Used correctly, assessments play a vital role in the success of a course: they provide valuable feedback to students regarding their knowledge gaps, encourage deeper understanding of the material, help students to develop critical thinking, and guide students to accomplish a course's learning goals. They also provide a signal to future employers,…

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…

While primary and secondary teachers are legally required to adhere to inclusion guidelines for students experiencing disabilities, instructors in higher education have had more leeway to operate under a more traditional paradigm which can marginalize rather than include students in the classroom. Furthermore, students experience exclusion for…

This article presents strategies for using two types of essay-writing rubrics in a developmental English class of students transitioning into college-level writing. One checklist rubric is student-facing, designed to serve as a guide for students throughout the writing process and as a self-assessment tool. The other checklist rubric is…

In order to consistently give quality feedback to students, the author introduces the revision and automation tools in Microsoft Word 2007. These features, Comments, Tracking, and Changes, are part of the Review group in MS Word 2007. Additionally, the AutoCorrect feature can be used to enhance and support editing endeavors. This article offers a…

Peer assessment of long written tasks poses particular problems as these tasks typically involve complex learning and solving ill-structured problems which require divergent responses. Marking reliability of this kind of writing task is difficult to achieve. The author illustrates this through an evaluation of two implementations of peer…

Allowing students to improve their grade by revising their written work may help students learn to revise, but it gives them no incentive to turn in quality work from the start. This article proposes a way to invert the process, thereby teaching students how to revise, while enforcing a more disciplined approach to good writing. (Contains 3…

Starting from the premise that good writing requires sound thinking, this paper presents a workable process for developing and using writing assignments as thinking and learning tools within a historical and philosophical context. Though presented from the perspective of a chemist, this process is actually general in nature and links writing…

This paper discusses the pedagogical and technological aspects of assessing wiki-based collaborative learning activities. The first part of the paper presents a general framework of collaborative learning assessment. The framework is based on four aspects of assessment, characterized by four questions: who, what, how and by whom. The second part…

Writing in mathematics can improve procedural knowledge and communication skills and may also help students better understand and then remember problems. The majority of mathematics teachers know that they ought to include some writing assignments in their instructional plans, but the challenge of covering the curriculum and the time required to…

In the late 1970s, poet Lewis MacAdams labeled the many writers beginning to visit schools as "wild cards in the deck of education," bringing fresh possibilities to a somewhat staid curriculum. Now, nearly thirty years later, the authors wonder if it isn't time to renew the metaphor, as everyone strive to name what happens when poets bring their…

Regrettably, cheating is widespread on all levels of our educational system. Effective monitoring and judicial review processes that ensure that students who cheat are subjected to appropriate disciplinary action are essential. However, policing is not enough. We must go beyond policing to change the culture of the classroom in ways that…

In this article, the authors reflect on a very different form of ITT assessment--"patchwork text"--wherein the learner provides several small pieces of work, or "patches", which are "stitched" together with a reflective commentary, written once all of the patches are complete. Each piece of work should stand alone,…

This document presents writing samples that have been annotated to illustrate the criteria required to meet the Common Core State Standards for particular types of writing--argument, informative/explanatory text, and narrative--in a given grade. Each of the samples exhibits at least the level of quality required to meet the Writing standards for…

Students learn mathematics more effectively and more deeply when reading and writing is directed at learning mathematics. Although reading and writing in mathematics may necessitate more skills and practice to master, the mathematical learning derived from reading and writing mathematics far outweighs the burden it places on teachers and students.…