This piece focuses on increasing writing instruction for secondary English teacher candidates in the form of integrating reading and writing. Often, teacher candidates are not sufficiently prepared in university coursework to teach writing and are left to rely on formulaic writing that merely prepares their students for the end-of-year tests.…

As pressure mounts on colleges to document what their students learn, it remains tough to judge from outside the classroom how much knowledge they gain from their academic experience. The traditional measure of learning is the course grade. Nothing says academic success more succinctly than an A. Alternative methods to document learning have…

An analysis of interviews, focus-group discussions, assessment instruments, and assignment prompts revealed that within general education, faculty assessed critical thinking as faceted using methods and criteria that varied epistemically across disciplines. Faculty approaches were misaligned with discipline-general institutional approaches.…

Critics of standardized testing have recommended replacing standardized tests with more authentic assessment measures, such as classroom assignments, projects, or portfolios rated by a panel of raters using common rubrics. Little research has examined the consistency of scores across multiple authentic assignments or the implications of this…