This article reports on an innovative approach to teaching Calculus I which was initiated in a two-semester course designed for students at risk of failing Calculus I. The treatment consisted of voluntary oral assessments offered before every written examination. Analyses showed that the treatment students did significantly better than the control…

Assessment practices that aim to promote both quality and equity may be compromised in a higher education market where students are consumers and grades the currency exchanged for measures of success. In such a climate, academics report feeling pressured to make course content and assessment less challenging in order to obtain positive student…

According to the Internet World Stats (2010), the growth rate of internet usage in the world is 444.8 % from 2000 to 2010. Since the number of internet users is rapidly increasing with each passed year, e-learning is often identified with web-based learning. The institutions, which deliver e-learning service via the use of computer and internet,…

Open education resources (OER) are taking centre-stage in many higher educational institutions globally, driven by the need to raise institutional profiles, improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning and achieve universal access to education. Many academics attracted to the idea of turning teaching materials into OER have, however, found…

The current post-apartheid system of education in South Africa requires students to be critical thinkers. Education institutions utilise a variety of assessment strategies; peer assessment, self-assessment, and group assessment are some of the formative assessments that are crucial in the promotion of students. This article reports on the findings…

Student success is at the heart of both institutional effectiveness and the community college mission, yet measuring such success at community colleges is problematic. This article highlights three efforts to grapple with this problem--a multistate work group of system- and state-level policymakers to create an improved set of student success…

Within the (Computer-Supported) Collaborative Learning (CS)CL research community, there has been an extensive dialogue on theories and perspectives on learning from collaboration, approaches to scaffold (script) the collaborative process, and most recently research methodology. In contrast, the issue of assessment of collaborative learning has…

In psychological research, one often aims at explaining individual differences in S-R profiles, that is, individual differences in the responses (R) with which people react to specific stimuli (S). To this end, researchers often postulate an underlying sequential process, which boils down to the specification of a set of mediating variables (M)…

Recursive partitioning is an analytic technique that is useful for identifying complex combinations of conditions that predict particular outcomes as well as for delineating multiple subgroup differences in how such factors work together. As such, the methodology is well suited to multidisciplinary, life course inquiry in which the goal is to…

Developmental research often involves studying change across 2 or more processes or constructs simultaneously. A natural question in this work is whether change in these 2 processes is related or independent. Associative latent transition analysis (ALTA) was designed to test hypotheses about the degree to which change in 2 discrete latent…

Calculating and reporting appropriate measures of effect size are becoming standard practice in psychological research. One of the most common scenarios encountered involves the comparison of 2 groups, which includes research designs that are experimental (e.g., random assignment to treatment vs. placebo conditions) and nonexperimental (e.g.,…

Scalability coefficients play an important role in Mokken scale analysis. For a set of items, scalability coefficients have been defined for each pair of items, for each individual item, and for the entire scale. Hypothesis testing with respect to these scalability coefficients has not been fully developed. This study introduces marginal modelling…

The American Academy of Dermatology (2008) reports that our students will experience 80% of their lifetime exposure to the Sun by the time they are 18. Further, research has demonstrated that continued exposure to the Sun's ultraviolet rays can lead to skin aging, sunburn, immune suppression, ocular melanoma, cataracts, corneal burns, and even…

An internal standard method applicable to undergraduate instrumental analysis or environmental chemistry laboratory has been designed and tested to determine the Henry's law constants for a series of alkyl nitriles. In this method, a mixture of the analytes and an internal standard is prepared and used to make a standard solution (organic solvent)…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined emerging comprehension monitoring, including error detection, evaluation, and correction within the context of story understanding in preschool children with and without language impairment. Method: Thirty-seven children between the ages of 30 and 61 months completed an online comprehension monitoring…