This executive summary highlights findings from the main report (published separately) which examines the practical implications of student learning objective (SLO) assessment decisions for teacher appraisal. We present student-level growth data from SLO assessments administered in 2013-2014. Growth data are compared according to type (i.e.,…

Encouraged by previous studies which recommended incorporating insights from Conversation Analysis (CA) into English conversation teaching to improve EFL students' oral proficiency, this paper reports on the findings from Phase I of a longitudinal study designed to investigate the impact of employing a CA-informed teaching (CA-T) model to improve…

Learn about the Challenge Based Science Learning Project and its larger implications for the fields of Next Generation Science Learning and Open Educational Resources. The project involved 18 middle school teachers and five administrators from three U.S. school districts partnering with instructional coaches and learning sciences researchers from…

Background: Students' ability to construct and coordinate units has been found to have far-reaching implications for their ability to develop sophisticated understandings of key middle-grade mathematical topics such as fractions, ratios, proportions, and algebra, topics that form the base of understanding for most STEM-related fields. Most of the…

This study aims to identify an adequate approach for revealing conceptual understanding in higher professional education. Revealing students' conceptual understanding is an important step towards developing effective curricula, assessment and aligned teaching strategies to enhance conceptual understanding in higher education. Essays and concept…

Drawings are an underutilized assessment format in Human Anatomy and Physiology (HA&P), despite their potential to reveal student content understanding and alternative conceptions. This study used student-generated drawings to explore student knowledge in a HA&P course. The drawing tasks in this study focused on chemical synapses between…

This article describes the development of the Community-Based Learning (CBL) Scorecard by a grant-funded consortium of liberal arts institutions. The aim of the scorecard was to promote assessment that improves student learning with an instrument that employs a quantitative scale, allowing for benchmarking across institutions. Extensive interviews…

The development of college students' cultural competence is important in an increasingly diverse world. This exploratory, qualitative, action research study examined how 158 first-year students understood and applied core concepts after participating in a standardized diversity and social justice lesson plan designed using transformative education…

Standards-based assessment rubrics are recognised as an important tool for ensuring clear criteria in higher education. Most of the available evidence on rubrics comes from studies with face-to-face undergraduate students. Our study evaluated the introduction of rubrics into a postgraduate subject that included both online and face-to-face…

As students graduate and enter the workforce, they face the job market's demand for critical thinking (CT) skills. The demand is caused by the market's increasing need for providing professional services that require performing complex tasks. In response to this demand, institutions of higher education are expected to prepare their graduate…

Blended learning is an instructional approach meant to enhance students' learning experiences by merging and deliberately integrating online technology into a face-to-face learning environment. With the increase in online instruction and blended learning comes the need for quality professional development programs that foster learning and…

This study examined how Year 12 students use their inquiry skills in solving conditional probability questions by means of Inquiry-Based Learning application. The participants consisted of 66 students of similar academic abilities in Mathematics, selected from three classes, along with their respective teachers. Observational rubric and lesson…

Transnational students, that is, those who have had one or more years of schooling in the US and are now in school in Mexico, make up a sizeable and growing population. For these students, the language of the home, Spanish, abruptly becomes the language of school and what was the language of school and socialization outside the home, English, is…

The instructional value of rubrics for promoting student learning and aiding teacher feedback to student performance has been extensively researched in the educational literature. There is, nonetheless, a dearth of studies on students' rubric use in second/foreign language contexts, and fewer studies have investigated the factors affecting…

Undergraduate biology majors require biological literacy about the critical and dynamic relationships between plants and ecosystems and the effect human-made processes have on these systems. To support students in understanding systems relationships, we redesigned an undergraduate botany course using an ecological framework and embedded systems…