E-learning is gradually gaining prominence in higher education, with universities enlarging provision and more students getting enrolled. The effectiveness of automated essay scoring (AES) is thus holding a strong appeal to universities for managing an increasing learning interest and reducing costs associated with human raters. The growth in…

Higher education has changed dramatically in the last 40 years. What was the privilege of rich nations or poor countries' elites is now an integral part of international competition and development strategies. However, the rapid expansion in enrollment has posed significant challenges in terms of providing adequate financing, access and securing…

Raters of Georgia's (USA) state-mandated college-level writing exam, which is intended to ensure a minimal university-level writing competency, are trained to grade holistically when assessing these exams. A guiding principle in holistic grading is to not focus exclusively on any one aspect of writing but rather to give equal weight to style,…

After passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, states assumed greater responsibility for designing their own accountability and assessment systems. ESSA requires states to measure "higher order thinking skills and understanding" and encourages the use of open-ended performance assessments, which are essential for…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important…

In this essay Charles Harvey offers a worried reflection on the range, extent, depth, affects, and effects of the perpetual assessment of the person in (post)industrial nations in the contemporary world. Harvey begins his analysis by appealing to the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard to provide an interpretive…

Educational theorist Richard Kiely highlights the central importance of "high intensity dissonance" in successful international service-learning. This essay applies Kiely's model of dissonance and transformative learning to Intercordia, an international service-learning program offered at the University of St. Michael's College and the…

This essay explores intersections among Jesuit, Quaker, and feminist theologies and pedagogies of social justice education in order to propose and elaborate an innovative theoretical and theological framework for experiential learning in religious studies that prioritizes relationality, called erotic education. This essay then applies the…

In an earlier paper, Slee and Keenan demonstrated that it was possible for tertiary education institutions to design culturally responsive assessment procedures that complied with standardised assessment policy. The authors' paper described "Growing Our Own," an initiative between Charles Darwin University and Northern Territory Catholic…

Teaching Chinese students in an American university can be both challenging and rewarding. Cultural and language differences can lead to some superficial confusion and interpretational problems. However, the vast differences in the ways Chinese students view the role of the public sector, as compared to the US, can mean that the instructors and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to outline a reflective essaying model as a useful way of encouraging learning in higher education. It aims to define reflective essaying as the free and serious play of mind on an interesting topic in an attempt to learn. Design/methodology/approach: Reflective essaying is first introduced as a unifying…

The matter of cities is, as urban critic Jane Jacobs argued, a complex problem akin to the life sciences. As a rich tradition of philosophical and geographical thought has suggested (Bergson, Lefebvre, and Harvey), the city is not a thing but a process. In order to reconcile process methodology and pedagogy, this essay explores six key ideas…

Adult learners are already involved in the process of self-regulation; hence, higher education institutions should focus on strengthening students' self-regulatory skills. Self-regulation can be facilitated through formative assessment. This paper proposes a model formative assessment strategy that would complement existing university teaching,…

The 13th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2020) was originally arranged to take place in Ifrane, Morocco. Due to the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) epidemic, EDM 2020, as well as most other academic conferences in 2020, had to be changed to a purely online format. To facilitate efficient transmission of…

This study examined the difficulty level of essay topics used in the large-scale assessment of writing in relation to five different scoring models, and sought to determine what effects the scoring models would have on passing rates. In model one, examinee's score is the direct result of a score assigned by the reader or the sum of scores assigned…