A flexible approach to assessment may promote students' engagement and academic achievement by allowing them to personalise their learning experience, even in the context of large undergraduate classes. However, studies reporting flexible assessment strategies and their impact are limited. In this paper, I present a feasible and effective approach…

Teaching the general psychology course provides instructors with the opportunity to invite students to explore the dynamics of behavior and mental processes through the lens of theory and research. Three innovative writing assignments were developed to teach students to think like a psychologist, operationalized as enhancing critical thinking,…

Homemade PowerPoint games are a low-tech alternative for using game design in classrooms. To date, much of the research examining the games has not shown an improvement in performance. This has led some to question whether the games are properly aligned with the instructional strategies researchers have used as justifications to support using…

Experts are more proficient in manipulating and translating between multiple representations (MRs) of a given concept than novices. Studies have shown that instruction using MR can increase student understanding of MR, and one model for MR instruction in chemistry is the chemistry triplet proposed by Johnstone. Concreteness fading theory suggests…

Active learning is increasingly promoted within institutions of higher education to assist students develop higher order thinking and link knowledge to meaning. In this paper, the authors evaluate the use of weekly online quizzes based on prescribed preparatory material as a tool to incentivize preparatory reading in order to enable and encourage…

Feedback is known to have a large influence on student learning gains, and the emergence of online tools has greatly enhanced the opportunity for delivering timely, expressive, digital feedback and for investigating its learning impacts. However, to date there have been no large quantitative investigations of the feedback provided by large teams…

A substantial proportion of the classroom time involves exposing students to a variety of assessment tasks. As students process these tasks, they develop beliefs about the importance, utility, value, and difficulty of the tasks. This study aimed at deriving a model describing the multivariate relationship between students' perceptions of the…

In this article, the author proposes an innovative, exam-based homework grading method to facilitate both collaboration among students and individual accountability while learning a complex theory and applying it to solve a problem. Results from this novel approach to grading a "comparative advantage theory" homework assignment, using an…

Peer assessment can expand the cognitive schemas of students, facilitate knowledge construction, and promote discussion and cooperative learning among students and their peers. In recent years, the application of the internet to conduct peer assessment activities has been widely implemented. The advantages of networked peer assessments over…

Critical thinking is considered a necessary learning outcome for all college students and essential for academic and career success. There are many challenges to developing a comprehensive approach to teaching and assessing critical thinking skills. Although the literature has many examples of the incorporation of critical thinking and assessment…

This global, quantitative study explores the instructional and assessment strategy use of leadership educators who teach online, academic credit-bearing leadership studies courses at graduate- and undergraduate-levels. Participants include 81 graduate-level and 37 undergraduate-level instructors who taught an online leadership studies course…

Although feedback is often seen as a critical component of the learning process, many open questions about how specific feedback features contribute to the effectiveness of feedback remain--especially in regards to peer feedback of writing. Nelson and Schunn (2009) identified several important features of peer feedback in their nature of feedback…

Recruiters seek candidates with certain business skills that are not developed in the typical lecture-based classroom. Instead, active-learning techniques have been shown to be effective in honing these skills. One skill that is particularly important in sales careers is the ability to make a powerful and effective presentation. To help students…

This article details what resulted when I re-designed my undergraduate statistics course to allow failure as a learning strategy and focused on achievement rather than performance. A variety of within and between sample t-tests are utilized to determine the impact of unlimited test and quiz opportunities on student learning on both quizzes and…

The study aims to examine the effectiveness of web-facilitated, hybrid, and online learning modalities among undergraduate students in a public institution so as to determine the adaptability and replicability of these three learning modalities. This is a quasi-experimental study. A total of 103 undergraduate exercise science majors participated…