A Brief History of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (TEA)

The origins and development of the IEA are traced from its origins with a group of assessment professionals to its status as a major international organisation carrying out large‐scale educational surveys. The paper describes the people and the projects in its short history and looks at its future prospects.     

Dialectics of development: teacher identity formation in the interplay of ideal ego and ego ideal

This paper results from research examining pre-service teacher development in relation to experiences of mentoring during the Professional Experience component of their programme. The paper focuses on the interplay between pre-service teachers’ personal aspirations for their own practice and identity and their perceptions of more socialized and formalized institutional requirements. The paper highlights the developmental potential of dialectical interactions between these ‘inside out’ and ‘outside in’ perspectives on pre-service teachers’ practice and identity, drawing on psychoanalytic theory in order to gain insights into this process by viewing the pre-service teachers wishes and aspirations for their practice and identities as manifestations of the Lacanian (‘inside out’) ideal ego; whilst the school culture and the mentor teachers’ (actual and anticipated) comments and judgements are read as representations of the (‘outside in’) ego ideal. The paper concludes with considerations of how universities and schools, pre-service teachers and mentors, might be encouraged to recognize the need for a sustained and open-ended dialectic between the ego ideal and the ideal ego in ways that might enrich the professional identities available to pre-service teachers.     

The Notion of Creativity in Art and the Influence of Cultural Exposure

This study investigates how art teachers judge the creativity of student art work. Both conceptual and operational definitions given by teachers were studied. Furthermore, cultural exposure as measured by a teacher's exposure to non-Asian cultures, was studied to see how it might influence art teachers' judgements. Two instruments were developed for the purpose of this study. One instrument was a questionnaire designed to collect qualitative data from the respondents. The second instrument was used to measure art teachers' ratings of creativity. The data revealed that the conceptual definitions given by art teachers varied considerably. However, when asked to rate subjectively the creativity of art products, moderate agreement was reached among art teachers. Exposure to non-Asian cultures did not seem to have an effect on an art teachers' operational definition of creativity. Results of the study imply that the usefulness of the term creativity needs to be reviewed in general usage and in documents such as curricula. It would seem that there is not a clear notion among art teachers as to what constitutes creativity and a creative product.     

Writing4practice in engineering courses: Implementation and assessment approaches

In this article, we analyze a two‐semester effort to integrate writing instruction into a multi‐disciplinary sophomore engineering design course in Northern Arizona University's College of Engineering and Technology. Specifically, we describe the programmatic implementation and assessment approach to evaluate whether student writing improved over the course of the semester. After discussing the reasons for taking a writing‐intensive approach to engineering, we analyze the results of a pre‐and post‐test administered over the span of an academic semester. Although the outcome of our assessment did not show significant improvement, we argue that writing instruction is important for increasing students’ overall learning skills. We conclude by pointing out several benefits and disadvantages of trying to assess writing improvement over two one‐semester periods.