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This article seeks to discuss the implications of the new digital, epistemological base in language assessment processes. In order to do so, it is necessary to understand the ontological and epistemological changes occurring in post-typographic societies since such changes have altered notions such as language, text, and gender towards the vast array of multimodalities in today’s meaning making processes. Such conceptual understanding allows us to refer to some of the specificities in language assessment in light of new social demands. The text concludes in favour of a deep review on the ways of teaching and assessing languages, be them native or foreign, so that contemporary education might respond to the new emerging ethics and aesthetics in multiliterate societies.

The aim of this text is to analyze the training tasks of the pedagogical coordinator (PC), according to legislation, in relation to the perception of professionals in four public schools – two state and two city schools – in the state of São Paulo. The concepts of Placco, Almeida and Souza (2012) and Roldão (2015) are used as the theoretical references,  to  support  the  concepts  of  training  and  pedagogical  coordination. The procedures adopted for the systematization of the ideas expressed here were documental analysis of the laws and research data extracts, based on questionnaires and interviews conducted in 2010/2011 by the authors of the present text. The analysis of the prescribed and the performed in the daily life of the schools revealed that the coordinators gave priority to the training dimension but, in relation to the activities they performed daily, such prioritization did not occur.  

This paper focuses on the debates concerning full time-education, which has been subject of attention in Brazil in recent years. The analysis discusses the limits of current large-scale external assessments to check the quality of full-time schools. The objective of this article is to reflect on a possible criteria systematization concerning the quality of full-time schools, in order to assess their effectiveness. The arguments were based on a review of the scientific literature, documentary analysis and secondary research analysis, mainly of qualitative nature, and take as reference Holtappels’ contributions, as well as studies about the expansion of the school day in Brazil. The findings indicate that the model presented may contribute as a heuristic tool to guide the schools’ organizational development.

The evaluation of learning is an integral part of curriculum development used for the regulation and measurement of intentional learning in the course of teaching. However, the practices that prevail in schools, with their traditional, organizational, mechanistic and uniformistic "grammar", in place since the 19th century, separate the ways, spaces and times intended for teaching and assessment, due to the concepts inherited of teaching and learning, which are inadequate. This text reviews the concept of evaluation, including an ongoing project of formation research in a Portuguese school. This project, coordinated by the authors, focuses on the reflection and improvement carried out by teachers regarding their ways of developing and measuring learning evaluation, according to progressively assessed criteria agreed on among peers, whose intermediate data are presented here.

Self-regulated learning has been studied extensively in the field of Educational Psychology, since it allows the students to plan, direct, monitor and evaluate their learning. Notwithstanding, in many schools, these possibilities are not mastered by the students, leading to serious damage to the development of problem-solving skills, and hence, to reasoning itself. From a Vygotskian perspective, the present article analyzes a real case – described by the authors from their own perspective (but endorsed by some students) – and seeks to show that it is possible to teach self-regulation to students. The study highlights, however, that the path to achieve success in learning involves building trust relationships within the classroom and the understanding of error as an inherent part of learning.  

This paper was aimed at analyzing perceptions and assessment practices of teachers and students in four Portuguese universities. Perceptions were studied by means of a questionnaire that was administered to both teachers and students. Assessment practices were studied through class observations and interviews with both teachers and students.  Results showed that, in general, perceptions and assessment practices were more consistent with a teacher-centered pedagogy, based on subject-matter exposure and assessment for grading, rather than with a pedagogy that puts students at the center of pedagogical dynamics, based on assessment for learning and on feedback distribution. Perceptions and practices encompassed in the latter perspective, though a minority, have shown that it is possible to move towards a more progressive and innovative pedagogy in higher education.

This article takes forty narratives of teachers who recalled situations of particularly memorable evaluation situations that occurred when they were students. Of these forty narratives, thirty-one express an intolerable abuse of power. Nine express emancipatory evaluative practices.  Through  an  analysis  of  these  discourses,  the  meanings of the abuses – humiliation, violence, discrimination, deception, arbitrariness – and of the minority emancipation are quantified and qualified, seeking to explain these practices in the light of the historical, social, organizational and professional times. It is concluded that these practices need to be fought against and prevented; and, that stricter policies and practices of access to the profession and the exercise of more interactive pedagogic action are required.

This article draws on social realist approaches in the sociology of knowledge and in light of them constructs three scenarios for the future of education in the next decades. The primary focus of the paper is on one of the most crucial questions facing educational policy makers – the relationship between school and everyday or common sense knowledge. The different possibilities for how the school/non-school knowledge boundaries might be approached are expressed in three scenarios – ‘boundaries treated as given’, ‘a boundary-less world’ and the idea of ‘boundary maintenance as a condition for boundary crossing’. The curriculum implications of each are explored and the article makes the case for the third scenario. The factors likely to make one or other scenario dominate educational policy in the next 20–30 years are also considered.

This article presents the results of a survey that aimed to investigate concepts of learning evaluation made by teachers who work in public schools organized in cycles, within a municipal network. Implementation of the learning cycle in the educational system set the automatic progression and implementation of formative assessment for students’ learning. Teachers’ testimonies collected in interviews were analyzed according to Collective Subject Discourse methodology. The main findings of the survey show that the new concept of education, school organization and evaluation, (re)constructed for over a decade, contributed to teachers’ understanding of learning evaluation from a different perspective through evaluative processes that are more formative and inclusive, in an attempt to overcome the qualifying and exclusive assessment design currently so impregnated in educational systems.   

