With the advent of the newly developed Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards, innovative assessments, including technology-enhanced items and tasks, will be needed to meet the challenges of developing valid and reliable assessments in a world of computer-based testing. In a recent critique of the next generation…

As someone who values collaboration with her students, supports students' ownership of their own learning, and looks for opportunities to increase their critical learning skills, Ce Rosenow finds many benefits to using task-specific rubrics that evolve from class discussion. She explains that this process is ideal for honors students because of…

As an educator, the author has been drawn to rubrics at times and repelled at other times. After working with students at various levels for many years, she has come to learn the value of rubrics that are well-crafted. A well-crafted rubric is difficult to create, and it might be easier to dismiss the entire notion of rubrics than to devote the…

This paper discusses plagiarism origins, and the ethical solutions to prevent it. It also reviews some unethical approaches, which may be used to decrease the plagiarism rate in academic writings. We propose eight ethical techniques to avoid unconscious and accidental plagiarism in manuscripts without using online systems such as Turnitin and/or…

Liberal arts mathematics courses can provide non-majors the opportunity to connect mathematical topics with areas of personal interest. This article describes two end-of-unit writing assignments (on voting and graph theory) that have been structured so that each student is able to synthesize course material in a unique way, while ensuring a…

Rubrics are a rapidly growing subfield of information literacy assessment, providing a powerful tool for understanding student learning. This paper explores the role that the creation and application of an information literacy rubric can play in program development. Because of the Information Literacy in Student Writing assessment project at…

As a language skill, writing has had, still has and will continue to have an important role in shaping the scientific structure of human life in that it is the medium through which scientific content is stored, retained, and transmitted. It has therefore been a major concern for writing teachers and researchers to find a reliable method for…

Developing activities which are effective in assessing what counts in social studies and showing progress is challenging for social-studies teachers. In this article, we explore the three dimensions of the social studies learning area which were identified in the Nature of Social Studies (NSS) scale developed by the National Monitoring Study of…

This study was conducted in order to investigate the effectiveness of trait based assessment on teaching writing skill for EFL learners. Designed as pre-experimental study with one group pretest and posttest design, it examined 20 students of the second semester of English Department of "Hamzanwadi University" in the academic year…

In this article, co-written by a teacher and a professor, the authors examine possible explanations for why Adam (first author), a New York City public school special educator, failed the edTPA, a teacher performance assessment required by all candidates for state certification. Adam completed a yearlong teaching residency where he was the special…

This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core…

An ePortfolio Assessment Institute (AI) structured as a faculty development opportunity was undertaken to increase faculty confidence in teaching and assessing ePortfolios and to collect reliable data about student performance on four learning outcomes associated with an institutionwide ePortfolio initiative. Faculty raters participated in the…

Assessments are powerful tools for informing teachers and students about where student thinking stands with relation to a learning goal. Yet, few studies provide qualitative analyses of assessment practice across a unit. This study uses a framework of nine dimensions of effective assessment practice in science classrooms to compare more and less…

This paper describes a classroom-based study designed to investigate the aspects of improvement in students' English language writing abilities from five Paragraph Writing Skill Labs, organized in 2015. The labs were specially designed to train students to produce a well-organized paragraph based on the framework of Oshima and Hogue (1988, 1991),…

Creativity is a simple concept that can be difficult to get one's head around. In its most basic sense, creative means "original and of high quality." Probably the foremost characteristic of creative students is that they put things together in new ways. Teachers can assess creativity at every grade level and in every subject, using both basic and…