Background: Experiential educators face difficulties assessing participants and programs because there are so many measurement tools to choose from, many measures have validity issues such as those based on self-reported data, objective tests may not adequately measure social or psychological outcomes, and tests in content disciplines often assess…

Purpose: The goal of the study was to test an intervention using a brief essay as an instrument for evaluating higher-order information literacy skills in college students, while accounting for prior conditions such as socioeconomic status and prior academic achievement, and identify other predictors of information literacy through an evaluation…

The present manuscript reports an attempt to support students in learning to apply knowledge from class to novel situations on course exams. Students took short-essay exams at the end of each unit. Students were offered two practice opportunities during each unit: answering practice questions and participating in a mock exam study session. On…

Large-scale writing programs can add value to the traditional timed writing assessment by using aspects of the essays to assess the effectiveness of institutional goals, programs, and curriculums. The "six learning goals" prompt in this study represents an attempt to provide an accurate writing assessment that moves beyond scores. This…

Composition teachers have generally embraced collaborative learning in the years since Kenneth Bruffee published his first article promoting its advantages in "College English" in 1972. But assigning collaboratively written papers in an introductory college writing course is still rare. This study assesses the benefits and drawbacks of assigning a…

"Voice" is widely considered to be a feature of effective writing. It's no surprise, then, that voice criteria frequently appear on rubrics used to score student essays in large-scale writing assessments. However, composition theorists hold vastly different views regarding voice and how it should be applied in the evaluation of student writing, if…

In this study we report the findings that we obtained when we repeated a study conducted approximately 10 years ago. In the initial study we found that mature students did as well as traditional-entry ones in first-year essays and examinations. However, they did less well initially when writing laboratory reports. In this replication study these…

Over the past two decades the interest and use of student portfolios for assessing student learning outcomes has grown considerably. This paper presents an overview of the portfolio approach to outcome assessment adopted by the Department of Management at California State University, San Bernardino and discusses major issues encountered over six…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

Promoting collaboration skills and dispositions is widely encouraged currently in the field of teacher preparation. However, very few university classrooms incorporate collaboration into their assessment practices. One factor may be the perceived potential lack of soundness of such methodologies. This study is a qualitative examination of the…

This study reports the development and evaluation of a web-based interactive writing environment designed for elementary school students. The environment includes three writing themes, "story pass on", "story chameleon" and "thousand ideas", to encourage reading comprehension, creativity and problem-solving skills of…