A valuable supplement to student evaluations of teaching (SETs) is the mid-semester feedback (MSF) technique, an intervention that can facilitate meaningful improvement of the teaching and learning experience. Scheduling time for an MSF enables a systematic, formative evaluation of instruction on a specific student population in a given semester.…

Principal preparation programs in Kentucky can use the items in the Dispositions, Dimensions, and Functions for School Leaders (EPSB, 2008) as mastery benchmarks to quantify incoming Educational Specialist (Ed.S) students' perceived level of mastery. This can serve both internal and external purposes by providing diagnostic feedback to students…

As writing instructors, the authors spend hours "talking back" to their students through written comments on their drafts. But how do student writers receive their comments, and what do they "do" with this feedback? Teachers invest so much time and energy in their responses to papers. How do they know what gets through, what makes sense to their…

"Reasoning and sense making should occur in every classroom every day," states "Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making" (NCTM 2009, p. 5). As this book suggests, reasoning can take many forms, including explorations and conjectures as well as explanations and justifications of student thinking. Sense making, on the other…

In order to improve recruitment of teachers to rural schools, preservice teachers need opportunities to become familiar with rural education contexts, overcome anxieties promoted by negative stereotypes and build confidence in their professional and personal abilities. Traditional approaches involve rural practicums which are not feasible for many…

The purpose of the conference presentation upon which this paper is inspired was to present an innovative approach to motivate students to write in a second language during a first-year Spanish class. Usually, students comply with writing exercises that convey basic thoughts, due to constrained vocabulary and limited knowledge of grammatical…

Professional development for distance tutors is traditionally delivered through texts or websites, supplemented by face to face workshops. However, one of the major challenges is to ensure that they engage with the materials and carry away something which is of value to their practice. At the Open University (UK) our 8000 tutors work from home,…

In this paper, we share two blended learning approaches used at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. We have been using these two approaches in the last twelve years in many courses ranging from the diploma to graduate programs. For the first blended learning approach, we integrated one asynchronous communication tool with face to…

The development of entrepreneurial skills and knowledge is a priority for governments that want to encourage an innovative and enterprising society. Furthermore, education institutions are becoming increasingly required by employers to produce graduates that have practical, real-world skills. Business plan competitions, although primarily aimed at…

The standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education require that teacher education programs document teacher candidates' effectiveness across different domains. Most challenging for our program is the directive to document the impact that candidates have on preK-12 student learning. To gather information on the effects…

The author and preservice teachers in a postbaccalaureate Issues and Reform in Secondary Education course engaged Ernest Stringer's (2004) model of action research to develop generative curricula. They adhered to Walter C. Parker's (1991, 2006) vision of public formation and essential social studies teaching and used student-centered teaching…

Claims are frequently made that practice should be based on evidence. However, the nature of what should count as "evidence" depends on purpose and context. In the case of curriculum development, decisions may rest on local and provisional evidence. This article takes an area of contemporary political interest--enhancing student…

The purpose of this article was to summarize lessons learned from implementing web-enhanced teaching in landscape architecture studio courses. The lessons are documented as challenges and opportunities based on a two-year assessment study of web-enhanced landscape architecture construction studios. This article will help landscape architecture…

This paper reports the evaluation of a unique three-year program designed to support teachers new to a school district. The emphasis of the evaluation process was on the participation of the stakeholders in the evaluation process and the development of their abilities in evaluation. There is educational significance to this study on two levels.…

Proformative evaluation--first introduced in Scriven's (2006) "The great enigma: An evaluation design puzzle"--"is motivated, like formative evaluation, by the intention to improve something that is still developing, but unlike formative, the improvement is only possible by taking action, hence proactive instead of reactive, hence both, hence…