Coexistence problems, often translated as violence and lack of  discipline, are some of the greatest difficulties faced by schools. This study aimed at the construction and testing of instruments to assess school climate for students, teachers and administrators, considering a correspondence between school climate and quality of interpersonal relationships. It also aimed to prepare and develop, in two public middle schools, an intervention project aimed at improving the coexistence. Following the diagnosis of these schools’ climate, an intervention was developed comprising: inclusion of a weekly subject in students’ schedules; implementation of conflict mediation procedures; proposals of youth involvement and continued school staff training. This study presents theoretical and practical foundations to support improvement of the quality of the school climate and enables schools to plan for coexistence. 

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The aim of this paper is to verify if the Programa Alfabetização na Idade Certa [Literacy in the Right Age Program] (Paic) has contributed to improving the equity in Ceará’s municipal schools. Equity is defined as a situation in which all students, regardless of their social origin, achieve appropriate results. The evaluation of our results is a pedagogical interpretation that indicates adequate proficiency in the Portuguese language of students in Prova Brasil. We investigated the impact of Paic’s on the probability of students achieving satisfactory performance in Portuguese using the Differences-in-Differences (DID) method. The equity concept, operationalized through DID, led us to conclude that the program improved equity in the analyzed cohort because it increased the proportion of students that reached the adequate level of Portuguese proficiency, especially in schools where the majority of students are poor. The analysis revealed that Paic presented elements aligned with principles of justice which adjust to the objective of equity in elementary school.  

   The Plano de Desenvolvimento da Escola (PDE-Escola) [School Development Plan] is a planning tool for schools that receive technical training and financial support from the Ministry of Education (MEC) to develop an improvement plan for management, relationship with the community, pedagogical political projects and infrastructure. Administrative and Prova Brasil (2005 to 2012) data, as well as fixed models estimation on school level per year, were used to assess whether the PDE-Escola has an effect on academic performance. The schools were separated into three groups: a) schools carrying out the PDE-Escola without financial resources; b) schools carrying out the PDE-Escola with financial resources; and c) schools that stopped receiving financial resources from the PDE-Escola. The results show that the PDE-Escola is effective only when associated with the transfer of resources. The results were quite heterogeneous among Brazilian states, which suggests that the design and implementation context of the program matters.   

Based on documentary research, foreign initiatives of assessment and accreditation of institutions of early childhood educational are characterized, with regard to their purpose and operation. Results of studies from Brazilian researchers who have relied on initiatives from other countries in order to analyze the quality of early childhood education in national contexts are brought together. Proposals were selected that can show steps to be taken in Brazil, under public administration, regarding the assessment of this stage of basic education, in the implementation of the National Education Plan and the duty of the State to ensure quality education for all.

This study proposes models to follow the evolution of average educational performance of a group of individuals in Mathematics. They were evaluated over time using Item Response Theory, enabling estimation of average skills in periods not evaluated and improving the interpretation of scales. The linear, quadratic, logistic and Gompertz growth curves were evaluated. The longitudinal feature leads to interdependence among skills at the various evaluation times, with the proposal of some covariance structures to model this dependence. The parameters of the items were known from a prior calibration. Real data from the Program for the Development of Education (PDE-School) of the Ministry of Education were used. It was found that the logistic growth curve, associated with the correlation structure AR(1), fit better to data, with a very high correlation between the estimated skills and that the greatest gain in skill occurs by the end of the 6th school year.  

The aim of this study is to assess the short-term impact of the sixth-grade experimental project and the factors that mediate this impact. The main feature of the project proposed by the Department of Municipal Education (SME) of Rio de Janeiro, in 2011, is its expansion up to the 6th grade the elementary education, with only one lead teacher to teach the main subjects. To evaluate the project, we used the differences-in-differences method with propensity scorematching. The results indicate an improvement of 0.16 standard deviations in mathematics at the end of the first half of the project, for the schools that entered in the 6th Grade Experimental, in 2014. The main mechanisms that explain performance improvement are the improved climate in the classroom, in pedagogical autonomy and in the training of teachers.

To guarantee the right to a good education to everyone everywhere, it is necessary to rely on external devices that make it possible to know how much of it is ensured, so that schools have mastery of the levels of education offered. The main question is how to do this so that, instead of looking at competition among schools or at providing criteria for choice by clients, internal improvement with appropriate resources is enhanced. This paper is a current review of accountability, linked to institutional self-assessment as a process to build school capabilities. The responsibility or accountability has as its primary purpose training for improvement, while at the same time ensuring essential learning for all.

This article presents an overview of the deployment process of the Sistema Mineiro de Avaliação da Educação Pública (Simave), in order to understand its development in the light of three generations of evaluation of Basic Education in Brazil. These generations were identified through a bibliographical study of the Simave deployment process. The first generation was identified in experiments undertaken before Simave and in the first years of this system (2000-2002), period guided by the diagnostic nature of the evaluations. The second generation of evaluation was identified between 2003 and 2007 and marked by the beginning of the Results Agreement Program of the Government of Minas Gerais involving performance targets and results management. The third generation, started in 2007, was marked by a second phase of the Results Agreement Program, involving the payment of the productivity bonus linked to the performance of students in the Simave evaluation tests.