Homework problem sets allow a student to measure personal understanding and enable an instructor to evaluate individual student and overall class performance. For this study, students were asked to self-grade their homework assignments for a junior-level Fundamentals of Transportation Engineering course. Although self-grading studies have been…

Used correctly, assessments play a vital role in the success of a course: they provide valuable feedback to students regarding their knowledge gaps, encourage deeper understanding of the material, help students to develop critical thinking, and guide students to accomplish a course's learning goals. They also provide a signal to future employers,…

Homework has been shown to provide positive impacts on student performance at the undergraduate level. Providing an incentive for students to complete homework assignments, however, can be challenging and result in grade inflation or promotion of a mentality where students attempt to collect points rather than use these assignments for feedback…

An interactive textbook for a material and energy balances course measured over 1,300 reading interactions and hundreds of auto-graded problems per student each term. Specifically, seven cohorts and 601 students completed over 700,000 reading interactions and 150,000 auto-graded problems. Median reading participation was over 93%. Median correct…

Allowing students to make choices (e.g., on the reading materials to read for an assignment) can contribute to creating learning environments that promote critical thinking, and intrinsic motivation among students. Given this potential that choice has to enhance instruction, it is reasonable to examine its potential as a contributor to enhanced…

Many middle school (MS) students have been exposed to inappropriate instructional practices in physical education (PE). Involvement in and exposure to these inappropriate instructional practices becomes a common occurrence, causing students to believe this is what should take place in their PE class. The purpose of this study was to better…

I describe the motivation, structure, implementation, and student feedback of my mastery-based testing (MBT) system with a significant final exam component in Calculus I and II since 2016. Grades for each written assignment, quiz, and exam question were assigned on a Mastery/Progressing/Needs Improvement (M/P/NI) scale. Homework and quizzes could…

With a strong movement of schools starting to use standards-based grading practices, one of the aims of this study was to learn if traditional grading practices communicate grades that are accurate based on the students' learning of the course objectives. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which employability and homework…

Homework gives students the opportunity to practice new skills in both familiar and unfamiliar situations, and to develop an understanding of related concepts. Although some of these goals can be easily accomplished in online homework, many systems are less useful for handling open-ended questions. Written homework, on the other hand, takes time…

Traditionally, assessing and grading students in science has been an exercise centered around points and percentages (Feldman, Kropf, and Alibrandi 1989; Prøitz 2013). However, with the introduction of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the need to revisit grading practices stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing number of…

This paper examines the presence of systematic differences in teachers' grading behaviour across gender and whether these can be attributed to teacher bias. This study measures these differences by comparing teachers' grades with national exams, which are externally and anonymously marked. Consistent with the literature, the gender gap in teacher…

Student success and attempts on hundreds of online homework problems housed in a fully interactive online textbook, Material and Energy Balances zyBook, were studied over three cohorts of students (n=284). Auto-graded homework questions with randomized numbers and content can explore proficiency in the course material. Students are allowed to…

During the pandemic, there were many discussions concerning how the pandemic was affecting students' learning and their ability to function in a remote classroom. However, the day-to-day routines and instructional strategies of teachers were being overlooked. The purpose of this research is twofold. The first is to provide examples and information…

Arguing that there is a "glaring" disconnect between recommended policy and actual practice in the area of grading, the authors outline four common grading practices that they say can impair instructional integrity and distort academic outcomes: 1) the use of the an average, or arithmetic mean, of performances to calculate a final grade;…

Historically, race and poverty have been contributing factors when considering gaps among students in their academic achievement. The purpose of this study was to determine how employability and homework scores within traditional points and percentages weighted grading models impact grades from an equity lens. This study analyzed 779 students'…