Accelerated substantial progress regarding many fields of production and services imposes pressure upon the labor market. Employers are desperately looking for skilled workers in nearly all technological fields. All over the world this pressure reaches the national systems of vocational education and training. Along with the output orientation turn new standards are imposed, forcing firms and schools to make every endeavor to improve and remodel their programs as well as their practices to reach more and more ambitious goals. To be successful they need the results of scientific research from which they demand reliable information on methods to diagnose the state and learning progress of students and on means to foster and promote competencies of heterogeneous groups of leaners. The book offers 22state-of-the-art articles covering the central fields of vocational education and training and reporting on new and adequate ways to deal with these challenges.
Considering the relevance of teachers‘ diagnostic competence for understanding students’ thinking and providing effective learning opportunities, Macarena Larrain investigates the development of future primary school teachers’ diagnostic competence in error situations already during initial teacher education. Using video vignettes of classroom situations and samples of students’ work, the author focuses on fostering future teachers’ competence to identify students’ errors, elaborate hypotheses about the causes of those errors and to design appropriate strategies for supporting students in overcoming their misconceptions. She also describes aspects of teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and experience that are relevant for the competence and its development.
This handbook provides an overview of major developments around diagnostic classification models (DCMs) with regard to modeling, estimation, model checking, scoring, and applications. It brings together not only the current state of the art, but also the theoretical background and models developed for diagnostic classification. The handbook also offers applications and special topics and practical guidelines how to plan and conduct research studies with the help of DCMs. Commonly used models in educational measurement and psychometrics typically assume a single latent trait or at best a small number of latent variables that are aimed at describing individual differences in observed behavior. While this allows simple rankings of test takers along one or a few dimensions, it does not provide a detailed picture of strengths and weaknesses when assessing complex cognitive skills. DCMs, on the other hand, allow the evaluation of test taker performance relative to a potentially large number of skill domains. Most diagnostic models provide a binary mastery/non-mastery classification for each of the assumed test taker attributes representing these skill domains. Attribute profiles can be used for formative decisions as well as for summative purposes, for example in a multiple cut-off procedure that requires mastery on at least a certain subset of skills. The number of DCMs discussed in the literature and applied to a variety of assessment data has been increasing over the past decades, and their appeal to researchers and practitioners alike continues to grow. These models have been used in English language assessment, international large scale assessments, and for feedback for practice exams in preparation of college admission testing, just to name a few. Nowadays, technology-based assessments provide increasingly rich data on a multitude of skills and allow collection of data with respect to multiple types of behaviors. Diagnostic models can be understood as an ideal match for these types of data collections to provide more in-depth information about test taker skills and behavioral tendencies.
This book addresses challenges in the theoretically and empirically adequate assessment of competencies in educational settings. It presents the scientific projects of the priority program “Competence Models for Assessing Individual Learning Outcomes and Evaluating Educational Processes,” which focused on competence assessment across disciplines in Germany. The six-year program coordinated 30 research projects involving experts from the fields of psychology, educational science, and subject-specific didactics. The main reference point for all projects is the concept of “competencies,” which are defined as “context-specific cognitive dispositions that are acquired and needed to successfully cope with certain situations or tasks in specific domains” (Koeppen et al., 2008, p. 62). The projects investigate different aspects of competence assessment: The primary focus lies on the development of cognitive models of competencies, complemented by the construction of psychometric models based on these theoretical models. In turn, the psychometric models constitute the basis for the construction of instruments for effectively measuring competencies. The assessment of competencies plays a key role in optimizing educational processes and improving the effectiveness of educational systems. This book contributes to this challenging endeavor by meeting the need for more integrative, interdisciplinary research on the structure, levels, and development of competencies.
