As the COVID-19 pandemic motivated a shift to virtual teaching, exams have increasingly moved online too. Detecting cheating through collusion is not easy when tech-savvy students take online exams at home and on their own devices. Such online at-home exams may tempt students to collude and share materials and answers. However, online exams'…

Aim/Purpose: This article investigates the process of identifying and correcting hallucinations in ChatGPT-4's recall of student-written responses as well as its evaluation of these responses, and provision of feedback. Effective prompting is examined to enhance the pre-evaluation, evaluation, and post-evaluation stages. Background: Advanced Large…

The educational value of portfolios as assessments has been widely acknowledged across the higher education sector and literature as providing a platform to promote student-centred and reflective learning (Brown, 1997; Snadden & Thomas, 1998; Karlowicz, 2000). While there is plentiful research investigating the benefits of providing portfolios…

The paper attempts to give an overview of evaluation in higher education institutions with particular emphasis on the faculties of humanities, education and social sciences disciplines at the University of Eswatini (Swaziland) in Southern Africa. It describes the general methodology of evaluation and identifies obstacles and relevant strategies…

Metacognitive skills are important because they help people develop an understanding of effective strategies. This skill also helps improve one's critical thinking and creative thinking so as to be able to overcome problems in everyday life. The purpose of this research is to train students' metacognitive skills through biology learning using the…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental research was to reveal the JiRQA learning supports on biology students' achievement in the multi-ethnical classroom in higher education. The research sample was included 125 students consisting of the ethnics of Dayak, Javanese, and Malay. The achievement data were obtained from the pretest and posttest using…

We examined the efficacy of a combined electronic essay writing and editing mnemonic driven strategy with 24 college students in a two-year postsecondary program for students with developmental disabilities. We used a pre-posttest experimental design with random assignment to treatment/control groups. During 26 sessions each consisting of 50 min.,…

This study is an investigation of the effects of linguistic features on quality of second language (L2) writers' essays for writing course placement at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB), and by implication at other universities and colleges. This study addresses the following research questions: (1) To what extent do selected linguistic…

In this article, the authors report on a study designed to explore college students' experiences in two writing environments, or ecologies: a media-free, silent zone and a media-saturated zone. Participants shared varying reactions to both environments. Some individuals found media distracting while writing, and others found it to be an energy…

Under the framework of item response theory (IRT) and generalizability (G-) theory, this study examined the effects of item difficulty on rating reliability and construct validity on both the constructed-response (CR) items and essay items on English examinations. The data collected for this study were students' scores and responses on the two…

Rating essays is a complex task where students' grades could be adversely affected by test-irrelevant factors such as rater characteristics and rating scales. Understanding these factors and controlling their effects are crucial for test validity. Rater behaviour has been extensively studied through qualitative methods such as questionnaires and…

The problem of poor writing skills at the postsecondary level is a large and troubling one. This study investigated the writing skills of low-skilled adults attending college developmental education courses by determining whether variables from an automated scoring system were predictive of human scores on writing quality rubrics. The human-scored…

Higher education institutions in the United States provide placement essay tests to ensure international students' readiness for college courses. The high-stakes nature of placement tests makes educators and researchers seek significant components of differentiating levels of placement tests. This study investigated the prediction of two levels…

Different genres of writing entail various levels of syntactic and lexical complexity, and how this complexity influences the results of Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) programs like Grammarly in second language (L2) writing is unknown. This study explored the use of Grammarly in the L2 writing context by comparing error frequency, error types…

Students' critical thinking skills are very important in the 21st century. Learning strategies can play a role in enhancing students' critical thinking skills in the Nutrition and Health lecture. The results of a survey in 2013 showed that the implementation of learning strategies had not given students the opportunity to practice their critical…