Mathematics teachers need to teach students more than just a laundry list of mathematical skills. Many of us also want to train our students to use mathematical habits of mind. However, traditional grading schemes usually do not allow us to reward intellectual courage and modesty. In this paper, I report on my implementation of specifications…

We investigated how Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms could automatically grade answers to open-ended inference questions in web-based eBooks. This is a component of research on making reading more motivating to children and to increasing their comprehension. We obtained and graded a set of answers to open-ended questions embedded in a…

Background: Weight bias is a pervasive problem for adolescents in school contexts. Despite evidence of negative attitudes towards students who are overweight, comparatively little research has examined whether teachers provide biased assessments of student work. Aims: The purpose of this study was to experimentally test whether middle and high…

Assessment leadership has often been associated with school leaders (SL), comprising principals and vice-principals. This study aimed to examine the under-researched assessment leadership role of Middle Leaders (ML) instead. Data was drawn from a larger, mixed-methods project that involved a self-report questionnaire administered to principals,…

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to understand the lived experiences of secondary teachers who grade student work, including their grading beliefs, decisions, and feedback practices at Discovery Hills Unified School District. The theory that guided this study was self-determination theory as it helps explain the…

The pandemic brought a massive shift in traditional education strategies. Educational literature is focusing on case studies for online-learning platforms. This research aims to break down the adaptations in teaching styles and curriculums across different countries due to the worldwide shift towards newer technology and learning mediums to…

Online education programs are on the rise and institutions of higher learning are utilizing Learning Management Systems (LMS) to facilitate online learning. The Community of Inquiry (CoI; Garrison et al., 1999) framework identifies three categories of cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence to guide the development of online…

Group work, where students work on projects to overcome challenges together, has numerous advantages, including learning of important transferable skills, better learning experience and increased motivation. However, in many academic systems the advantages of group projects clash with the need to assign individualised marks to students. A number…

This paper builds on an earlier study that developed a 10 question framework for improving the quality of criteria sheets (also known as rubrics) used in Master of Education programmes. To test that framework 15 rubrics were independently evaluated by seven teachers using the above mentioned framework. Raw data from the evaluations were collated…

Co-assessment is a type of participatory assessment in which the teacher and student jointly discuss, negotiate and assess the student's task or performance. Although the literature on co-assessment is scarce, some authors highlight the benefits for students of participating in co-assessment in higher education, including learning, improved…

The hallmark of a well-designed game is player persistence -- the same characteristic professors hope to cultivate in their students, especially in the face of the student retention crisis. The four studies reported here include an archival study, a focus group, and two experiments. They each test a minor game mechanic that may have a small but…

In any science field, including physics, it is important to remain abreast of new assessment methods to cater to the 21st-century student. The rationale of this paper is to argue for a move away from the use of lower-order thinking skills (LOTS) in e-assessment in favor of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), in line with Bloom's Revised Taxonomy.…

The purpose of this action research project was to investigate the impact of a mastery-based grading system on the mindsets of high school students. The mixed methods data collection for this project took place over the course of two years. The students were part of a high achieving and mostly high socio-economic status community. I collected…

Subscore reporting under item response theory models has always been a challenge partly because the test length of each subdomain is limited for precisely locating individuals on multiple continua. Diagnostic classification models (DCMs), providing a pass/fail decision and associated probability of pass on each subdomain, are promising…

Grading reliability for a class can be measured as the correlation between the students' grade point average (GPA) and the grades they received in that class. Grading leniency can be measured as the difference between the average grade for the class and the students' average GPA. Data from more than fifty-thousand course sections show that lenient…