Item Response Theory (IRT) is a ubiquitous model for understanding humans based on their responses to questions, used in fields as diverse as education, medicine and psychology. Large modern datasets offer opportunities to capture more nuances in human behavior, potentially improving test scoring and better informing public policy. Yet larger…

This brief, produced by WestEd as part of a collection of Crisis Response Resources, provides guidance and resources to help district and school leaders ensure students with disabilities are well supported through distance learning prompted by the coronavirus crisis. The brief begins with key questions to guide adminis­trators as they consider how…

This is the fifth report in the "School District Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic" series, covering changes that occurred in public school districts between April 24 and May 8, 2020. Data for this report were collected on May 7 and 8. School districts' responses for this period were captured by the fifth wave of the American Enterprise…

Engagement has received significant research attention in recent years in an effort to better understand student achievement and the lack of it. Oral participation is generally highly valued in American classrooms and is often thought to be a good indicator of students' engagement in learning. As a result, many college instructors require and/or…

The benefits of collaborative learning, although widely reported, lack the quantitative rigor and detailed insight into the dynamics of interactions within the group, while individual contributions and their impacts on group members and their collaborative work remain hidden behind joint group assessment. To bridge this gap we intend to address…

Survey results from a national sample of economics instructors describe the grading policies and practices in principles of economics courses. The survey results provide insights about absolute and relative grading systems used by instructors, the course components and their weights that determine grades, and the type of assessment items used for…

This article presents a rubric for evaluating student performance on written case assignments that require qualitative analysis. This rubric is designed for three purposes. First, it informs students of the criteria on which their work will be evaluated. Second, it provides instructors with a reliable instrument for accurately measuring and…

The tension between criterion-referenced and norm-referenced assessment is examined in the context of curriculum planning and assessment in outcomes-based approaches to higher education. This paper argues the importance of a criterion-referenced assessment approach once an outcomes-based approach has been adopted. It further discusses the…

In this paper, we applied the crowdsourcing approach to develop an automated popularity summary scoring, called wild summaries. In contrast, the golden standard summaries generated by one or more experts are called expert summaries. The innovation of our study is to compute LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) similarities between target summary and…

The online environment challenges social work educators in their approach to developing students' cultural awareness and culturally competent skills. To develop student competencies, it is important for accredited social work programs to consider both their explicit and implicit curricula. Although research has focused on the influence of…

Getting students to use grading feedback as a tool for learning is a continual challenge for educators. This work proposes a method for evaluating student performance that provides feedback to students based on standards of learning dictated by clearly delineated course learning outcomes. This method combines elements of standards-based grading…

The purpose of this study was to understand students' perspectives on the role of homework. Middle school students (N = 506) volunteered to complete open-ended surveys describing their perceptions regarding the effectiveness of homework. Qualitative analysis revealed that students identified several instructional and noninstructional reasons for…

In the course overview, the authors state that this course prepares those who enroll to teach Stretch and Studio Composition at the University of New Mexico by introducing relevant theory and pedagogy in the areas of basic writing, multilingual writing, metacognition, and reading instruction. While the English 537: Teaching Composition Practicum…

The "assessment 'for' learning" movement in education has increased attention to self-grading and peer-grading practices in primary and secondary schools. This research synthesis examined several questions pertaining to the use of self-grading and peer-grading in conjunction with criterion-referenced testing in 3rd- through…

This study followed mindset changes in elementary teachers as they transitioned from traditional grading to standards based grading during the earliest stages of the change process. A pre- and post-survey of mindsets of participants, individual interviews, and a focus group interview were conducted. While the results of the pre- and post-survey…