Teachers and school leaders frequently express a disconnect in the purpose and importance of teacher evaluation, particularly as it relates to educator growth. At the same time, some schools are beginning to communicate student growth through a standards-based grading philosophy. One way schools might "walk the talk" of their grading…

Construction management education in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) domain is increasingly challenged with managing limited resources while increasing instructors' teaching effectiveness and improving students' learning outcomes. To address this challenge, the authors proposed a new automated activity-on-node (AON)…

Traditional letter and number grades are inaccurate and harmful to children, while research indicates that standards-based grading is both more accurate and better for all stakeholders. However, despite standards-based report cards (SBRCs) coming in many forms, the best number and arrangement of performance level descriptors (PLDs) remains…

Preliminary evidence regarding the effectiveness of a participation-based, formative assessment pedagogy in the laboratory component of undergraduate science classes is presented in this paper. The formative approach to teaching lab is unique in science education given the prevailing paradigm of summative assessment via grading lab reports. The…

High school administrators desire a high graduation rate, and government actors and community members pressure administrators to raise this rate. In the context of this challenging dynamic, principals sometimes compel teachers to alter their grading practices. While amending grading practices may provide the impression of improvement, it is…

Bimodal grade distributions indicate a gap in learning, where the highest quartile of students is skilful in the subject matter, but the lowest quartile is not retaining course material that demonstrates a good level of understanding. Students in the lower quartile do not necessarily have the same challenges as remedial students (i.e., those that…

I show that there are better measures of student college performance than grade point average (GPA) by undertaking a fine-grained empirical investigation of grading within a large public university. The value of using GPA as a measure of comparative performance is undermined by academically weaker students taking courses where the grading is more…

Teachers consider many different kinds of factors in determining student grades. They use a mix of achievement and non-achievement factors in grading decisions, to the criticism of educational measurement experts (Brookhart, 1991; Brookhart, 1993; Frary et al., 1993; Popham, 2009). The factors that influence this decision making are particularly…

As labor-based grading contracts gain momentum in first-year writing classrooms, new kinds of response to writing take center stage. We explore how session notes composed by embedded peer tutors and students become rich tools in a writing process and create a gateway to the writing center for first-year students. By reading session notes in…

This article examined student experiences before and after an essay writing assignment that required the use of ChatGPT within an undergraduate engineering course. Utilizing a pre-post study design, we gathered data from 24 participants to evaluate ChatGPT's support for both completing and grading an essay assignment, exploring its educational…

This action research study, set in a midwestern high school in the United States, was designed to investigate the impact of implementing equitable grading practices in a first semester ninth-grade biology course. Many grading practices commonly used in classrooms in the United States are subjective, can be used to maintain compliance in the…

Undergraduate research experiences provide engaging learning opportunities but are often not formally assessed for gains in knowledge and skills. This study examined undergraduate research assessment practices and the implementation of a satisfactory/unsatisfactory (S/U) research course in all academic units within a college of agricultural and…

Providing students with feedback on their performance is a critical part of enhancing student learning in chemistry and is often integrated into homework assignments, quizzes, and exams. However, not all feedback is created equal, and the type of feedback the student receives can dramatically alter the utility of the feedback to reinforce correct…

Research on flexible assessment suggests that providing students with choice in assignments can increase motivation and deepen investment in learning. Although instructors are often advised to adopt flexible assessment, they are also warned about potential detriments such as perceived lack of rigour among colleagues, the stress that…

The same L2 speaking performance may be analysed and evaluated in very different ways by different teachers or raters. We present a new, technology-assisted research design which opens up to investigation the trajectories of convergence and divergence between raters. We tracked and recorded what different raters noticed when, whilst grading a…