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

Accountability has become one of the major keywords in education during the last two or three decades, and it is not being discussed without controversy. Accountability has always been deemed a necessity for schools to fulfill their purpose in society; however, different views on whether and to what extent schools can be regulated from the outside have led to dissimilar assumptions about who should be accountable to whom and by what means. In a globalized world and with the influence of powerful transnational actors, accountability systems have been converging in the past decades. At the same time, new accountability instruments have been woven into existing structures and processes that have been culturally, historically, and socio-politically preshaped. Accordingly, approaches towards educational accountability worldwide today seem to be similar and diverse at the same time. In this context, the question is how these accountability systems relate to the institutional conditions they are situated in, and how different actors coordinate the order in education within different types of accountability and governance systems. Finally, one can also discuss to what extent accountability policies affect power relations and normalize inequalities within society.

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.

Achievement motivation theories are used to understand gender discrepancies in motivation across various academic domains. Early on in the field of motivation research, researchers commonly used an attribution framework to study achievement-related outcomes among men and women. Self-efficacy theory and a revised expectancy-value theory of achievement-related choices dominate the current literature on gender differences and achievement motivation. Current trends in research on gender and academic motivation include the shifting and expanding of theoretical frameworks, a new focus on the motivation and achievement of male students, and the use of advanced methodologies and cross-national data to conduct comparative research on gender and patterns of motivation.

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

The quality of education in any country rests on school communities as a whole. However, the real implementers of innovations and changes in curriculum are teachers. Teachers, as practitioners, are the ones most often held accountable for successes and failures in educating schoolchildren. The way to facilitate teachers in handling challenges and keeping up with curriculum renewals is through constant support in the form of continuous professional development (CPD) by means of action research. Action research as CPD has been viewed as a critical platform for advocating change, which is the outcome of teachers’ ability and autonomy to lead in making informed decisions about their own practices. Given its usefulness, action research is found well established, vastly practiced, and widely published in the Western countries. This has raised the question of the spread of action research as CPD in the Southeast Asian region. Preliminary analysis reveals that in some Southeast Asian countries, such as Timor Leste, there is limited literature on action research, while in countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, action research has been well documented. At the same time, there’s an emerging trend in Southeast Asian countries to adopt different models of action research. In Malaysia, for instance, action research has been primarily classroom based, whereas in Indonesia, a critical and community-based approach to action research seems to be prevalent. This suggests that the kinds of action research conducted in the different Southeast Asian countries may reflect variations in cultural, economic, and geographic landscapes. Given the importance of action research to teacher practitioners and school leaders, and in providing an identity to the action research approaches conducted in Southeast Asia, the historical trail of action research presents a window to the nature of CPD concerns of each country, as well as the successes and challenges of conducting action research as CPD for sustained impact.

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.

A common definition of listening distinguishes between hearing and listening. The basic distinction describes hearing as a passive action of perceiving sounds, whereas listening involves paying active attention to various layers and elements of what one is hearing. Active listening to music, featuring the discerning of sounds, musical structures, harmonies, and the interrelations between the sounds, is akin to contemplating complex ideas. Providing meaning for this nexus of relationships requires listeners to grapple with these complex musical nuances, listening to different layers of the melody and harmony and connecting them to cultural and historical aspects. Challenging students to grapple with the complex nuances of musical pieces, to listen to different layers of the melody and harmony, and to connect those elements to cultural and historical aspects will provide them the opportunity to reflect upon the social and cultural contexts in which they live. The concept of what it means to be active (or mindful) has been examined from various perspectives and theories and holds great potential in advancing individual growth and social sensitivity.

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

Victims of trafficking, once they are released from their captors, need psychological and educational intervention to achieve their recovery and integration. For this, it is important to design and develop educational programs that foster language learning, professional training, and good habits of nutrition and higiene, and that provide alternatives for leisure and free time.

These education programs, designed for adults, should be initiated in the shelter houses where the victims are released. They are developed by multidisciplinary teams formed by professionals in education, psychology, nursing, and social work. The final objective is to provide competences to the people included in the program so that they can leave the shelters and be able to live autonomously and independently in the host society.

Alternative schooling has a long history. However, defining alternative schooling is difficult because it necessitates an answer to the question: “alternative to what?” It suggests that there is an accepted schooling archetype from which to differentiate. However, just what that model might be is likely to vary over time and place. In one perspective, alternative schools challenge what Tyack and Tobin, in 1994, referred to as the traditional grammar of schooling as it pertains to conventional forms of schooling developed in Western societies since the Industrial Revolution. Alternative schools challenge the taken-for-granted grammar of schooling variously through their organization, governance structures, curriculum, pedagogy, type of students, and/or particular philosophy. Certain types of alternative schools, including democratic schools, developmental and holistic alternative schools (e.g., Montessori and Waldorf/Steiner), and flexi schools, might offer lessons to the educational mainstream on how to be more inclusive and socially just. However, there are also ways in which they can work against such principles.

The application of neuroscience to educational research remains an area of much debate. While some scholars have argued that such applications are not possible (and will never be possible), others have been more optimistic and suggest that these are possible, albeit under certain conditions, for example when one aims to understand very basic cognitive processes. Concrete examples of these applications are increasing in the emerging interdisciplinary field of mind, brain, and education or educational neuroscience, which posits itself at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and educational research. From a methodological point of view, cognitive neuroscience can be applied to (some types of) educational research, as it offers a toolbox to investigate specific types of educational research questions. Promising applications of cognitive neuroscience to educational research include comprehending the origins of atypical development, understanding the biological processes that play a role when learning school-relevant skills, predicting educational outcomes, generating predictions to be tested in educational research, and undertaking biological interventions. The challenges of applying cognitive neuroscience deal with ecological validity, the scope of a biological explanation, and the potential emergence of neuromyths.

