There is an urgent need for our educational system to shift assessment regimes from a narrow, high-stakes focus on grades, to more holistic definitions that value the qualities that lifelong learners will need. The challenge for learning analytics in this context is to deliver actionable assessments of these hard-to-quantify qualities, valued by…

Designers have a limited selection of K-12 online course creation standards to choose from that are not blocked behind proprietary or pay walls. For numerous institutions and states, the use of the iNACOL "National Standards for Quality Online Courses" is becoming a widely used resource. This article presents the final phase in a…

Using three tenents of Critical Race Theory, this study examines the influence of edTPAs on diverse early childhood pre-service teachers in a graduate program. Findings suggest that (1) Color-blind admissions policy and practice were at odds with edTPA's perceived academic language demands; (2) A tension emerged between financial demands of edTPA…

Integrating technology into assessment processes in university contexts can change educational practices, in some cases by fostering self-regulated learning and in others by enabling more interactivity and participation among users. In this paper, we examine the opportunity to use electronic rubrics (erubrics) to assess learning. We report a…

In this study we evaluated the predictive validity of conceptual scoring. Two independent samples of Spanish-speaking language minority preschoolers (Sample 1: N = 96, mean age = 54.51 months, 54.3% male; Sample 2: N = 116, mean age = 60·70 months, 56.0% male) completed measures of receptive, expressive, and definitional vocabulary in their first…

Globalization affects many aspects of our lives in the 21st century and requires us to adopt an international perspective. For this study, global content was integrated into one course of an undergraduate special education teacher education program. A total of 118 teacher candidates were enrolled in the course over two semesters. A pre-post test…

The purpose of this study was to examine 4 early writing measures used to monitor the early writing progress of 1st-grade students. We administered the measures to 23 1st-grade students biweekly for a total of 16 weeks. We obtained 3-min samples and conducted analyses for each 1-min increment. We scored samples using 2 different methods: correct…

As character education is gaining currency, some institutions have started to incorporate character education into its instructional practices. However, this is not an easy task. Limited hours of contact and teachers' insufficient know-how of teaching and evaluating students' characters have hampered the efforts. This paper reports a small effort…

The realities of the 21st-century learner require that schools and educators fundamentally change their practice. "Educators must produce college- and career-ready graduates that reflect the future these students will face. And, they must facilitate learning through means that align with the defining attributes of this generation of…

Engaging students in meaningful applications of their knowledge is a key aspect of both addressing the standards and providing greater access. Not only do the standards emphasize the importance of meaningful engagement in real-world tasks, but evidence shows that engagement is strongly related to student performance on assessment tasks, especially…

Using a primarily experimental design, this study investigated whether discussion boards in online community college philosophy classes can be designed in the Blackboard course management system to lead to higher order thinking. Discussions were designed using one of two teaching techniques: the activation of prior knowledge or the use of peer…

Background: Every year, significant effort and resources are expended around the world to develop innovative instructional strategies and materials to improve undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education. Despite convincing evidence of efficacy with respect to student learning, most will struggle to become successfully…

The purpose of this research was to determine how information synthesis skills can be taught effectively, and to discover how the level of synthesis in student writing can be effectively measured. The intervention was an information synthesis lesson that broke down the synthesis process into sequenced tasks. Researchers created a rubric which they…

The challenge of teaching in the sciences is not only conveying knowledge in the discipline, but also developing essential critical thinking, data analysis, and scientific writing skills. I outline an exercise that can be done easily as part of a microbiology laboratory course. It teaches the nature of the research process, from asking questions…

Traditional instructional materials such as textbooks contain significant educational content, but the navigational mechanisms to access that content are limited and, more importantly, not designed with learning in mind. To address this gap, we present the Adaptive Map, a novel organization and navigation tool designed to help students better…