Perhaps more than any question other than "How much time should students spend doing homework?" parents and educators want to know, "What kinds of homework assignments are most effective?" Clearly, the answers to this question vary according to many factors, especially the developmental level of students and the topic area. Generally, answers are…

Daily, teachers step foot inside their classrooms with the intentions of making a difference in their students' lives by demonstrating care. Depending on a teacher's individual style, care may be demonstrated in multiple ways. The author explores four distinctive themes of a caring teacher. These are: (1) student-oriented; (2) work-oriented; (3)…

Electronic classroom response systems (CRSs) have been in use in large college lectures for over three decades. Such systems are designed to provide instructors and students with immediate statistical analyses of student electronic responses to multiple-choice questions posed to the class by the instructor. The technique known as peer instruction…

Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) researchers visited 38 public high schools around the United States in 2007 and 2008 with the goal of validating and operationalizing a definition of college readiness. Schools in the sample were selected because they were demonstrating success at enabling more students from underrepresented groups to…

In writing assessment, there are quite a number of factors influencing the marking stability and the reliability of the assessment such as the attitude towards marking and consistency of markers, the physical environment, the design of the items, and marking rubrics. Even the methods to train markers have effects on the reliability of the…

The need for a discussion of school counselor preparation and supervision is supported by the guidelines established by both the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP), 2009 and the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), 2005. The significance of this article is to provide a reflective…

Reviewing the advantages and many disadvantages of conventional grading systems, the article discusses pass/fail grading, suggests the contract system as a solution, and describes a sample contract for a beginning high school child development class. (MW)

In an effort to evaluate the undergraduate pass-fail option system of grading at the University of Texas at Austin, 869 undergraduate students, 269 faculty members, and 35 administrators participated in a questionnaire survey. Results indicated: (1) During the 1973 fall semester, 3,896 undergraduate course registrations out of a total of 155,133…

Grading is at best a problem. Many kinds of grading have been attempted using letters, numbers, words, etc. The letter-grade techniques (typically including A,B,C,D,F) have been the most common in the United States, especially in high school and college. However, some students and faculty have been disenchanted with such techniques. Hence, other…

Undergraduates completed one of two questionnaires that were identical except for the course grading system, pass-fail vs letter grades. The "overjustification hypothesis," which proposes that grades undermine high intrinsic interest but augment low interest in academic tasks, was partially supported. Questions concerning the classroom…

The study examined differences in the classroom grading procedures of 91 preservice teachers for labeled versus nonlabeled gifted students. Ss were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: nonlabeled, labeled achiever, or labeled underachiever. Ss were given packets containing student writing samples and were asked to score the papers…