After the passage of "No Child Left Behind," and especially after Obama-era Race to the Top initiatives, rising accountability for improved achievement and widespread dissatisfaction with the instructional value of statewide test reports led many school districts to purchase computer-adaptive "interim" testing systems. A common…

Intercultural competence in foreign language teaching has gained importance in recent times. Although current work has highlighted the advantages of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) for intercultural development, little is known about its potential for teaching literature in secondary schools. Treating literature itself as an art…

In this article, we focus on the design of a second language (L2) formative feedback system that provides linguistic complexity graph reports on the writings of English for special purposes students at the university level. The system is evaluated in light of formative instruction features pointed out in the literature. The significance of…

The purpose of this study was to determine if teachers are currently providing screencast video feedback for students as a means of formative assessment while they develop digital content. If this approach was already in place, the benefits of the practice were explored to support existing research on the method. If they did not use the…

One of the main challenges higher educational institutions encounter amid the recent COVID-19 crisis is transferring assessment approaches from the traditional face-to-face form to the online Emergency Remote Teaching approach. A set of language assessment principles, practicality, reliability, validity, authenticity, and washback, which can be…

The following research reports on a collaborative effort between two university field supervisors for an elementary teacher preparation program in the Pacific southwest. Utilizing practitioner inquiry and situated learning as conceptual frameworks, the authors qualitatively examine the experiences ten elementary education teacher candidates have…

It has been argued that successful professional development efforts, especially in assessment-literacy, need to address emotional components and the existence of implicit conceptions in order to raise consciousness and ultimately transform practice (Xu and Brown, 2016: p. 156). Experiential approaches have been shown to be highly effective for…

Growing class sizes and the rapid advancement of information technology have prompted institutions to implement blended learning in their academic offering. There are few reports in the literature on a holistic assessment of the effectiveness of the instructional design of blended learning courses for large classes. We defined effectiveness from a…

The study analyses the scope and role of Bloom's Taxonomy (1956) in reforming teaching-learning practices in the classroom by employing a systematic balance of questions from both the lower and higher domains of learning in the summative assessment. Thus, this study analyses the annual question papers designed by the Boards of Intermediate and…

In this article, we use a two-dimensional assessment to examine the experimental impacts of a mathematics learning trajectory-oriented formative assessment program on student strategies for problems involving multiplication and division. Working from the theory that the development of students' multiplicative reasoning involves improvements in…

English dominates as an international language for science and research. Consequently, this is the most widely used language in university bilingual (e.g. Spanish-English, Chinese-English, Swedish-English) science courses around the world. However, very little is known about how to foster bilingual scientific writing in these types of courses.…

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues are urgent in education. We developed and evaluated a massive open online course (N = 963) with embedded equity simulations that attempted to equip educators with equity teaching practices. Applying a structural topic model (STM)--a type of natural language processing (NLP)--we examined how…

To understand instruction during the spring 2020 transition to emergency distance learning (EDL), we surveyed a sample of instructors teaching undergraduate EDL courses at a large university in the southwest. We asked them how frequently they used and how confident they were in their ability to implement each of nine promising practices, both for…

In this commentary, Mary James highlights two problems she deemed critical during her work exploring the relationships between assessment and learning in theory and practice. First, efforts to improve assessment for learning were not always successful either in improving performance or in other ways. Second, and this may be a reason for the first…

Thinking and learning are corresponding and interdependent processes in every classroom. To improve learning, teachers must be open to new ideas, particularly ideas that locate conditions for maximum learning. This paper presents four overlooked but critical ideas that identify a common area, a GAP experience within which maximum learning is…