Authentic assessments are designed to evaluate knowledge and skills that are relevant for students' life beyond university, emphasising practical, applied skills. They offer an alternative to assessments that don't explicitly foster transferability of skills. The present study examined undergraduate student perceptions of authentic and traditional…

This CALDER research brief builds on pioneering research by the Measures of Effective Teaching Project (Kane et al., 2013) and Jackson (2018) to look at two measures of teacher quality-value-added measures (VAMs) for both test outcomes and non-test outcomes--and what they can tell education leaders about the teacher workforce. Both measures use a…

This three-article dissertation examined the key aspects and outcomes of a Formative and Alternative Assessment Methodology (FAAM) implemented at a Colombian university during COVID-19. The first study explored, through in-depth interviews, participants' experiences with the FAAM, which included assessment principles, strategies, resources, and…

A January 2024 survey found that 72 percent of parents had considered a new school for their children in the past year. And in 2025, Texas and Tennessee are poised to become the next states to enact education savings account (ESA) programs, potentially giving millions more students the education options that their parents want for them. As a…

Specifications grading is an alternative grading scheme that prioritizes transparency and progress-oriented feedback, with the goals of increasing student motivation, fostering clear communication, and achieving educational equity. Despite its recent, rapid increase in popularity, little attention has been paid to the forms of support faculty need…

An essential task in higher education is to construct a fair admission procedure. A great deal of research has been conducted on a central aspect of admission: predictive validity. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates how the predictive validity of a composite admission score could be improved without…

How do students perceive alternative approaches to grading? Do those perceptions change over time? This mixed methods study addressed these questions for three alternative grading approaches - democratic contract grading, specifications grading, and "ungrading" - in a community college context. While alternative grading models in higher…

This paper presents a tool for creating student models in logistic regression. Creating student models has typically been done by expert selection of the appropriate terms, beginning with models as simple as IRT or AFM but more recently with highly complex models like BestLR. While alternative methods exist to select the appropriate predictors for…

This paper presents a tool for creating student models in logistic regression. Creating student models has typically been done by expert selection of the appropriate terms, beginning with models as simple as IRT or AFM but more recently with highly complex models like BestLR. While alternative methods exist to select the appropriate predictors for…

In spite of their pivotal role in language learning, psychological variables involved in language learning have received less attention in empirical research. Therefore, this paper tried to inspect the effects of interventionist DA, interactionist DA, and non-DA on EFL students' SAF, FLCA, and FLLM. To achieve this goal, 78 respondents were chosen…

Ungrading is an emancipatory pedagogy that focuses on evaluative assessment of learning. Self-regulated learning (SRL) has consistently been referred to as the learning theory that undergirds ungrading, but SRL--with its deficit frame in the literature and in practice--fails to uphold ungrading's emancipatory aims. An asset-framed learning…

Classroom teaching is a demanding and arduous profession, requiring teachers to have a suitable personality to succeed and persevere. However, academic institutions usually determine acceptance based solely on cognitive test scores, despite research indicating the added value of personality measures. This study presents the MESILA personality…

Research has demonstrated that deaf children of deaf signing parents (DOD) are afforded developmental advantages. This can be misconstrued as indicating that no DOD children exhibit early language delays (ELDs) because of their early access to a visual language. Little research has studied this presumption. In this study, we examine 174 ratings of…

Assessments of reading and reading-related skills which measure acquired knowledge may pose problems for the prediction of future reading performance. Such static measures often result in floor effects in the early stages of reading instruction, and may be particularly inaccurate predictors for children from culturally and linguistically diverse…

This paper aims to critique approaches to qualitative coding that carry a bottom-up or inductive thinking. Despite the wide contributions of this epistemology to the social sciences, this paper contends that contemporary research and methodological debates have inadequately explored different epistemologies for coding. As such, this paper proposes…