Collaborative testing has been shown to improve performance but not always content retention. In this study, we investigated whether collaborative testing could improve both performance and content retention in a large, introductory biology course. Students were semirandomly divided into two groups based on their performances on exam 1. Each group…

This article discusses an exploratory study that examined whether a wiki-based project could foster student-centered learning. Student teachers were divided into five groups to tackle a group project which involved creating digital learning materials on wiki that could teach information technology (IT) to secondary school students. As assessment…

Current literature provides many examples of rubrics that are used to evaluate the quality of web-quest designs. However, reliability of these rubrics has not yet been researched. This is the first study to fully characterize and assess the reliability of a webquest evaluation rubric. The ZUNAL rubric was created to utilize the strengths of the…

A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tested the fit of Kelly and Lee's six-factor model of career decision problems among 188 college students. The six-factor model did not fit the data well, but a five-factor (Lack of Information, Need for Information, Trait Indecision, Disagreement with Others, and Choice Anxiety) model did provide a good fit.…

With the rising number of Latino and dual language learner (DLL) children attending pre-k and the importance of assessing the quality of their experiences in those settings, this study examined the extent to which a commonly used assessment of teacher-child interactions, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), demonstrated similar…

National Board of Accreditation (NBA), a body constituted by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is responsible for the accreditation of Technical education programmes in India. NBA evaluates the performance of engineering programmes quantitatively by assessing 70 variables grouped under a set of 8 predefined criteria, and…

The variationist paradigm in sociolinguistics is at a disadvantage when dealing with variables that are traditionally treated qualitatively, e.g., "identity". This study essays to level the accuracy and descriptive value of qualitative research in a quantitative setting by rendering such a variable quantitatively accessible. To this end,…

A persistent conflict between assessment professionals and faculty members in the humanities seems to focus inevitably on resistance to the concept of interrater reliability. While humanities faculty are often willing to engage in course-embedded assessment that uses some type of scoring rubric, when the demand for agreement in scoring is…

In this article, the authors describe an assessment-centered teaching (ACT) framework they developed to communicate the integration of assessment and instruction. The framework is a visual representation of the relationships among the fundamental elements of assessment knowledge: the characteristics of quality goals for student learning and…

Learn everything you need to know to implement an integrated system of assessment and grading. The author details the specific benefits of formative assessment and explains how to design and interpret three different types of formative assessments, how to track student progress, and how to assign meaningful grades. Detailed examples bring each…

This article describes four measurement tools that are of potential value for institutional researchers as greater demands are being placed upon their work. The author describes scale development, select methods for setting passing scores, validating passing scores and the topic of equating--both equipercentile and linear. Not only should…

In this paper, the authors introduce the "Targeted Assessment Rubric for Interdisciplinary Writing," an empirically-tested instrument designed to assess interdisciplinary writing at the collegiate level. Interdisciplinary writing presents unique challenges to students, calling upon them to mediate the rhetorical, theoretical, and…

From the perspective of doctoral students and instructors, we explain a developmental, interactive process based upon the Checklist for Qualitative Data Collection, Data Analysis, and Data Interpretation (Onwuegbuzie, 2010) for students' writing assignments regarding: (a) the application of conceptual knowledge for collecting, analyzing, and…

Get an in-depth understanding of how to create fun, engaging, and challenging performance assessments that require students to elaborate on content and demonstrate mastery of skills. This update of an ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) classic includes new scoring methods, reading assessments, and insights on navigating…

During this decade there have been numerous efforts to identify instructional practices that improve students' writing. These include "Reading Next" (Biancarosa and Snow, 2004), which provided a set of instructional recommendations for improving writing, and "Writing Next" (Graham and Perin, 2007) and "Writing to Read" (Graham and Hebert, 2010),…