Oral demonstration of knowledge is an effective learning and assessment strategy. It has been shown that generating explanations to oneself, or self-explaining, can improve student understanding of information. This can be achieved via student-generated videos. The quantitative effects of student-generated videos on learning and assessment in…

An introductory Astronomy survey course is often taken to satisfy a college graduation requirement for non-science majors at colleges around the United States. In this course, material that can be broadly categorized into topics related to "the sky", "the Solar System", "the Galaxy", and "cosmology" is…

Assessment and evaluation practices within honors programs have attracted considerable attention within the honors academic community, e.g., the spring/summer 2006 volume of the "Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council." Calls for carefully created and constructed assessment activities within honors programs have met with mixed…

We present some key findings of a four-year, two-phase writing assessment project at Central Michigan University: Phase One (2002), a survey of faculty members (n=115) and subsequent focus groups (n=14) and Phase Two (2005), an evaluation of two samples of student writing (n=635 and 632). Major findings of Phase One reported here include the…