This volume addresses an urgent need across multiple disciplines to broaden our understanding and use of response processes evidence of test validity. It builds on the themes and findings of the volume Validity and Validation in Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences (Zumbo & Chan, 2014), with a focus on measurement validity evidence based on response processes. Approximately 1000 studies are published each year examining the validity of inferences made from tests and measures in the social, behavioural, and health sciences. The widely accepted Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (1999, 2014) present five sources of evidence for validity: content-related, response processes, internal structure, relationships with other variables, and consequences of testing. Many studies focus on internal structure and relationships with other variables sources of evidence, which have a long history in validation research, known methodologies, and numerous exemplars in the literature. Far less is understood by test users and researchers conducting validation work about how to think about and apply new and emerging sources of validity evidence. This groundbreaking volume is the first to present conceptual models of response processes, methodological issues that arise in gathering response processes evidence, as well as applications and exemplars for providing response processes evidence in validation work.
This book presents a comprehensive overview of extant literature on competence-based vocational and professional education since the introduction of the competence concept in the 1950s. To structure the fi eld, the book distinguishes between three approaches to defi ning competence, based on 1.functional behaviourism, 2. integrated occupationalism, and 3. situated professionalism. It also distinguishes between two ways of operationalizing competence: 1. behaviour-oriented generic, and 2. task-oriented specifi c competence. Lastly, it identifi es three kinds of competencies, related to: 1. specific activities, 2. known jobs, and 3. the unknown future. Competence for the unknown future must receive more attention, as our world is rapidly evolving and there are many ‘glocal’ challenges which call for innovation and a profound transformation of policies and practices. Th e book presents a range of diff erent approaches to competence-based education, and demonstrates that competencebased education is a worldwide innovation, which is institutionalized in various ways. It presents the major theories and policies, specifi c components of educational systems, such as recognition, accreditation, modelling and assessment, and developments in discipline-oriented and transversal competence domains. Th e book concludes by synthesizing the diff erent perspectives with the intention to contribute to further improving vocational and professional education policy and practice. Joao Santos, Deputy Head of Unit C5, Vocational Training and Adult Education, Directorate General for Employment, Social Aff airs and Inclusion, European Commission: “This comprehensive work on competence-based education led by Martin Mulder, provides an excellent and timely contribution to the current debate on a New Skills Agenda for Europe, and the challenge of bridging the employment and education and training worlds closer together. Th is book will infl uence our work aimed at improving the relevance of vocational education to support initial and continuing vocational education and training policy and practice aimed at strengthening the key competencies for the 21st century.” Prof. Dr. Reinhold Weiss, Deputy President and Head of the Research, Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), Bonn, Germany: “This book illustrates that the idea and concept of competence is not only a buzzword in educational debates but key to innovative pedagogical thinking as well as educational practice.” Prof. Dr. Johanna Lasonen, College of Education, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA: "Competence-based Vocational and Professional Education is one of the most important multi-disciplinary book in education and training. Th is path-breaking book off ers a timely, rich and global perspective on the fi eld. Th e book is a good resource for practitioners, policymakers and researchers."
This book offers a comprehensive overview of current, innovative approaches to assessing generic and domain-specific learning outcomes in higher education at both national and international levels. It discusses the most significant initiatives over the past decade to develop objective, valid, and reliable assessment tools and presents state-of-the-art procedures to adapt and validate them for use in other countries. The authors highlight key conceptual and methodological challenges connected with intra-national and cross-national assessment of learning outcomes in higher education; introduce novel approaches to improving assessment, evaluation, testing, and measurement practices; and offer exemplary implementation frameworks. Further, they examine the results of and lessons learned from various recent, world-renowned research programs and feasibility studies, and present results from their own studies to provide new insights into how to draw valid conclusions about learning outcomes achieved in various contexts.
Metacognition plays an important role in numerous aspects of higher educational learning strategies. When properly integrated in the educational system, schools are better equipped to build more efficient and successful learning strategies for students in higher education. Metacognition and Successful Learning Strategies in Higher Education is a detailed resource of scholarly perspectives that discusses current trends in learning assessments. Featuring extensive coverage on topics such as spiritual intelligence strategies, literacy development, and ubiquitous learning, this is an ideal reference source for academicians, graduate students, practitioners, and researchers who want to improve their learning strategies using metacognition studies.
Student Success for Healthcare Professionals Simplified helps students meet the demands and challenges of their studies by providing strategies for success in the classroom, the lab, the library, and the internship site, as well as sound advice and guidance for maintaining emotional and physical well-being.
