How does one grade an electronic portfolio? This question is one I have thought about, have enacted, and have written about, primarily in reference to ePortfolios used in writing classrooms (Yancey, McElroy, & Powers, 2013). But what happens when the content and developmental levels are changed, in this case from an undergraduate first-year…

Portugal, like many other countries, faces obstacles regarding school-based sexuality education. This paper explores Portuguese schools' approaches to implementing sexuality education at a local level, and provides a critical analysis of potential strengths and weaknesses. Documents related to sexuality education in a convenience sample of 89…

Students' performances in introductory programming courses show large variation across students. There may be many reasons for these variations, such as methods of teaching, teacher competence in the subject, students' coding backgrounds and abilities, students' self-discipline, the teaching environment, and the resources available to students,…

Assessment and evaluation constitutes an important dimension of education. If education is the process of creating the desired changes in an individual's behaviors, evaluation then is the process of making judgments about whether those desired changes are acquired by the individual or not. The existing curricula in Turkey were put into practice…

The purpose of this research is to examine how the topic of social media has been integrated and executed within academic institutions and marketing courses. An exploratory survey of marketing educators that taught social media in their course(s) was undertaken. The survey addressed how social media was embedded within an institute's curriculum,…

Mastery of academic writing skills remains one of the greatest challenges for university students, especially in the first year. Amongst the reasons offered for the challenges are lack of clarity about the university's expectations and low levels of teacher feedback on work submitted, a failure to engage, and low levels of contact with teaching…

There has been a wealth of research examining learning environments as one of the variables that contributes to academic success for students studying science. A constructivist learning environment has been explored as one way to assist students in achieving greater success with science learning. There is a lack of research concerning how and if…

Continued improvement of the training and preparation of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) special agents is critical to the organization's ability to protect the national security of the United States. Too little attention has been paid to the factors that improve new agent trainees' (NATs) ability to learn and succeed in their training…

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…

A central part of education reform today is the wide-ranging and unprecedented effort to either revamp existing teacher evaluation systems or develop and implement entirely new systems. High-quality teacher evaluation systems are seen as one lever for improving the teacher workforce and hence the outcomes of students, including high school…

While there are lots of books with information on why and how to differentiate instruction, here at last is a book that gets to the heart of why some efforts to differentiate flop while others lead to sweeping, positive results. When it's your job to support differentiated instruction in a single school or systemwide, you need the guidance from…

As a method of helping teachers evaluate their own instructional performance on the basis of how that instruction affects learners, teaching performance tests may prove a useful ally to the elementary school principal. (Author)

This article discusses four aspects of assessing children with disabilities: factors that influence assessments (the instruments, environment, examiner, and the child), transactions that occur between the client and caregiver, establishing rapport, and some teaching strategies that are based on a child's learning style. A case study is presented.…

This document provides a reference guide for the Teaching Performance Profile--Diagnostic Evaluation created by the Digicator System, Inc., in response to an acknowledged need for better instructional performance of teachers. This guide is one product of a system designed to synthesize knowledge on teaching and make it available and applicable to…

This research brief explores the extent to which teacher-designed assessments are authentic in inclusive secondary schools and how students with and without disabilities perform on these assessments. Data come from three high schools that are participating in a 5-year national study conducted by the Research Institute on Secondary Education Reform…