Improving students' STEM competencies is important and relies on fine-grained assessments, however, assessing scientific inquiry in an authentic, automated way is challenging for a number of reasons. Here, we provide an overview of how the learning sciences and computational sciences were used in the design and development of Inq-ITS and its…

Information is at the heart of lifelong learning, effective citizenship and good decision making. Yet information can come from a variety of sources with different degrees of trustworthiness, accuracy and depth (Metzger, 2007). The information age has resulted in an explosion of knowledge that can be readily accessed by anyone who uses the…

Purpose: The purpose of authentic assessment can enrich students with a set of skills that can have a significant impact on their employability. The key aim of these actions is to equip students with the practical skills to be work ready. The focus here is to demonstrate effects on student satisfaction and observations from teaching staff accrued…

This paper explores the introduction of the new Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) for graduate teachers in Australia. We investigate how the broader discussion around TPAs has been understood by multiple agents during an eight-month period from January 2019 to August 2019. Data includes legacy media, social media tweets and a survey of school…

Assessment, accountability, and transparency represent a greater focus than ever in higher education. Community colleges are not exempt from these requirements, though they are overlooked in the creation of state and national assessment instruments. Therefore, we designed and distributed the Perceptions of Community College Assessment (PCCA)…

Various studies show that sustainability and education are closely interdependent. Design and implementation of the right performance assessment for students' skills acquisition and achievements is, therefore, critical for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article presents an in-depth analysis of the Qatar education system…

Since the pandemic, the United States has faced tremendous teacher shortages (Riser-Kositsky, 2021) and national organizations have called for measures to address barriers related to teacher hiring and retention (NEA, 2022a., b; White House, 2022). Many states -- including California -- require pre-service teachers to pass state performance…

Purpose: Verbal fluency, a task frequently employed in neuropsychological assessment, provides important word productivity data but little information about subjective effort associated with demand monitoring and resource allocation. In two experiments, this study investigated the effects of task variables (semantic vs. phonemic cues; alternating…

In this paper, we describe subskills of visual communication based on the skill structure outlined in the Common European Framework of Visual Literacy. We have developed this Framework further through assessing the development of subskills related to visual communication in the "produce" and "respond" domains of CEFR-VC in…

Over the past few decades, university rankings have become an increasingly important factor in the higher education sector. Universities are ranked based on various criteria such as research output, teaching quality, and graduate employability. However, there is a growing movement to incorporate sustainability and social impact into the ranking…

Assigning grades is conventionally the exclusive, lonely terrain of the instructor, even as other aspects of responding to student writing are collaborative. As an alternative that promotes student engagement and agency, labor-based contract grading is used in a growing number of writing classrooms. This article describes an alternative:…

National calls to improve science education include focusing on scientific practices coupled with learning disciplinary core ideas. Among the practices is constructing explanations. In the field of cellular and molecular biology, explanations typically include a mechanism and can be used to make predictions about phenomena. In this work, we…

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) has been monitoring international trends in reading achievement among fourth-grade students for 25 years. As a critical point in a student's education, the fourth year of schooling establishes the foundations of literacy, with reading becoming increasingly central to learning across all…

Taking into account the challenges of EFL vocabulary learning for East Asian learners, this study developed a set of experimental English vocabulary material with pictographic glosses which may stimulate students' situational interest (with dimensions of exploration intention, instant enjoyment, novelty, attention demand, challenge, and total…

We employed qualitative research methods to examine student learning in context during a teacher's unit on 1920s-Great Depression in an 11th grade United States & Virginia History class in a standards-based setting with a high-stakes end-of-course test. We focused on four focal students (all of whom were classified as English learners at some…