The purpose of this multiple intrinsic case study was to describe how Northeastern United States middle school teachers and students engaged with a new automated writing evaluation tool used to score and provide feedback on extended essay assignments to improve teaching and learning writing. Richard Elmore's (1993) instructional core framework is…

This study investigated the extent to which an extended time limit in an argumentative writing test affects the quality of argumentation in L2 writing. Thirty-two adult ESL learners each wrote two essays on different prompts, one in 30 minutes and one in 45 minutes in a counter-balanced design. The 64 essays were analytically rated by four trained…

Evaluation of student written work during summative assessments is an important and critical task for instructors at all educational levels. Nevertheless, few research studies exist that provide insights into how different instructors approach this task. Chemistry faculty (FIs) and graduate student instructors (GSIs) regularly engage in the…

Essay exams offer many benefits for instructors who seek to vary their assessment methods and engage students in critical discourse, yet they also pose many challenges and require thoughtful construction and evaluation. The author provides an extensive overview of the literature to illuminate best practices for designing and assessing effective…

The author of this article describes individual pre-class and group in-class assignments based on current news articles. Guided student pre-class readings of periodical articles can form the basis for engaging in-class group assignments. Many economics instructors seek to develop student skills at applying the concepts under study to analyze…

Employers have continually indicated that writing instruction is much needed in higher education across all majors. It has become more imperative now than before to better prepare our graduates for professional success in an age of increasing writing necessity, data analytics and reporting, and technical sophistication. Writing assessment in a…

With support from the California Community College Chancellor's Office, the MMAP Research Team, a team of The Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges (RP Group) conducted a literature review on various assessment measures used for English as a Second Language (ESL) programs to explore effective assessment methods including…

Peer learning is often used in classrooms to help and support knowledge and skill acquisition. One form of peer learning, peer assessment, involves the quantitative (i.e., peer ratings) or qualitative (i.e., peer feedback) evaluation of a learner's performance by another learner among students. While we might be concerned about the quality of the…

This paper reports the design of learning-oriented formative assessments in an EFL writing course that involved learners in regularly responding to teacher feedback. Following major assessment and feedback frameworks developed recently, these formative assessments were explicated in three aspects: the scheduling of learning and assessment…

We implemented two different approaches of using peer review to support undergraduate essay assignments for students taking large second-year courses in life sciences and biology: a web-based online peer review (OPR) approach and a more traditional face-to-face peer review (FPR) approach that was conducted in tutorial settings. The essays…

Although service learning provides unparalleled real world experiential student learning opportunities and benefits to four major constituencies--student, faculty, community and institution, it takes place in an uncontrolled environment introducing uncertainty into the instructional process. Faculty might avoid this valuable approach to…

Starting from the premise that good writing requires sound thinking, this paper presents a workable process for developing and using writing assignments as thinking and learning tools within a historical and philosophical context. Though presented from the perspective of a chemist, this process is actually general in nature and links writing…

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…

This investigation focused on a group of 17 faculty drawn from disciplines in the humanities social sciences and natural sciences. Using in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and qualitative coding strategies, this study examined how faculty conceptualized the term critical thinking (CT), and how they assessed for it in general education…

This essay describes Louisiana State University's search for an alternative to available placement protocols. Under the leadership of Les Perelman at MIT, LSU collaborated with four universities to develop iMOAT, a program for administering online assessments of student writing. This essay focuses on LSU's On-line Challenge, which developed from…