Nowadays, with increasing competitiveness in every field, securing a good job may be difficult. In this connection, students aiming to get into the best educational institution (EI) would give them their best chance of quality education and good job opportunities. Institutional evaluation and selection are complex tasks that must simultaneously…

Higher education leaders face growing pressure to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of not only their institution but also each academic program offering. With increasing accountability and limited time for meaningful reflection on student learning and development, now is the time to rethink how a quasi-annual academic program review…

School leaders struggle in their efforts to implement standards-based grading reforms in large part because they fail to address the inconsistency in grading practices among individual teachers. This article describes three crucial steps necessary to gain greater consistency in teachers' grading practices: (1) Reaching consensus on a purpose…

The addition of 'clinically significant impairment' (American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, Author, 2013) to the diagnostic criteria for autism in DSM-5 attempts to establish a threshold for the condition. However, the increased prominence of the neurodiversity paradigm and social model of…

In June 2023, the Supreme Court held that the admissions systems at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Harvard University were racially discriminatory, effectively ending affirmative action. Are race-neutral admissions policies at selective K-12 schools next? Bob Kim considers two circuit court cases -- "Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax…

Traditionally in England, exam results in General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs) (and before them O levels) and A levels have been reported as letter grades, with A (or A*) as the top grade, then B, C etc. The reforms gave the opportunity to revisit the arguments for different formats of reporting, and Cambridge Assessment contributed…

Teaching evaluation is a central process across institutions for faculty retention, promotion, and tenure. While there is a rich literature on methods for evaluating teaching, there is less scholarship on the goals and processes for reforming systems of teaching evaluation. Surprisingly, there is little to no information on teaching criteria at…

The Whippoorwill Award aims to bring attention to the theme of rural spaces and people in the larger genre of young adult literature. This award annually recognizes the best books for the middle grades and young adult readers that portray the value of rural spaces, knowledge, people, and cultures. The Whippoorwill Award is intended to be a…

Current approaches used in educational research and practice to evaluate the quality of written arguments often rely on structural analysis. In such assessments, credit is awarded for the presence of structural elements of an argument, such as claims, evidence, and rebuttals. In this article, we discuss limitations of such approaches, including…

Admission systems play a critical role in shaping educational opportunities by determining what choices are available to whom. Policy makers and institutions must balance multiple, often conflicting, goals which requires trade-offs between competing values. In this paper, we present core values for admission to higher education alongside a novel…

This paper describes, and lays out an argument for, the use of a procedure to help groups of reviewers to judge the quality of prior research reports. It argues why such a procedure is needed, and how other existing approaches are only relevant to some kinds of research, meaning that a review or synthesis cannot successfully combine quality…

Critical appraisal of evidence is performed to assess its validity, trustworthiness and usefulness in evidence-based practice. There currently exists a large number and variety of critical appraisal tools (also named risk of bias tools and quality assessment instruments), which makes it challenging to identify and choose an appropriate tool to…

Direct Admissions is a system developed and piloted recently in the US that defaults graduating high school students into post-secondary admittance by data-matching their profiles (transcripts, standardized test scores, and prerequisites) with institutions' preset eligibility criteria. As applicant and institutional interest in direct admissions…

Academic entitlement formation will have adverse effects on both students and instructors, influence the teaching effectiveness and the learning experience, and threaten academic integrity and quality. Thus, it is crucial to know not only what factors may facilitate the development of academic entitlement, but also what strategies can be used to…

Literature inclusion and exclusion (E/I) criteria are a fundamental selection methodology in different applications. Mainly, the E/I criteria are identified and chosen with respect to the question for which the manuscript itself is produced, thus allowing the selection of the literature. This procedure is not always related to the economic…