Overview and Problem of Practice: The evaluation of student learning in higher education is of interest to many stakeholders including students, faculty, higher education administrators, employers, governmental entities, and accreditors. Despite this interest, many institutions struggle to successfully facilitate the process of evaluating student…

The aims of university System Dynamics (SD) programs include the mastery of systems thinking skills, modeling skills, and/or application to solving real-world, dynamic, complex problems. Existing research has articulated learning sequences of what learners should know and be able to do, and when. It is called the competence development framework…

Individual readiness assurance tests (iRATs) are frequently graded in team-based learning (TBL) classrooms, with the goal of incentivizing individual pre-class preparation. The purpose of this study was to determine whether shifting to an ungraded iRAT process affects student preparation and learning, as measured using assessment scores, and…

Multiple-true-false (MTF) assessments can provide granular feedback on course materials, which stems from the format of the MTF question and helps to enhance student understanding and illuminates misconceptions that can be hidden with other assessment types (Brassil & Couch, 2019). The purpose of this study was to document how students use and…

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' perspectives on the intent and purpose of grading, the effectiveness of grading systems, and how large, complex systems can implement effective change. The design of the study was qualitative, based on an anonymous survey mixed with open-ended and Likert Scale questions. The participants in this…

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the US-based First-Year Composition (FYC) instructors understand and facilitate metacognition in their classes and assess students' metacognition through exploratory, mixed methods approaches. I argue that even if we understand the importance of metacognition generally for student populations, we…

This convergent mixed methods study examined the impact of student learning objectives (SLOs) and the evaluation process on teachers' sense of efficacy. The study participants included kindergarten through eighth grade teachers from one large urban Midwestern school district. The quantitative research questions examined teachers' reported sense of…

The instructional and assessment environments that students experience can have an enormous impact on their mathematical success, their understandings of what mathematics is, and their views of themselves as learners and doers of mathematics. While there has been ample research conducted about how teachers use assessment results to inform their…

This study was guided by two key questions: First, what dimensions of continuous improvement do school leaders believe are most important to foster student performance in urban K-12 schools? Second, how does Alabama compare to national leaders regarding their approach to continuous improvement? Initially developed by Meehan et al. (2002), the…

Higher education in post-independence Africa remains trapped in foreign knowledge systems, despite decades of strong cries to replace them with Afrocentric systems. The purpose of this dissertation-in-practice was to evaluate the Africanization of an undergraduate program at a college in Southern Africa. Using the CIPP Model of evaluation, a…

This dissertation investigates the application of network models in educational assessment across diverse learning settings, encompassing both clinical and classroom environments. As educational paradigms shift and digital tools become more embedded in learning processes, traditional assessment methods often fall short in effectively capturing the…

Within the confines of this study, the researcher investigated Project Lead the Way (PLTW) Engineering curriculum goals within Missouri high schools. The study measured Missouri PLTW teachers' perceptions of various elements of the curriculum as well as state and national PLTW End of Course student assessment data to determine if a relationship…

Despite the prevalence of student learning objectives (SLOs) in teacher evaluation systems throughout the United States, research on the validity of student and teacher SLO scores used for high-stakes decisions is lacking. For this reason, this dissertation is comprised of two chapters that examine student and teacher-level SLO performance data…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to gain an understanding of nursing faculty members' lived experiences of Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in undergraduate nursing education. As owners of their programs' curriculum, nursing faculties are charged with the responsibility of providing needed knowledge, skills, and…

This study extends existing student ratings research by exploring how teaching methods, individually and collectively, influence a minimum standard of student achievement on learning objectives and how class size impacts this influence. Twenty teaching methods were used to predict substantial or exceptional progress on each of 12 learning…