Alternate assessments of modified academic achievement standards (AA-MAS) must be designed, developed, implemented, and validated following the same rigorous principles and procedures used for other assessments. However, the uniqueness and unfamiliarity of the target population for these assessments requires innovative thinking, especially in…

The rapid development of computer and network technologies has attracted researchers to investigate strategies for and the effects of applying information technologies in learning activities; simultaneously, learning environments have been developed to record the learning portfolios of students seeking web information for problem-solving. Although…

From a review of instructional design theories, research, and practice, the author has derived his "First Principles of Instruction". In this article, he suggests a rubric for using these principles to evaluate existing instruction. The article presents a Course Evaluation form and accompanying demonstration and application rubrics that enable the…

Preschool teachers working in blended classrooms are faced with identifying which children need intensive instruction as well as being responsible for directly linking individualized learning outcomes with state or federal early learning standards. The series of studies presented were designed to illustrate how teachers working in blended…

Aligning standards and individual needs of students with disabilities has been emphasized as a prerequisite for the students' access to, and meaningful progress in, the general curriculum. As inclusive assessment tools, instructional rubrics are believed to have potential in effectively linking standards and the Individualized Education Program…

This case study examines the reasoning of a clinical supervisor as she assesses preservice teacher candidates with a state-mandated performance assessment instrument. The supervisor's evaluations were recorded using video annotation software, which allowed her to record her observations in real-time. The study reveals some of the inherent…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce and describe the features of a new e-learning quality framework developed for a large multi-campus university. The framework is explicitly designed to improve the quality of e-learning sites and the quality of online student learning, by developing the skills of the academics who design the sites.…

The internal consistency and validity of the interRAI Community Health Assessment and Deafblind Supplement were tested with 182 persons with deaf-blindness. All subscales demonstrated good to excellent internal consistency, and expected associations provided evidence of convergent validity. This instrument can facilitate standardized service…

Motivated in large part by accreditation pressures, campuses are turning to new providers for assistance with a wide range of assessment-related tasks and processes. Some offer help in formulating student learning outcomes--and in bringing (as one says) "the science of learning" to "the art of teaching." Several are in the rubric-development…

In this study, the purpose was to determine whether there was concordance among raters in the assessment of the writing performance using analytic rubric; furthermore, factors affecting the assessment process were examined. The analytic rubric used in the study consists of three sections and ten properties: External structure (format, spelling and…

Composition theory and research indicate that, whether they use a holistic or an analytic rubric, teachers should share their scoring guide with their students. Both students and teachers benefit in substantial ways when students draft and revise their written work in the context of the rubric their teachers will use to assess student writing.…

Computer aided assessment is a common approach used by educational institutions. The benefits range into the design of teaching, learning, and instructional materials. While some such systems implement fully automated marking for multiple choice questions and fill-in-the-blanks, they are insufficient when human critiquing is required. Current…

Because there is no commonly accepted view of what makes for good writing, automated essay scoring (AES) ideally should be able to accommodate different theoretical positions, certainly at the level of state standards but also perhaps among teachers at the classroom level. This paper presents a practical approach and an interactive computer…

A total of 51 Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) protocols, administered by graduate students in training, were examined to obtain data describing the frequency of examiner errors and the impact of errors on resultant test scores. Present results were generally consistent with previous research examining graduate…

Developing scoring rubrics to evaluate student work was studied, concentrating on the use of intermediate points in rating scales. How scales that allow for intermediate points between defined categories should be constructed and used was explored. In the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) visual arts field test, researchers…