The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on…

Research on flexible assessment suggests that providing students with choice in assignments can increase motivation and deepen investment in learning. Although instructors are often advised to adopt flexible assessment, they are also warned about potential detriments such as perceived lack of rigour among colleagues, the stress that…

As COVID-19 spread in early 2020, a lockdown was implemented across Canadian provinces and territories, resulting in the shuttering of physical post-secondary campuses. Universities quickly pivoted to remote learning, and faculty members adjusted their instructional and assessment approaches to align with virtual environments. Presumably to aid…

Plant identification is a critical skill for students in biological sciences, especially forestry. Many students begin with limited plant identification abilities and struggle to learn this skill. To support student learning of identification and ecological characteristics of important forest plants in an undergraduate forest ecology course at the…

In Ontario, as the number of students requiring special education support continues to rise, the transition to inclusive classrooms has become more challenging for teachers due to limited time and lack of resources and support in the classrooms. However, this study explored how eight elementary school teachers addressed these obstacles in their…

The purpose of this study was to assess whether the use of student self-assessment of non-cognitive skills is accurate and reliable by comparing them to the assessment of student development provided by their teachers of these same skills. For this study non-cognitive skills refer to skills including communication, collaboration, creative…

Graded Response Method (GRM) is an alternative to multiple-choice testing where students rank options according to their relevance to the question. GRM requires discrimination and inference between statements and is a cost-effective critical thinking assessment in large courses where open-ended answers are not feasible. This study examined…

For the last seven years, an interdisciplinary course known as "Greener Solutions", offered by the University of California, Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, has brought together graduate students in chemistry, environmental health, and engineering to understand each other's disciplines, and to work together to develop safer…

With the excessive use of social media in the 21st century, attempts to integrate social media within higher education have also increased. In this area, research has been particularly focused on the aspects of students, rather than the instructors. This study puts the emphasis on the instructors with the aim to explore their use of social media…

Many psychological scales written in the Likert format include reverse worded (RW) items in order to control acquiescence bias. However, studies have shown that RW items often contaminate the factor structure of the scale by creating one or more method factors. The present study examines an alternative scale format, called the Expanded format,…

While Alberta is serving a considerable number of English as a Second Language (ESL) 1 students, these students have been documented to be academically underrepresented compared to their native speaking peers. Within the framework of language policy and planning, this study examines the interplay between the macro and micro levels of the education…

The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) is an international, non-profit educational organization. The Association's purpose is to advance the knowledge, theory, and quality of teaching and learning at all levels with information technology. The "EdMedia + Innovate Learning" conference took place in New York,…

This paper begins with a discussion of Canadian and international work that has identified a number of shortcomings with standardized assessments, which are framed within neoliberal ideology. It then explores the principles of good assessment and applies them to an analysis of British Columbia's standardized Social Studies 11 exam. It finds that…

Explored classroom assessment reform from four perspectives: technological, cultural, political, and postmodern. Interviewed teachers about their understandings of alternative assessment. Responses of 29 teachers in Ontario, Canada, show how teachers integrated changes into their practices and the successes and obstacles they encountered during…

Presents two physics poems in the sonnet style, Electron Love and The Barn, that were part of a student's personal evaluation instrument. (JRH)