Analytic rubrics are promoted as important tools to assess learner performance and to improve learning outcomes. Rubrics, however, are not appropriate for every classroom assessment, particularly given the time and effort required to construct well-designed rubrics. In classroom assessment, instructors must balance the beneficial consequences of…

Students in a course on the psychology of language and thought first wrote flash fiction stories and analyzed them using course concepts. As an experiential learning exercise, they subsequently analyzed those stories for a number of psycholinguistic variables using the discourse technology Coh-Metrix. Their assignment was to change a number of…

This paper reports on an interdisciplinary pedagogical research project involving academic literacy experts and lecturers at a School of Nursing. Specifically, the paper focusses on the development of a data-driven analytical rubric to teach and assess critical reflections in year-one nursing. The purpose of the project was to support the teaching…

The field of multilingual testing and assessment has grown rapidly in recent years due to the widespread need to integrate immigrant populations into mainstream education and to provide fair and equitable forms of assessment for all students. However, a continuing emphasis on bilingual students has created a significant gap in testing and…

This publication highlights the key concepts and findings of the 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) study. Oral reading fluency is defined as the ability to read text aloud with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. The NAEP ORF study was administered to a nationally representative sample of over…

We developed assessment tasks aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) that require students to use argumentation and explanation practices along with disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts to make sense of energy-related phenomena. Scoring rubrics were created to evaluate students' ability to make accurate claims, cite…

Increasingly, universities are screening candidates for professorships on their commitment to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI). In 2018, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Heather Mac Donald drew attention, in a "Los Angeles Times" op-ed, to the decision at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) to require…

The Better Math Teaching Network (BMTN) is a networked improvement community (NIC) of researchers and high school teachers from New England who use improvement science principles to deepen student engagement in algebra content. The BMTN began as a pilot during the 2015-16 school year and concluded in fall 2021. Key learnings from the network…

This toolkit provides state and local CTE leaders with actionable resources, guidance and tools to ensure CTE learner voices are elevated and heard for the improvement of CTE policies and practices. The learner voice is often neglected when decisions are made about Career Technical Education (CTE) programs, even though learners themselves are…

Evaluation is often a required component for funded projects; however, the process of undertaking an evaluation does not always result in valuable information that can be used for learning, reflection, and program improvement. In light of methodological shortcomings and lack of meaningful use of evaluations, informal science education researchers…

In this paper, the effectiveness of employing rubric as a self-assessment technique of the project method is investigated, which covers a wide range of knowledge, skills and abilities in a variety of learning objects and activities. The assessment rubric is defined as a descriptive rating guide, which consists of specific pre-defined performance…

We present here an extension of Morrison's and Ruder's "Sequence-Response Questions" (SRQs) that allows for more nuance in the assessment of student responses to these questions. We have implemented grading software (which we call ANGST, "Automated Nuanced Grading & Statistics Tool") in a Microsoft Excel sheet that can take…

Scoring essays written in L2 is one of the most arduous and time-taking tasks for language teachers due to the heavy work involved in the process. In this respect, the present study aimed to build a regression model to predict essay quality using only one or two rhetorical moves in the setting of an English Language Teaching department in Turkey.…

Learning and teaching in the university sector is at an impasse. Almost every university one surveys seeks to produce graduates who are adaptive, creative, curious, and entrepreneurial. But the learning and teaching quality assurance frameworks upon which universities rely to prepare such graduates are comprised of rigidly prescriptive norms,…

This study examined the item and category response option functioning of items on the "Student Risk Screening Scale for Internalizing and Externalizing Behaviors" (SRSS-IE), using item response theory (IRT) methods with a sample of 2,122 middle school students. The SRSS-IE is a screening instrument used to identify students who are…