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Background: Teachers' perspectives provide crucial insights into classroom practice in early childhood education settings. Although many kindergarten programmes emphasise play "and" assessment to support children's learning and development, recent research suggests that there are some disparities between teachers' articulated role of play and what they report assessing during periods of play. As a range of research designs can be used in efforts to probe the complex relationships between perspectives and practice, it is important to consider which methodological approach, or combination of approaches, may prove optimal in early years contexts. Purpose: The study sought to explore the relative merits of using: (1) semi-structured interview; and (2) video-elicitation interview approaches to gain deeper understanding of the connections between teachers' perspectives and practices within kindergarten education. Methods: An in-depth, qualitative enquiry was undertaken. This included classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, and video-elicitation interviews from 20 kindergarten classrooms in Ontario, Canada. Interview data were thematically analysed. Findings: The analysis indicated that video-elicitation interviewing influenced the structure and content of participants' responses when compared with semi-structured interviews, providing additional and valuable insights into the ever-present negotiation between perspectives and practice. Conclusion: The study highlights how semi-structured and video-elicitation interview approaches each offer particular strengths and limitations, and can be used independently or in combination to gain a deeper understanding of the connection between teachers' perspectives and their classroom practices. The selection of one approach, or combination of approaches, needs to be carefully aligned with the overarching research goals of a study.

Background: The presence and function of assessment in Canadian classrooms has changed in the past thirty years. Driving this continuously evolving landscape of classroom assessment is the fundamental belief that classroom assessment can be effectively used to monitor and support student learning and achievement. A central challenge amid this changing landscape is that teachers are required to keep pace with increasing assessment expectations, with research continuing to show that teachers are generally underprepared for the current context of assessment they may face. A potential root cause of this reported unpreparedness relates to teacher preparation in assessment during initial teacher education programmes. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine approaches to assessment education across Canadian teacher education programmes. Drawing on data from teacher educators and teacher education documents (e.g. course syllabi), two research questions guided this study: (1) What are the programmatic provisions for assessment education across Canadian teacher education programmes?; and (2) What are teacher educators' approaches to assessment education? Method: This study explores the landscape of assessment education across Canada through analyses of interviews with teacher educators (n = 25) and programme documentation drawn from 12 teacher education programmes. Findings: The analyses identified six overarching themes that characterise contemporary assessment education: (1) similar structures of assessment education; (2) limited time for assessment education; (3) inconsistent messaging; (4) focus of learning; (5) attitudes and explicitly modelling assessment; and (6) building explicit connections to teaching contexts across kindergarten-12th grade (student ages 5-18). Conclusions: Understanding how teachers are educated in assessment is the first step in redressing teachers' low levels of assessment literacy. This exploratory pan-Canadian study provides a theoretical and descriptive foundation for future research into assessment education in Canada and elsewhere, with the aim of improving teacher education in assessment.

