Peer assessment training was motivated, developed and evaluated to address fairness in higher education group learning. Team-centric pedagogies, such as team-based learning have been shown to improve engagement and learning outcomes. For many instructors using teams, peer assessments are integral for monitoring team performance and ensuring…

Massive Open Online Courses appear to have high attrition rates, involve students in peer-assessment with patriotic bias and promote education for already educated people. This paper suggests a formative assessment model which takes into consideration these issues. Specifically, this paper focuses on the assessment of open-format questions in…

Alternative high schools serve some of the most vulnerable students and their programs present a significant challenge to evaluate. Determining the impact of an alternative high school that serves mostly at-risk students presented a significant research problem. Few studies exist that dig deeper into the characteristics and strategies of…

The SAS Educational Value-Added Assessment System (SAS[R] EVAAS[R]) is the most widely used value-added system in the country. It is also self-proclaimed as "the most robust and reliable" system available, with its greatest benefit to help educators improve their teaching practices. This study critically examined the effects of SAS[R] EVAAS[R] as…

D'Eon et al. concluded that change in performance self-assessment means from before to after a workshop can detect workshop success in their and other situations. In this commentary, their recommendation is refuted by showing that (a) self-assessments with balanced over- and underestimations are still biased and should not be used to evaluate…

Some students are less accurately measured by typical reading tests than other students. By asking teachers to identify students whose performance on state reading tests would likely underestimate their reading skills, this study sought to learn about characteristics of less accurately measured students while also evaluating how well teachers can…

A conception of invalidity as bias is related to content validity for standardized achievement tests. A method of estimating content bias for each of three content domains (a priori, curricular, and instructional) based on the specification of a content taxonomy is also proposed. (Author/CM)

Discusses the importance of fairness in evaluation studies of second-language programs and the potential for misinterpretation of studies which are not program-fair. Strategies designed to overcome this problem from the perspective of standardized tests include: specific tests for each program, program-specific plus program-neutral measures,…

In the social sciences, evaluating the effectiveness of a program or intervention often leads researchers to draw causal inferences from observational research designs. Bias in estimated causal effects becomes an obvious problem in such settings. This article presents the Heckman Model as an approach sometimes applied to observational data for the…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires the reporting of participation in assessments overall and by subgroup, including students with disabilities. As states and school districts strive to meet the goals for adequate yearly progress required by NCLB, the use of individual accommodations continues to be scrutinized for effectiveness,…

Handicapped children of cultural and linguistic groups different from those of the majority culture are presently unable to attain an appropriate education. Bilingual/multicultural exceptional children are overrepresented in special education classes in comparison to their percentage of the total population, as a result of biased assessment…