Editorial

One of the strengths of this journal is its presentation of assessment research from diverse education systems. This serves to contrast the values and processes evident in different settings, presenting alternate world views and drawing out the rationale for current practices in the contexts in which we work. In this regular issue, we have articles from the Middle East (Egypt, Iran and Israel), North America (Canada and the USA), Asia (China and Hong Kong), Australia (New Zealand) and Europe (Finland and Norway). Despite this widespread representation of educational contexts, the journal under-represents the issues in Africa and South America. In the last publication (20:4), Yusuf Sayed and Anil Kanjee co-edited a Special Issue on assessment in sub-Saharan Africa. The Editorial Board welcomes further articles from authors in Africa, especially empirical work that seeks to follow up the issues raised in the Special Issue. We also anticipate a forthcoming Special Issue on assessment in South America and again invite authors from South America to submit their work to the journal for publication. The leading article in this regular issue is a study on the selection of gifted students for special programmes. The research was conducted by Elad Segev and Sorel Cahan using data from over 67,000 Israeli students. The authors demonstrate that month of birth has exceptionally high predictive value for the selection to gifted student programmes, with maturity having a positive effect. They argue that their findings, which concur with findings in other countries and other tests, have wide implications for our interpretation of assessment results. Youngsters within each cohort may carry this handicap through their educational careers and beyond. Age-adjusting scores is a leap of faith, though, in which we must believe that our statistical models predict future performance better than the scores themselves. An empirical demonstration showing that age-adjusted scores are better predictors of a criterion variable would therefore be valuable. The next two articles investigate teachers’ beliefs about assessment in Egypt and Iran, using Brown’s (2006) Teaching Conceptions of Assessment Inventory (TCoA). This adds to the literature on this topic, with the TCoA having been applied to the study of teachers’ beliefs in many countries and in a number of languages (see Gebril and Brown, this issue). The TCoA is published in Arabic in an appendix to Atta Gebril and Gavin T.L. Brown’s article, which will be useful for researchers seeking to pursue this topic in Arab-speaking nations. Although the instrument has been found to have factor invariance across a number of countries, Gebril and Brown found that there were three main factors (rather than the usual nine) in their analysis of over 500 Egyptian teachers’ beliefs. As factor invariance is notoriously difficult to sustain, it is not surprising that the TCoA has a different number of factors in some populations. Reza Pishghadam, Bob Adamson, Shaghayegh Shayesteh Sadafian and Flora L.F. Kan conducted research on the relationship between 113 English language teachers’ burnout and their conceptions of assessment. They found the Persian translation of the TCoA to have factor invariance, using confirmatory factor analysis. Associations between teachers’