Examining the Examinations looks at the required advanced science and mathematics examinations taken by university-bound students in seven countries. This research focuses on topics covered, types of questions used, and performance expected from students. The book concentrates on comparisons of the examinations, illustrating their similarities and differences with selected questions taken from the actual examinations. The international comparisons presented offer a window on educational laboratories' in seven countries.

In response to the emerging need to develop teachers as professionals who evaluate their own work, this book presents the foundations of self-evaluation as well as self-evaluation models and tools that are likely to help educational practitioners to evaluate their own teaching, and thus raise the level of their professional functioning.
The book is intended to serve several groups: student teachers whose socialization into the teaching profession should include the perception of self-evaluation as an inherent part of teaching; the student teachers' supervisors who are expected to help in...

Major "paradigm shifts"-replacing one "world view" with another regarding what constitutes appropriate knowledge do not happen over night. Centuries usually intervene in the process. Even minor shifts admitting alternative world views into the domain of legitimate knowledge producing theory and practice-require decades of controversy, especially, it seems to us, in the field of education. It has only been in the last 20 years or so that the educational research community has begun to accept the "scientific" credibility of the qualitative approaches to inquiry such as participant observation,...

Attempting fonnally to evaluate something involves the evaluator coming to grips with a number of abstract concepts such as value, merit, worth, growth, criteria, standards, objectives, needs, nonns, client, audience, validity, reliability, objectivity, practical significance, accountability, improvement, process, pro duct, fonnative, summative, costs, impact, infonnation, credibility, and - of course - with the tenn evaluation itself. To communicate with colleagues and clients, evaluators need to clarify what they mean when they use such tenns to denote important concepts central to their...