This paper suggests that when a course is planned within one culture for delivery to members of another culture, appropriate quality control of assessment becomes an issue of major proportions. Based on their experience of presenting an Aid Agency-funded Masters course in a developing country in the Pacific, the authors describe the processes to…

The concept of fail-forward can be used as a teaching technique to motivate students to learn from their mistakes. For example, when students are allowed to re-work incorrect responses on a test for a partial grade they are failing-forward. In this paper we look at the effects of failing-forward on student effort in online learning environments.…

Assessment continues to be a topic of discussion and concern for many music educators and music teacher educators. The discussion of assessment in music education can spark lively and passionate debate among music educators, music teacher educators, students, policy makers, and parents alike. This article offers a discussion of some of the…

The Lithuanian Informatics Olympiads (LitIO) is a problem solving programming contest for students in secondary education. The work of the student to be evaluated is an algorithm designed by the student and implemented as a working program. The current evaluation process involves both automated (for correctness and performance of programs with the…

Struggling schools that come under increased accountability pressure face a number of challenges, changing instructional policies and practices to facilitate student improvement. But what effect does school accountability have on teachers' mobility decisions? This study is the first to exploit policy variation within the same state to examine the…

We define Grade Lift as the difference between average class grade and average cumulative class GPA. This metric provides an assessment of how lenient the grading was for a given course. In 2006, we started providing faculty members individualized Grade Lift reports reflecting their position relative to an anonymously plotted school-wide…

Participation, a commonly graded component of composition classrooms, is rarely the focus of current research studies. While some discussions have addressed grading practices or ways to increase participation, student and instructor voices have yet to be included in studies of classroom participation in composition courses. Yet these voices are…

The main purpose of this study is to focus on Swedish PE teachers' experiences with a criterion-referenced grading system and its practical consequences. It aims specifically at investigating the dimensionality of grades and how teachers reason and effectuate when grading students. The study consists of two parts: quantitative data collection of…

Although Social Security funds are in decline and no solution is evident, few politicians have the temerity to try to change the system. Why? Because Social Security is the third rail in politics: if one touches it, he or she will die. The field of education has an issue that is equally as lethal: grading. Grading is one of the most private…

Despite the recommendations of some measurement specialists, teachers do not always assign grades based on achievement only. The primary purpose of this study is to clarify the meaning of grades, and to examine some of the factors teachers consider when assigning final grades with a focus on borderline cases. The sample consisted of 516 American…

Japanese college students (N = 18) aspiring to become English teachers in junior or senior high schools studied several examples of educational games and created their own English games as an assignment during the last two weeks of an educational psychology course. Results indicated (1) a significant increase between pre- and post-…

This paper investigates the use of new media technologies, in particular wikis, for the compiling and grading of group assessment tasks. Wikis are open web pages that can be viewed and modified by anyone with internet access and are well known for their collaborative nature. Wikis are also transparent, which means that any edit/modification is…

This article addresses educators' concerns about using asynchronous online discussions in lieu of face-to-face discussions. Drawing from research on asynchronous online education and Bloom's taxonomy, the authors introduce the system of "original examples" and "value-added comments" that they have developed to promote engaging and meaningful…

In this study, the researcher sought to determine whether Nebraska teachers and administrators agreed about what constitutes sound grading practice. The results of this study indicated that Nebraska teachers and administrators working in public schools in 7th-12th grade settings did not always agree about what constituted sound grading practice.…

This developmental evaluation used multiple methods to evaluate the implementation of a grading reform initiated by two math teachers in a large traditional middle school in greater Minnesota. The reform, titled "Grading for Learning," was developed based on a review of scholarly research and a collaboration of an interdisciplinary group…