Background: Cultivating students' problem-solving knowledge and skills in the workspace has been regarded as a primary goal in technical and vocational education. To this end, students are usually guided to complete the learning of workspace knowledge and skills by following the question, prompt, interaction and evaluation (QPIE) procedure.…

In massive open online course (MOOC) environments, computer-based analysis of course reviews enables instructors and course designers to develop intervention strategies and improve instruction to support learners' learning. This study aimed to automatically and effectively identify learners' concerned topics within their written reviews. First, we…

Comparative studies on paper and pencil--and computer-based tests principally focus on statistical analysis of students' performances. In educational assessment, comparing students' performance (in terms of right or wrong results) does not imply a comparison of problem-solving processes followed by students. In this paper, we present a theoretical…

To be able to support students' competence development in solving physics problems over the course of a lesson series effectively, teachers need a proper appreciation of students' deficiencies. As teachers commonly assess students' competence by means of written tests, teachers are challenged to interpret students' work on these tests and to…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to study the use of FIS Response Analysis for Critical Thinking Assessment (FRACTA) method to assess critical thinking in STEM problem solving. The use of FIS (facts, ideas and solutions) chart as a tool to elicit student critical thinking responses and the method of scoring the responses are investigated. Method:…

Background: Invention and mastery learning approaches differ in their foundational educational paradigms, proposed mechanisms of learning, and potential impacts on learning outcomes. They also differ in their resource requirements. We explored the relative effects of 'invent and problem-solve, followed by instruction' (PS-I) learning compared to…

Purpose: This paper aims to compare two types of prompts, encouraging participants to think about real-world examples or engineering principles to show how these two approaches can result in vastly different design practices. Design/methodology/approach: Two studies (N = 20, N = 40) examine the impact of two different prompts. Non-expert students,…

A mathematical client-driven task known as Model-Eliciting Activities was implemented with students of different levels of achievement (i.e., low, average, and high) at the high-school level. The study strived to prove that Model-Eliciting Activities can be solved by students at any achievement level and be used as an assessment tool. Students…

From the perspective of Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory and Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), dynamic assessment (DA) highlights the role of mediation in the learning process by unveiling the distance between actual learning proficiency and potential learning development. DA is more helpful in fostering students' ability to solve problems…

The advent of problem-based assessment has opened the question of whether or not conventional approaches to assessment are truly a representative of students' knowledge (Lampert, 2001). In an attempt to find out about the suitability of problem-based tests in evaluating student-teachers' knowledge of teaching English, a problem-based test was…

As clinical reasoning is a fundamental competence of physicians for good clinical practices, medical academics have endeavored to teach reasoning skills to undergraduate students. However, our current understanding of student-level clinical reasoning is limited, mainly because of the lack of evaluation tools for this internal cognitive process.…

Bayesian techniques have become increasingly present in the social sciences, fueled by advances in computer speed and the development of user-friendly software. In this paper, we forward the use of Bayesian Asymmetric Regression (BAR) to monitor intervention responsiveness when using Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) to assess oral reading…

Although traditional methods to collect similarity data (for multidimensional scaling [MDS]) are robust, they share a key shortcoming. Specifically, the possible pairwise comparisons in any set of objects grow rapidly as a function of set size. This leads to lengthy experimental protocols, or procedures that involve scaling stimulus subsets. We…

In this article, the author argues first, that critical-thinking skills do exist independent of disciplinary thinking skills and are not compromised by interaction effects with the major; and second, that standardized tests (e.g., the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, which is his example throughout the article) are the best way to measure…

The success of Response-to-Intervention (RTI) and similar models of service delivery is dependent on educators being able to apply effective and efficient remedial procedures. In the process of implementing problem-solving RTI models, school psychologists have an opportunity to contribute to and enhance the quality of our remedial-procedure…