Describes an exploration the author and his seventh-grade students undertook as they wrote essays about objects of personal significance. Describes how they examined a piece of literature (an essay) as a model for their own writing, how they spent some time talking and listening to one another about their personal objects, and how they then wrote…

Students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) are required to pass the same competency exams as students enrolled in general education in order to graduate to new grade levels and to earn a high school diploma. In this study, the authors taught students with SLD a self-directed organizational strategy designed to assist them in passing the…

The topic of the assignment for eighth-grade students was reporting on the forest fires in Indonesia in chronological order, from 26 August to 27 September 1997. The final stage of the assignment was composing a report in essay format. The goal of this presentation was to examine the historical interpretation of the events and to simultaneously…

In this article, the author relates her experiences teaching a history course titled "Introduction to the Modern World." She relates how some of her colleagues immediately began providing her with unsolicited warnings regarding the difficulty of engaging students in world history and the impossibility of covering "500 years of the whole world" in…

This paper reports on a test that is being used to fulfill a university writing examination requirement for non-native speakers of English. The test, which requires students to read two passages, write short-answer comprehension and synthesis questions, and write an argument essay on a topic related to the passages, replaces a test that was based…

This study investigated the score exchangeability of concept maps with problem-solving essays. Of interest was whether sixth-grade students' concept maps predicted their scores on essay responses that used concept map content. Concept maps were hypothesized to be alternatives to performance assessments for content-area domain knowledge in science.…

This study examines a process-oriented ESL writing assessment called the Computerized Enhanced ESL Placement Test (CEEPT). The CEEPT at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign or its non-computerized alternative (EEPT) have since 2000 offered a daylong process-oriented writing assessment in which test takers are given extended time to plan,…

This research study investigated the use of technology tools to support constructivist learning experiences in a preservice teacher education reading methods course. Learning opportunities based on Kolb's learning styles model were used to support understanding of course content in the constructivist environment. Technology tools were used during…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

Grades in college freshman English composition courses were predicted from high school rank in class, multiple-choice writing scores, essays, current Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) Verbal scores, and scores from a revised version of the SAT-Verbal. Data were obtained from 21 English courses at 17 different colleges with some supplementary data…

This revised and updated handbook written by recent medical school graduates offers a firsthand account of successful strategies for the medical school admissions process. Six chapters discuss the following topics: (1) premedical preparation (planning undergraduate study and picking the right college); (2) power techniques for higher grades…

It has been found that when examinees are allowed to choose a subset of constructed response (CR) items to answer on a test, they tend to choose differently and often perform lower on more popularly chosen items. The purpose of this study was to examine this finding. Using an experiment that incorporated a revised Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry…

A study investigated attitudes toward and practices of plagiarism of Japanese college students writing in English. Data were drawn from two senior theses written in English and two in Japanese, 30 other student academic papers, interviews with students, and a questionnaire administered to 46 undergraduate and graduate students. In both…

This brochure offers a plan to help college students study for tests. It explains how to prepare for a test and reviews techniques for taking multiple choice, essay, and other types of examinations. Organization, planning, and time management are essential for becoming a successful student. Regular reviews are the key to reducing test anxiety and…

Results from an ongoing series of studies designed to describe changes in students' self-assessments across time are presented. In these studies, medical students predicted their performance on essay examinations in their first 2 years of medical school. Self-assessment is a valuable skill for clinical practice, and the importance of knowing what…