Program assessment has been a topic of significance in higher education over the last decade. Initially, program assessment was implemented in response to concerns over the quality of college graduates' education and increasing competiveness in the job market for American college graduates. Recently, higher education institutions have been…

This article reports the experience of a study group in a public university in Colombia, formed mostly by academic coordinators who worked in the design of assessment rubrics. Its focus is on the experience of the academic coordinator of the English program for teenagers, who concentrated on implementing the rubric to assess the students' oral…

This article outlines the current state of and recent developments in the use of corpora for language assessment and considers future directions with a special focus on computational methodology. Because corpora began to make inroads into language assessment in the 1990s, test developers have increasingly used them as a reference resource to…

Reading fluency has traditionally been recognized as a competency associated with word recognition and comprehension. As readers become more automatic in word identification they are able to devote less attention and cognitive resources to word decoding and more to text comprehension. The act of reading itself has been associated with growth in…

One of the best-known methods for setting a benchmark standard on a test is that of Angoff and its modifications. When scored dichotomously, judges estimate the probability that a benchmark student has of answering each item correctly. As in most methods of standard setting, it is assumed implicitly that the unit of the latent scale of the…

The 2013-2014 academic year marks the rollout of the redesigned advanced placement (AP) chemistry course and exam. There have been many questions as to why the course was redesigned and how the new examination will differ from its legacy version. In this article we give a brief overview of the legacy course and examine why a redesign occurred in…

Contemporary interest in STEM education is fueled, in part, by the poor performance of U.S. students on national and international assessments. According to a recent National Research Council (2011) report on STEM education in the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicates that approximately 75% of U.S. 8th…

The focus of this paper is on the design, administration, and scoring of a dynamically administered elicited imitation test of L2 English morphology. Drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural psychology, particularly the concepts of zone of proximal development and dynamic assessment, we argue that support provided during the elicited imitation test…

This study examined ratings of fourth graders' oral reading expression. Randomly assigned participants (n = 36) practiced repeated readings using narrative or informational passages for 7 weeks. After this period raters used the "Multidimensional Fluency Scale" (MFS) on two separate occasions to rate students' expressive…

Martial arts, including taekwondo, have become popular in the United States and are being taught in some physical education programs. Unfortunately, martial arts skills in physical education are likely to be taught in a traditional manner (mastering basic skills and performing routines as a large group) and assessed in a closed setting. The…

We provide a preliminary exploration into the use of note taking when combined with video examples. Student volunteers were divided into three groups and asked to perform two problems. The first problem was explored in a classroom setting and the other problem was a novel problem. The students were asked to complete the two questions. Furthermore,…

This article describes efforts in Massachusetts and the Multi-State Collaborative to Advance Learning Outcomes Assessment (MSC) to develop a statewide system for learning outcomes assessment that does not rely on standardized testing and that is designed to transcend the traditional tensions and boundaries between campus-based formative and…

Efficacy studies of educational programs often involve mediator analyses aimed at testing empirically appropriate theories of action. In particular, in the studies of professional development programs, the intervention targets primarily teachers' pedagogical skills and content knowledge, while the ultimate outcome is the student achievement…

The Regulations of the Commissioner of Education provide that an elementary-level science test is to be administered in Grade 4 to serve as a basis for determining students' needs for academic intervention services in science. The New York State Grade 4 Elementary-Level Science Test consists of two required components: a Written Test and a…

Graphic novels are an important literary mode with a complex history and practice, and provide struggling readers of all kinds with a visual (but equally rigorous) reading experience. English teachers must determine the criteria for quality examples of this mode to provide the highest quality texts possible to every student. This article uses…