This practice-sharing piece outlines two main approaches to flexible summative assessment schemes, including for each approach one example from my practice and another from a published study. The bento approach offers the same assessments to all students but a variety of grade weighting schemes, allowing students to change weighting during the…

This submission contains the Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group (CMESG), held at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. The CMESG is a group of mathematicians and mathematics educators who meet annually to discuss mathematics education issues at all levels of learning. The aims of the Study…

There have been calls in the literature for reforms to assessment to enhance student learning (Shepard, 2000). In many instances, this refers to the need to move from traditional assessment procedures that are characterized as content-heavy, summative, and norm-referenced approaches to more constructivist and student-centred approaches, often…

The implementation of authentic learning elements at education institutions in five countries, eight online courses in total, is examined in this paper. The International Virtual Benchmarking Project (2009-2010) applied the elements of authentic learning developed by Herrington and Oliver (2000) as criteria to evaluate authenticity. Twelve…

Diagnosing is a knowledge-based skill: to diagnose one must retrieve knowledge from long-term memory and then apply this to a new clinical problem. Prior research on expertise found differences in knowledge structure between experts and novices, and it is assumed that the superior diagnostic performance of experts is somehow related to their…

Instructional design strategy for improving problem solving is presented. The strategy entails selecting an appropriate domain of problem-solving tasks, learning hierarchies, teaching methods and assembling of learning materials, and designing teacher training and evaluation. Obstacles to be overcome and directions for future research are…

The family is an obvious group for whom problem solving effectiveness holds importance. Problem solving interaction refers to the manner in which the behavior of family members is organized to resolve situations in which there is an unachieved but attainable goal, and the means to overcoming the barriers to achieving the goal are not apparent, but…

Gotlib and Asarnow suggest that learned helplessness may not adequately model clinical depression. They reply to Rohsenow's criticism that Gotlib and Asarnow's conclusions are unwarranted because the null hypothesis is not demonstrated by a single study and because adequate diagnostic criteria are not presented. (Author/BEF)

Evaluative inquiry--systematically gathering and analyzing data for the purposes of judging program or innovation merit, worth or significance and/or supporting ongoing school-based decision making and problem solving--is an option available to educators that is not often used; this despite recent interest in action research and school-based…

The bulk of this conference report is made up of three papers. In the first, J. A. Riffel argues that there are two polar orientations to the problem of evaluation in education--the independent empirical and the participatory problem-solving. To date, education has been dominated by the former approach. Only the latter allows for a variety of…

This study examined planning processes and the acquisition of expert problem solving skills among individuals of different expertise on tasks of increasing complexity. Twelve French-speaking adult students of machining (novices) and 12 French-speaking teachers of machining (experts) in Quebec (Canada) were randomly assigned to a simple or complex…

The fifth in a series, this report reviews Apple microcomputer courseware--and some IBM computer courseware--authorized by Alberta Education from June 1985 to March 1986. It provides detailed evaluations of 97 authorized programs in business education (11), business education/math (1), computer literacy (4), computer literacy/math/problem solving…

Different aspects of text comprehension and different evaluation procedures were studied for elementary school students. Indicators sensitive to the different levels of comprehension involved were used, and recall was divided into recall macro, micro, and total. The sample consisted of 90 sixth graders in the national capital region of Canada.…

The sixth in a series, this report reviews microcomputer courseware authorized by the Alberta Department of Education from April 1986 through December 1986. (Although earlier publications in this series were cumulative, this edition and the fifth edition contain only new or revised reports.) This edition provides detailed evaluations of 39…

Fourth in a series, this cumulative report reviews Apple computer courseware and some IBM courseware (Business and Math sections) authorized by Alberta Education from January 1983 through May 1985. It provides detailed evaluations of 168 authorized titles in business education (17), computer literacy (12), early childhood education (8), language…