University examinations categorise students according to their individual achievements determined by teaching staff. This procedure serves the elicitation and certification of student knowledge and thus reproduces academic hierarchies. Drawing on empirical evidence from ethnographic fieldwork in Engineering and History departments, this article…

Scientific practices are the skills used to develop scientific knowledge and are essential for careers in science. Despite calls from education and government agencies to cultivate scientific practices, there remains little evidence of how often students are asked to apply them in undergraduate courses. We analyzed exams from biology courses at…

Corpus-based studies have offered the domain definition inference for test developers. Yet, corpus-based studies on temporal fluency measures (e.g., speech rate) have been limited, especially in the context of academic lecture settings. This made it difficult for test developers to sample representative fluency features to create authentic…

This study reflects on the development and implementation of mid-term oral examinations in large-scale lecture courses at a large, public research university; specifically, this work examines the implications of oral exams for fostering student engagement and concept-based comprehension in addition to institutional and course commitments to…

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether university students can adjust their study strategies to meet the cognitive demands of testing; a metacognitive self-regulatory skill. One hundred and fifty undergraduates attended three lectures as part of a course on the psychology of individual differences. These participants were then…

This article presents results from a two-semester field test of the Light and Spectroscopy Concept Inventory (LSCI). Statistical analysis indicates that the LSCI has the sensitivity to measure statistically significant changes in students' understanding of light-related topics due to instruction in introductory astronomy courses and to distinguish…

Recognition memory for sentences from a classroom lecture was tested as a function of lecture instructions, length of retention interval, and item type. With immediate testing, subjects differentiated original sentences from reworded and inferential statements similar in meaning. Only inferences were recognized as not having been presented after…

Two experiments used two 2 x 3 x 2 (instructors x test forms x class times) designs to compare three aspects of student performance (mean final examination scores, homogeneity of variance, and retake frequencies) on three test forms. The test items on the three forms were arranged in three ways: (1) forward--items paralleled the presentation of…

A study of 47 clinical medical faculty teaching behaviors had teachers report their teaching behaviors in four areas: interactive skills; knowledge or abilities important for students to develop; factors influencing curriculum development; and sources of pedagogical assistance. Subjects' written simulations on teaching techniques, curriculum…

The Course Entry Inventory was developed to assess the affective characteristics of college students when they enter a course. The four dimensions measured were: affective characteristics upon entry, willingness to undertake course activities and accept instruction, perceived importance of the course, and self-reported level of apprehension about…