The Big Bang: UK Young Scientists' and Engineers' Fair is an annual three-day event designed to promote science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) careers to young people aged 7-19 through experiential learning. It is supported by stakeholders from business and industry, government and the community, and brings together people from various…

The Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) is working to comply with the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Improvement Act of 2006 (Perkins) to ensure that its graduates have mastered the technical skills needed by business and industry. The legislation requires that each state identify and approve program assessment strategies…

An online interactive geometry item was developed to explore students' abilities to create prototypical and "tilted" rectangles out of line segments. The item was administered to 1,002 students. The responses to the item were hand-coded as correct, incorrect, or incorrect with possible evidence of a misconception. A variation of the nearest…

The use of drawings as representations of personal mental models or images is one method of analyzing personal beliefs. This article discusses the development of the Draw-An-Environment Test and Rubric (DAET-R) for assessing the mental models or images of the environment held by pre-service teachers. It also provides results of preliminary…

Certain learners are less sensitive to learning environments and can always learn, while others are more sensitive to variations in learning environments and may fail to learn (Cronbach & Snow, 1977). We refer to the former as high learners and the latter as low learners. One important goal of any learning environment is to bring students up…

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he should know, what he shall do." As teachers of American Literature, the authors admire Emerson's faith in the individual and find Thoreau's resistance to conformity an act of daring bravery,…

Purpose: To evaluate the clinical utility of the narrative scoring scheme (NSS) as an index of narrative macrostructure for young school-age children. Method: Oral retells of a wordless picture book were elicited from 129 typically developing children, ages 5-7. A series of correlations and hierarchical regression equations were completed using…

The purpose of this study was to examine the validity and reliability of a passage-copying measure that could be used to indicate general writing proficiency among secondary school English language learners. Participants were 57 students in 3 high school English as a second language classes. Alternate-form reliabilities for passage copying were…

In this study, a corpus of expert-graded essays, based on a standardized scoring rubric, is computationally evaluated so as to distinguish the differences between those essays that were rated as high and those rated as low. The automated tool, Coh-Metrix, is used to examine the degree to which high- and low-proficiency essays can be predicted by…

This study evaluated a "substantively driven" method for scoring NAEP writing assessments automatically. The study used variations of an existing commercial program, e-rater[R], to compare the performance of three approaches to automated essay scoring: a "brute-empirical" approach in which variables are selected and weighted solely according to…

Swain's Output Hypothesis proposes a facilitative effect for output on the acquisition of second language morphosyntax. In the context of classroom instruction, a number of studies and reviews suggest that explicit instruction in pragmatic elements promotes development. Other studies have offered less conclusive evidence of the effectiveness of…

Chapters in this book include: (1) New e-Learning Environments: e-Merging Networks in the Relational Society (Blanca C. Garcia); (2) Knowledge Building in E-Learning (Xinyu Zhang and Lu Yuhao); (3) E-Learning and Desired Learning Outcomes (Ralph Palliam); (4) Innovative E-Learning Solutions and Environments for Small and Medium Sized Companies…

As one part of a broad reform package, the 2011 Indiana General Assembly passed Senate Enrolled Act 001 (Public Law 90), a bill that significantly changed the way Indiana teachers will be evaluated and compensated. An earlier Center for Evaluation & Education Policy (CEEP) policy brief, "Revamping the Teacher Evaluation Process"…

Multigenre writing is defined as a collection of pieces written in a variety of genres but centered on one topic. It is distinctively different from traditional research writing in that the writer has autonomy to select a topic of interest, determine which genres will best express the information and make decisions throughout the writing process.…

Distance writing programs still struggle with assessment strategies that can evaluate student writing as well as their ability to communicate about that writing with peers at a distance. This article uses Kim, Smith and Maeng's 2008 distance education program assessment scheme to evaluate a single distance writing program at Old Dominion…