Formal testing dominates Singapore's secondary school curricula; the Ministry of Education seeks to redress this through promoting assessment for learning (AfL). Success however requires teachers' belief that AfL practices are valuable and achievable. A survey of all teachers in 12 secondary schools (n=913) investigated attitudes to 35 assessment…

This paper outlines the design and purpose of an open educational resource (OER) project focused on developing digital literacies and open educational practice (OEP) within a Canadian Faculty of Education. Called The Open Page, the project features a Tool Parade of videos and podcasts created with and by Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) students).…

The author discusses the importance of listening to children and engaging them in dialogue about their learning. She does not accept that assessment should entail labelling children and believes such practices encourage a culture of fixed "ability" thinking. Through examples of specific children, the author illustrates the importance of…

This paper discusses the process of analysing online discussion and argues for the merits of mixed methods. Much research of online participation and e-learning has been either message focused or person focused analysis. The former covers methodologies such as content and discourse analysis, the latter interviewing and surveys. The paper discusses…

Classification evaluation metrics are often used to evaluate adaptive tutoring systems-- programs that teach and adapt to humans. Unfortunately, it is not clear how intuitive these metrics are for practitioners with little machine learning background. Moreover, our experiments suggest that existing convention for evaluating tutoring systems may…

The paper takes a critical look at the different metrics that could be used to measure First Nations student success. The paper concludes that more than one metric is needed given the holistic worldview of First Nations Aboriginal people. A framework undergirding First Nations student success is presented and discussed.

Higher education in Egypt has recently shifted towards the constructivist theory that involves students in the learning process in all of its aspects. Therefore, the need for self-assessment has grown to engage learners in constructing their own knowledge and developing their thinking skills to succeed academically and in life. In response to this…

Student involvement in the area of curriculum criticism would provide a more comprehensive view of curricular and educational needs. Curriculum criticism is premised on an analogy between the curriculum (as a set of materials offering experience to its recipients) and the work of art in any medium. The curriculum critic attempts to portray the…

The purpose of this paper is to report a successful technique for assessing cooperative group work reliably and validly. The paper demonstrates a simple-to-use assessment procedure that tracks individual accountability, energizes student interaction, and rewards cooperative learning, even as it uses fewer administrative resources than traditional…

This paper aims to make the techniques of cooperative learning more attractive to teachers by presenting a method of assessment that avoids the drawbacks associated with trying to extract valid and reliable individual marks from cooperative performances. The paper presents an easy-to-use method of assessing an individual's contribution to a…

The "Competent Group Communicator" is an assessment tool designed to evaluate the performance of individual members who participate in task-oriented small group discussions. This instrument is designed to be used to evaluate the performance of students enrolled in a small group communication course, as a course placement tool, as a pre-…

An examination was made of the relationship between grades and satisfaction from three distinct research viewpoints: (1) how satisfaction influences grades (as opposed to other research studying the reciprocal of grades influencing satisfaction); (2) the satisfaction of graduating seniors (rather than focusing on freshmen and sophomores); and (3)…

Continuing education students are usually mature students who have a wealth of experience from which their peers and the lecturer could profit. An effective teaching method with such students is the use of cooperative work assignments, but a problem that prevents lecturers from using this method is the difficulty of assigning grades to individual…

A method for measuring the contribution an individual makes to group work is described, and its use is supported through a study of 57 university students aged from 20 to 46 years working in 8 groups of 4 to 10 members each. The method recognizes that the most valid sources of information on the contribution of each individual to the group work…

When one instructor teaches a course called "Communication and Critical Thinking," he uses Josina Makau's book "Reasoning and Communication: Thinking Critically about Arguments" (1990), which maintains that critical thinking requires training. Case methodology can be used for training, not exclusively but as an alternative to…