concept of educational leadership within various education settings across the Mediterranean region, exploring the intersection of education, culture and geopolitics as shaped by the distinct social, religious, national, cultural and geographic contexts.

This paperback reprint of the 1994 edition is a highly regarded curriculum development book by one of the most prominent figures in the field. It is designed to help readers understand the major approaches to curriculum planning and the formation of educational goals. In this edition, Eisner provides a conceptual framework that shows learners the different ways in which the aims of education can be regarded...and, describes their implications for curriculum planning and teaching practices. Coverage is grounded in the belief that the appropriateness of any given educational practice is dependent upon the characteristics and context of the school program, and the values of the community that program serves. Chapter titles include: Schooling in America: Where Are We Headed; Some Concepts, Distinctions, and Definitions; Curriculum Ideologies; The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach; Educational Aims, Objectives, and Other Aspirations; Dimensions of Curriculum Planning; On the Art of Teaching; The Functions and Forms of Evaluation; Reshaping Assessment in Education; Some Examples of Educational Criticism; and A Criticism of an Educational Criticism. For teachers and anyone else involved in planning educational curriculums.

Over the last two decades, large-scale national, or provincial, standardised testing has become prominent in the schools of many countries around the globe. National Testing in Schools: An Australian Assessment draws on research to consider the nature of national testing and its multiple effects, including: media responses and constructions such as league tables of performance pressures within school systems and on schools effects on the work and identities of principals and teachers and impacts on the experience of schooling for many young people, including those least advantaged. Using Australia as the case site for global concerns regarding national testing, this book will be an invaluable companion for education researchers, teacher educators, teacher education students and teachers globally.

Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda offers a systematic overview of the major issues, trends, and areas of priority in online distance education research. In each chapter, an international expert or team of experts provides an overview of one timely issue in online distance education, summarizing major research on the topic, discussing theoretical insights that guide the research, posing questions and directions for future research, and discussing the implications for distance education practice as a whole. Intended as a primary reference and guide for distance educators, researchers, and policymakers, Online Distance Education addresses aspects of distance education practice that have often been marginalized, including issues of cost and economics, concerns surrounding social justice, cultural bias, the need for faculty professional development, and the management and growth of learner communities. At once soundly empirical and thoughtfully reflective, yet also forward-looking and open to new approaches to online and distance teaching, this text is a solid resource for researchers in a rapidly expanding discipline.