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

There are several interrelated themes in arts-informed pedagogies in teacher preparation: the arts as tools to improve students' academic achievement; the arts for teachers' own professional identity and satisfaction (e.g., for teacher reflection, teacher retention, job satisfaction, and relationship building), and the arts for social change, justice, & education advocacy work. Creativity and agency have also received attention in arts-informed teacher education practice, encouraging “teacher as artist” metaphors as counterpoints for more prevalent orientations to teachers as those who treat and fix problems (like doctors or scientists). Comparing the act of lesson planning and instruction to that of the artist encourages teachers to see their tasks as creative, generative, surprising, and aesthetic. Finally, teacher education often focuses on ways in which the teacher can serve in the role of mentor-artist, coaching and guiding students’ creative expressions instead of and rarely as a complement to the teachers’ own creative endeavors. Across these themes, projects utilize aesthetic languages of the arts disciplines—visual art, theatre, music, dance, creative writing, and media arts—as meaning making tools toward particular academic, relational, and creative goals in teacher education. Arts-informed teacher education practices are reviewed to date, and key questions and concerns are considered regarding where, how, and why the arts are used, by whom, and to what end. Important to this review are extensions to the ways in which the arts have been used in other training fields such as nursing, police training, and social work. The extent to which the arts in professional development hold value is deeply connected to national arts value and will be compared to differences in other teacher education systems worldwide.

Research in arts education is characterized by a tension between presupposed theoretical concepts about “arts” and “education,” on the one hand, and the global field of untheorized arts education practices, on the other hand. This complexity is greatly magnified by the various historical and cultural understandings that characterize both the institutionalization of the arts as well as arts education itself. The fact that research traditions are themselves closely connected to a particular field of arts education adds an additional dimension to this complex question: according to our meta-studies relating to arts education-research, it is particularly evident that (1) Western and Eurocentric biases are quite dominant in this research field and that (2) well-established (Western, highbrow) art genres are dominating the research landscape, tying specific research styles, research interests, and objectives toghether.

To avoid normative and potentially hegemonial biases resulting from this situation, we analyze various arts education research approaches according to their the ontological, epistemological, and methodological anchorings. Based upon this, we develop a general meta-model of arts education research, combining a typology of perspectives defining arts education research and a set of dispositive dichotomies constitutive for this field.

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

Dynamic assessment is an umbrella concept, denoting a variety of assessment and testing forms that incorporate feedback, hints, or training in the assessment process and aim to measure a child’s progress when solving cognitive tasks, and in doing so provide an indication of his or her cognitive potential for learning.

Psychological and psychoeducational assessment is often applied in educational settings. Most of the instruments used in such assessments have a static nature. In administering these instruments, instruction is restricted to what is stated in the manual, which focuses mainly on telling a child what he or she has to do. The main focus of such tests is on the outcomes. The principal characteristic of dynamic assessment and testing, on the contrary, is that children are explicitly provided with feedback, prompts, or training intended to enable them to show progress when solving cognitive tasks. Where in static assessment the test outcomes are considered to measure that which a child already knows and has acquired so far, dynamic assessment procedures focus both upon learning progression and, in some cases, on the underlying cognitive processes. Dynamic measures are designed to assess developing or yet-to-develop abilities in a setting in which the assessor helps the child to solve the tasks, and teaches the child how to solve these tasks more independently. Consequently, dynamic assessment measures are primarily focused on a child’s potential for learning, rather than on past learning experiences, and likely provide a better indication of a child’s level of cognitive functioning than conventional, static test scores do separately or in combination with other instruments.

Dynamic assessment formats can be very different from each other, ranging from individually based forms of mediation, often called dynamic assessment, to active scaffolding and highly standardized procedures, offered to groups or individuals, often called dynamic testing. Outcomes of dynamic testing and assessment could, in principle, provide educational psychologists or teachers with information regarding learning outcomes during these forms of intervention.

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

Schools, teachers, and students are increasingly able to access and apply assistive technology to enhance inclusion within mainstream classrooms. The assistive technology may take the form of simple, easy-to-use, low-tech devices, or they may encompass more sophisticated, highly complicated devices that require training and greater levels of support to manage. To ensure that a classroom is truly inclusive, the teacher and other professionals involved in supporting children with disabilities and using assistive technology require appropriate knowledge and skills to bring potential to reality. The knowledge concerning what is available in the field of assistive technology is merely the starting point. Inclusive educators also require expertise in selecting devices and services, including the student in decision making, implementing the assistive technology within an inclusive setting, and assessing the effectiveness of the assistive technology to meet the needs of the student and the classroom.

There are many successful examples of assistive technology being successfully embedded into the practices of inclusive settings, but there is still some way to go to ensure this is a seamless approach and one that is universally informed by practice. While legislation can go some way toward mandating the use of assistive technology, teachers and schools are really at the forefront of implementation. There are many benefits and difficulties associated with adopting assistive technology to support students with disabilities, particularly in developing countries. While the challenges may be great, the potential for assistive technology to impact significantly on the educational, social, and recreational outcomes for students with disabilities in inclusive classrooms is immense.