Background: In Canada, contemporary collaborative professional learning models for educators utilise multiple forms of evidence to inform practice. Commonly, two forms of evidence are prioritised: (a) research-based evidence and (b) classroom-based evidence of student learning. In Ontario, the integration of these two forms of evidence within professional learning is increasingly facilitated by "middle leaders"--school district level educators who support system change through sustained school- and classroom-embedded professional development with teachers. Purpose: This study investigated the role of the middle leader in supporting teachers' use of research- and classroom-based evidence within the context of collaborative professional learning. It was guided by the following research questions: (a) What is the capacity of middle leaders to use research- and classroom-based evidence within professional learning contexts? (b) What challenges do middle leaders encounter in using research- and classroom-based evidence within professional learning contexts? and (c) How do middle leaders develop their capacity for evidence use within professional learning contexts? Programme Description: The context for this study was a three-year networked professional learning project that included nine school districts in Ontario, Canada. An evidence-based collaborative inquiry approach was used to explore the common goal of improving mathematics teaching and learning across the nine districts. Participants: A purposeful sample of 30 middle leaders (i.e. system facilitators) and 54 teachers (36 Primary/Junior school teachers [student ages 4-11] and 18 Intermediate/Senior school teachers [student ages 12-18]) across the nine school districts was selected based on these educators' high degree of engagement in the project and willingness to participate in data collection. System facilitators were relative experts in mathematics instruction and provided differentiated and embedded support in mathematics pedagogy to school inquiry teams (i.e. school administrators and selected teachers), responsive to their local needs and goals. Design and Methods: A qualitative approach was used, comprising focus groups conducted at the end of each project year with study participants. Data collection yielded 27 system facilitator focus groups (nine per year) and 27 teacher focus groups (also nine per year), each transcribed verbatim. Findings: Standard thematic coding of focus group data was used to elucidate four emergent themes across system facilitators and teachers: (a) realising the need for data literacy in the construction of classroom evidence, (b) challenges to evidence use, (c) support enabling evidence use and (d) changing attitudes about evidence. Overall, findings indicated that both middle leaders and teachers required data literacy to use, successfully, classroom evidence within a collaborative inquiry. Although middle leaders encountered challenges to facilitating teachers' classroom evidence use in collaborative inquiry, they developed their own data literacy through regular cross-district middle leader learning sessions and targeted support from pedagogical and research experts. While both middle leaders and teachers shifted their attitudes and practices with respect to classroom evidence use within the project, this finding did not extend to their critical interrogation of research evidence sources (i.e. research literacy). Conclusions: Middle leaders play a central role in promoting evidence use within networked collaborative professional learning. Diverse strategies are needed to support middle leaders' use of both research- and classroom-based evidence throughout collaborative inquiry cycles, to inform and monitor classroom, school, district and regional impacts. While increased data literacy may enhance educators' use of classroom evidence, it may not directly impact their uptake of research to inform their collaborative inquiries.

Background: The current global cohort of youth has been called "a generation at-risk", marked by a dramatic rise in youth who are not in employment, education or training programmes. In 2010, youth were three times as likely as adults to be unemployed, with youth unemployment worsening in 2012 and 2013. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to examine educational structures that can promote greater labour market attachment and successful transition into employment for youth worldwide. Vocational and work-based education (WBE) has been identified as one of the most recommended and promising educational structures for curtailing youth under- and unemployment. However, WBE takes many forms, making it difficult to discern which WBE programme is most likely to meet the diverse needs of any individual at-risk youth. Moreover, there has been a dearth of theoretical conceptualisations to explain WBE as a context that promotes resilience for at-risk youth as they transition into the world of work. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a revised model for WBE as an enabling context for at-risk youth in transition from school to employment. Specifically, a person-in-context approach is used, situating youth-related facets (e.g. agency) in relation to systemic facets (e.g. political, cultural) to provide a comprehensive theoretical basis for WBE. The revised model maintains three overlapping domains--the individual, the social-cultural and the economic-political--to address a theoretical gap in the literature on transition systems while providing a foundation for practical efforts to prepare at-risk youth for engaging in a changing labour market. Design and Methods: The model was constructed through a systematic and interdisciplinary integrative literature review that examined empirical, conceptual, policy-based and practice-based literature on at-risk youth transition from school to work. Articles and documents were analysed for both individual and contextual factors that influence transition, in order to contribute towards the development of a robust person-incontext model. Existing models of transition and other systems were also examined that addressed the needs of at-risk youth. A "person-in-context" approach was selected for our model as it enabled representation of both macro- and microcosmic factors that shape effective WBE programming. Conclusions: The model is organised around three critical domains that were identified as being influential for school-to-work transition: the individual domain, the social-cultural domain and the economic-political domain. Within each of these domains, multiple facets are described that shape youth transition. WBE is positioned at the centre of the model as an educational structure that can attend to the multiple facets that shape engagement in school and work. The paper concludes with an explicit research agenda linked to the model and practical implications for WBE programming.