At the authors' public liberal arts institution, biology masters students are required to enroll in BIOL 5050: Teaching Techniques. Course topics include designing effective lectures, assessment, classroom management, diversity in the classroom, and active learning strategies. The impact of this type of training on graduate students' attitudes and…

Musical Futures is an approach thought to make classroom music more engaging for students by drawing their outside musical lives into their school experiences. Consisting of complementary approaches arising from out-of-school contexts, Musical Futures incorporates the learning processes of popular musicians and community musicians. It is…

Self-efficacy beliefs have proven to be an important influence on an individual's learning success. Badging is increasingly an element of innovative technologies for educational computing such as MOOCs, adaptive learning systems, smart learning environments, game-based learning, and gamification, among others. However, there is not strong evidence…

The English language functions as a global language that facilitates communication among people of different lingua-cultures. This background leads to the question of whether the traditional language assessment still fulfils the needs of the majority of language learners who will use English for various purposes with people from different…

Despite much progress in improving the quality of preschool programs, there is still an uneven quality of instruction in early childhood settings. Providing support and professional development (PD) for teachers that is practical, systematic and sustainable is one potential avenue to increase classroom quality in preschool, including quality of…

This article examines a unique music curriculum and assessment environment through the fndings of a practical action research project carried out in secondary schools. I address two current international educational issues: the relationship between formal and informal learning in music, and how individuals' contributions in collaborative groups…

This study compares the performance of two estimation algorithms of new usage, the Metropolis-Hastings Robins-Monro (MHRM) and the Hamiltonian MCMC (HMC), with two consolidated algorithms in the psychometric literature, the marginal likelihood via EM algorithm (MML-EM) and the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), in the estimation of multidimensional…

Proponents of dynamic testing have advocated its use as a replacement or addition to conventional tests. This research aimed to investigate the effects of using versus not using a pretest on both the outcome on the posttest and the processes used in solving inductive reasoning tasks in dynamic testing using a graduated prompts training.…

The gold standard for identifying more effective pedagogical approaches is to perform an experiment. Unfortunately, frequently a hypothesized alternate way of teaching does not yield an improved effect. Given the expense and logistics of each experiment, and the enormous space of potential ways to improve teaching, it would be highly preferable if…

Research syntheses in education, particularly meta-analyses and best-evidence syntheses, identify evidence-based practices by combining findings across studies whose constructs are similar enough to warrant comparison. Yet constructs come preloaded with social, historical, political, and cultural assumptions that anticipate how research problems…

In this paper, I mine the scholarly work of longtime MIT professor Donald Schön for a set of tactics which, having originated in his studies of the architectural design studio, are shown to be relevant to the architectural analysis of existing buildings. In this way, a specific and hitherto untapped potential of Schön's work is developed, but more…

"Rubric" is a term with a variety of meanings. As the use of rubrics has increased both in research and practice, the term has come to represent divergent practices. These range from secret scoring sheets held by teachers to holistic student-developed articulations of quality. Rubrics are evaluated, mandated, embraced and resisted based…

Organizational culture is a popular topic in management classes, but teaching about culture in a way that undergraduate students can relate to can be a challenge. In this article, we describe the Texas A&M culture exercise, which draws attention to how to diagnose and evaluate organizational culture using each of Schein's three layers of…

The aim of this study was to determine the mediating effect of learning engagement on the relationship between perceived teacher feedback and college students' academic performance, and the moderating effect of assessment characteristics on the relationship between perceived teacher feedback and learning engagement. A sample of 2,458 students in a…

The study was to evaluate effectiveness of institutional Internal Quality Assurance (IQA) structure in Ghanaian public universities. The convergent parallel design within the mixed methods research paradigm based on the Context and Input levels of the CIPP evaluation model was adopted. A sample of 2,844 was drawn out of 125,799 staff and students…