A basic consideration in large-scale assessments that use constructed response (CR) items, such as essays, is how to allocate the essays to the raters that score them. Designs that are used in practice are incomplete, in that each essay is scored by only a subset of the raters, and also unbalanced, in that the number of essays scored by each rater…

This essay presents the use-first-and-investigate-later (UFAIL) approach to technological use through two case studies: the atomic bomb in World War II and chemical defoliants during the Vietnam War. The methodology of UFAIL is as follows: despite limited understanding of an array of potential effects (medical, environmental, etc.), technology…

This article is an introduction to two other articles in this issue, Catherine Maxwell's "Teaching 19th-century aesthetic prose" and Kirsteen Anderson's "The whole learner: the role of imagination in developing disciplinary learning". It highlights the significance of the courses described in Maxwell's and Anderson's accounts…

In this essay Thomas Fallace argues that John Dewey can best be described as a pragmatic historicist and a genetic psychologist. This means that Dewey believed that the best way to understand any idea, phenomenon, or entity is to trace its history, that the history of the individual and race pass through distinct stages of development, and that…

The aim of this phenomenographic study was to identify student teachers' (N = 20) ways of experiencing health education as a school subject, using semi-structured interviews and essays. The findings indicated that the target phenomenon was discussed through the general objective of the subject in five ways: health education as 1) a context for…

This study primarily investigated the validity and reliability of the writing assessments and their backwash effects on the undergraduates of Institute of International Studies, Ramkhamhaeng University (IIS-RU). The English-major students had academic writing skills problem, especially among the non-native English speakers, whose writing ability…

Skilled writers have at their disposal a range of rhetorical strategies for positioning themselves as competent members of a particular discourse community, including the judicious use of self-referential pronouns (e.g. "I," "she," "he") to overtly signal authorial presence. However, while researchers routinely recommend that second language (L2)…

The legacy and sustainability of a university education requires student independence and ownership of learning. Adopting a student-centred constructivist approach to teaching and learning allows students to develop a web of self-constructed, interconnected understanding, and supports their development into lifelong learners. The efficacy of this…

Numerous studies have shown both anecdotal and formal evidence of the benefits students obtain from doing writing activities in classes. Little formal discussion exists about how student writing in geography classes professionally affects faculty. In this article, focus shifts from student-derived benefits of writing in classes to faculty…

Surveys in 2 undergraduate psychology classes (N = 86) found that students felt less comfortable taking all-essay tests than taking multiple-choice or short-answer tests. The dominant examination format for students in university and in high school had been multiple-choice tests. We describe measures to encourage essay writing in large classes.…

Advanced knowledge is the basis for higher education, but less research on higher education deals with it. The essay elaborates on the major point in several ways: first, the practice-oriented higher education research tends to ignore advanced knowledge; secondly, higher education shall never turn a blind eye to advanced knowledge due to their…

Handbooks denote representative authority, which gives their content normative value and through which editors and authors can emphasize certain views and orientations within a field. The representative authority of a handbook is reinforced in various ways, both obvious and subtle. The "SAGE Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction" is no exception…

This essay examines the dangers of attempts by educators to clothe the teaching profession in a veneer of scientific certainty. The author argues that teaching is an art, not a science, and should be proudly proclaimed as such.

In this article, the author describes a practice of peer evaluation that she has found fruitful, both for developing students' sense of audience and for elevating the status of peer reviewers, whose opinions on successful writing are too often viewed as less trustworthy than those of their instructors. This technique of peer evaluation involves…

The third goal of Zen practice, helping others achieve enlightenment, suggests that teachers should help students learn about their own composing practices and histories as part of their instruction, but they cannot help others until they learn to help themselves by reflecting on their own processes and histories, becoming enlightened, and…