Research and Assessment Methods

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.

Educational assessment modes and practices will change in the 21st century due to the advancement of technology in education. Consequently, this creates high expectations among stakeholders who are directly involved with assessment administration as well as professional responsibilities in assessment administration. Accountability of assessment administration includes maintaining assessment security and integrity. Assessments must be aligned with learning outcomes and instruction. Assessment administration policies should be aligned with an institution’s assessment policies. Hence, assessment administrators collaborate with the institutions to develop and unify assessment standards and practices toward the enhancement of accessing students’ overall competence. Optimum performance and typical performance covers cognitive, affective, and psychomotor aspects.

For example, in Malaysia, Integrated Cumulative Grade Point Average has been introduced in assessing higher education students’ holistic performance, an extension from the implementation of School-based Assessment in Malaysian schools beginning in the year 2011. Previous assessment practices that focused more on cognitive aspects only involved paper and pencil tests. Thus, there were not many issues pertaining to assessment administration. However, to overcome the challenges in the new direction of assessment in the 21st century, it is important to pay particular attention to the accountability of assessment administration. There is also a need to accommodate and modify assessment administration according to the needs of current assessment mode and practices. We cannot wholly depend on standardized procedures all the time, because the nature of assessment may differ according to students’ ability, the types and venues of assessment, and national agendas.

Assessment administrators are accountable to ensure that honesty, integrity, due care, validity, reliability, and fairness are observed and maintained during the assessment. The administration of educational assessment generally involves three major phases, namely preassessment administration, assessment during administration, and postassessment administration. There are standardized documented rules and procedures that assessment administrators need to follow when administering educational assessment to ensure that standards of accountability are upheld.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.

Herein the term Action Research is addressed by reflecting upon two words, action and research, united within this century to create something quite useful and commonplace. The word research, which has a long and traceable evolution, has been linked to seeking and to action, which is certainly the opposite of inaction. Upon closer examination, it is the action that can be either covert or overt, since thinking can be an action. When used together Action Research presents an opportunity to seek, pursue, and track one’s actions to arrive at a target. Yet how a person decides to seek provides context. Regardless of the path taken, Action Research involves certain steps, such as reflection, that are focused, strategic, and seeking within a social context to move forward.

Action Research is malleable, flexible, and therefore can be many things depending upon how the terms are demarcated. However, herein Action Research is both a strategy and orderly process that supports those who may seek to examine, to change, and/or to improve. Action Research is a commitment and an approach from within that provides a structure that can simplify and guide an inquiry. Action Research (AR) can meet the needs of the individual or a group as it supports self-inquiry and group-inquiry equally, while unfolding in a series of steps and phases. The action step may include either cognitive and/or psycho-motor acts; the reflection step includes efforts to look back and within, whereas the third step, revision, demands that an action researcher plan for their next step. This AR process may include additional steps; however, AR remains cyclical and recursive and at times piecemeal as steps may overlap, accelerate, and challenge the action researcher over time, since theory and practice can be quite disparate.

Authentic tasks replicate real-world challenges and standards of performance that experts or professionals typically face in the field. The term “authentic assessment” was first coined by Grant Wiggins in K‒12 educational contexts. Authentic assessment is an effective measure of intellectual achievement or ability because it requires students to demonstrate their deep understanding, higher-order thinking, and complex problem solving through the performance of exemplary tasks. Hence authentic assessment can serve as a powerful tool for assessing students’ 21st-century competencies in the context of global educational reforms. The review begins with a detailed explanation of the concept of authentic assessment. There is a substantial body of literature focusing on the definitions of authentic assessment. However, only those that are original and relevant to educational contexts are included.. Some of the criteria for authentic assessment defined by the authors overlap with each other, but their definitions are consistent. A comparison of authentic assessment and conventional assessment reveals that different purposes are served, as evidenced by the nature of the assessment and item response format. Examples of both types of assessments are included. Three major themes are examined within authentic assessment research in educational contexts: authentic assessment in educational or school reforms, teacher professional learning and development in authentic assessment, and authentic assessment as tools or methods used in a variety of subjects or disciplines in K‒12 schooling and in higher education institutions. Among these three themes, most studies were focused on the role of authentic assessment in educational or school reforms. Future research should focus on building teachers’ capacity in authentic assessment and assessment for learning through a critical inquiry approach in school-based professional learning communities or in teacher education programs. To enable the power of authentic assessment to unfold in the classrooms of the 21st century, it is essential that teachers are not only assessment literate but also competent in designing and using authentic assessments to support student learning and mastery of the 21st-century competencies.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are part of a third wave of school reform in the United States. With accompanying tests, these standards combine calls for increased academic rigor, beginning in the 1980s, with more recent efforts to hold schools, teachers, and students accountable for learning outcomes in publicly funded schools. Origins of CCSS can be traced to the 1996 National Education Summit where the National Governors Association (NGA), philanthropic foundations, and business leaders founded Achieve to broker rigorous high school graduation requirements. In 2009, Achieve became the project manager for the construction of CCSS. In 2010, implementation began with incentives from the Obama administration and funding from the Gates Foundation.

Advocates choose among a variety of rationales: faltering American economic competitiveness, wide variability among state standards and educational outcomes, highly mobile student populations, and/or a growing income achievement gap. Critics cite federal intrusion in states’ rights, a lack of an evidentiary base, an autocratic process of CCSS production, and/or a mis-framing of problems facing public schools. With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, federal advocacy of CCSS ended officially.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.

Over the past 30 years, a growing field of scholarship has explored the relationship between education and the media. Scholars within this field have explored representations of education, schooling, teachers’ work, and students in print and other news media, utilizing approaches that include critical discourse analysis, news framing analysis, and more recently, corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The relationship between these representations, public understandings of education, and education policy has also been explored in the research literature, with a focus on the complex interplay between media discourses and public policy around education. The emergence of social media and the engagement of both educators and members of the general public on social media around issues related to education have seen this relationship shift in recent years. This, along with the growth of computer-assisted research approaches (including corpus-assisted analysis and network analysis, for example), has brought new theoretical and methodological possibilities to bear on the field.