Smoking and obesity are chief causes of mortality, morbidity, and medical expenditure. However, few studies have investigated the linkage between subjective obesity status and smoking behavior. This study examines whether females in a normal body mass index range who perceive themselves as obese are more likely to smoke than those who do not…

Popular teamwork assessments have been strongly criticized on the grounds of poor psychometric properties and their disconnect with conceptual models of teamwork. These issues raise concerns with respect to our ability to evaluate efforts devoted to advancing teamwork in academia. We report the development of a teamwork assessment that builds on…

Many initiatives exist to increase the adoption of open educational practices (OEP) within universities, but few initiatives start by exploring the capacity of educators to adopt open approaches. This paper addresses this challenge, suggesting that in order to build OEP capacity, universities should build on the existing skills of local champions…

Contributing to a lack of studies related to generic skills (GS) assessment, especially in non-Western university contexts, this article reports a study that explored practices and challenges of assessing students' GS in the Business Administration programmes in six Vietnamese universities. Content analysis of interviews with 41 teachers of skills…

National standardized assessment programs have increasingly included extended written performances, amplifying the need for reliable, valid, and efficient methods of assessment. This article examines a two-stage method using comparative judgments and calibrated exemplars as a complement and alternative to existing methods of assessing writing.…

While assessments of general social proficiency constructs are numerous in the ASD literature, and in the special education literature more broadly, investigations of the latent structure(s) of "vocational-specific" social proficiency constructs have yet to receive serious empirical investigation. Furthermore, trends in this literature…

The U.S. Department of Education (Department) Office of Inspector General (OIG) Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2018 through 2022 describes the focus and direction of OIG's operations over the next five years, establishes their organizational goals, and outlines the strategies they will employ to reach those goals and the measures they will use to…

The concept of power is a complex and often intangible aspect of the evaluation process that is frequently a focal topic among the conceptual evaluation literature concerning collaborative or culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) contexts. Unfortunately, there remains a significant theory to practice gap as power is often rarely addressed or…

The University of Kentucky provides an alternative certification program to prepare teacher candidates in moderate and severe disabilities. Observations occur every semester that candidates are in the 2-year program and must be conducted all across Kentucky, often many miles away from campus. University researchers placed cameras in the classrooms…

Preserving the unique contours of cultural communities is integral to the rich weave of our collective human heritage. However, the postcolonial United States (US) educational paradigm, reflected in curricula and standards based on white middle-class norms, has a flattening effect on the vibrancy of diverse languages and community traditions.…

Purpose: The purpose of this research as part of an Erasmus+ funded project tilted Aiding Culturally Responsive Assessment in Schools (www.acras.eu) is to provide an exploratory analysis of survey responses related to culturally responsive assessment policies, professional development and practices that were administered to school principals in…

In Jamaica, schools are placed in six regions which involve one to three parishes, but in one instance, two regions are partially located in one parish. While schools in any jurisdiction should perform in accordance with stated standards and established criteria, there are many factors which seem to mitigate against this expectation. This failure…

The extant research has focused on investigating the effectiveness of the use of closed caption videos for hearing impaired or English as second language learners. Yet, the research about whether such usage can be beneficial for other students is limited. This paper explores the effectiveness of closed caption videos (same-language subtitles) in a…

This research investigated the potential for curricula at the intersection of the arts and the sciences to develop creative productivity of students. The purpose of this research was to develop a series of rubric assessments to evaluate the content and creative and higher order thinking on a variety of teacher-made lesson plans and student-made…

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) strives to provide every student with a positive and productive assessment experience, generating results that are a fair and accurate estimate of each student's achievement. Further, Smarter Balanced is building on a framework of accessibility for all students, including English…