Notwithstanding the limitations of traditional student evaluations and the increasing interest in instructional improvement for student learning in STEM education, there has been relatively little research on practices used by STEM faculty for gathering formative student feedback that enhances teaching-for-learning. Using a grounded theory…

North Carolina's community colleges redesigned developmental math programs in 2011. The overall effectiveness of the redesign has not yet been evaluated. A concurrent mixed-methods study was conducted at Mid-Atlantic Community College (MACC) for a formative and summative evaluation of the redesigned program. Mezirow's transformative learning…

The purpose of this study was to examine policy making that led to the National School Reform Agreement and its effects on national and state-level curriculum reforms. Content analysis method was used to reveal the philosophic positions on education held by experts appointed to conduct the national policy reviews and the opinions of education…

Formative assessment is a tool for learning that virtually every educator uses in the classroom to some extent. While teachers may be motivated to use formative assessment for a variety of reasons, its intended purpose is to be a tool for both teachers and students for teaching and learning, respectively. However, many teachers, even those with…

This brief offers lessons learned from California State University teacher preparation programs engaged in using data to inform improvement efforts. The authors consider teacher preparation programs as systems that can undergo continuous, data-driven improvement through an improvement science approach. Teacher preparation programs typically have…

In this article, we provide brief overviews of the definitions of formative and summative assessment and a few examples of types of formative and summative assessments that can be used in classroom contexts. We highlight the points that these two types of assessment are complementary and the differences between them are often in the way these…

Although many schools around the world have claimed to embrace the Professional Learning Community process, it would be more accurate to describe the current state of affairs in many schools as PLC Lite. Educators rename their traditional faculty or department meetings as PLC meetings, engage in book studies that result in no action, or devote…

This column shares reflections or thoughtful opinions on issues of broad interest to the community. This month's issue discusses tools of formative assessment.

Despite multifaceted attempts to "protect the public," including the implementation of various assessment practices designed to identify individuals at all stages of training and practice who underperform, profound deficiencies in quality and safety continue to plague the healthcare system. The purpose of this reflections paper is to…

Student engagement is both a ubiquitous and broadly defined term in education. Engagement is the "conceptual glue" that connects student agency, social influences, organizational structures, and school culture. Of particular interest to the work presented in this paper, is how engagement and agency are interrelated, and the role of this…

In this paper we propose an adaptive approach to managing the development of students' knowledge in the comprehensive project-based learning (PBL) environment. Subject study is realized by two-stage PBL. It shapes adaptive knowledge management (KM) process and promotes the correct balance between personalized and collaborative learning. The…

Teachers come across errors not only in tests but also in their mathematics classrooms virtually every day. When they respond to learners' errors in their classrooms, during or after teaching, teachers are actively carrying out formative assessment. In South Africa the Annual National Assessment, a written test under the auspices of the Department…

The researcher conducted a formative experiment in a ninth- and a 10th-grade English classroom to observe a multiliteracies-based intervention implemented to improve high school students' arguments. Traditionally, argument is taught from a cognitive perspective, emphasizing concepts such as claims, evidence, and warrants. However, arguments are…

Oral language development can help English learners develop academic proficiency with the English language. In this investigation, at one middle school, teachers focused on improving oral language skills. Using a formative experiment process, the teachers developed an intervention to accomplish their pedagogical goal and then tracked data to see…

Research reports using global data show that the failure rates in introductory programming courses average about 32%. As learners from schools join the university and enrol for different courses, they find the sudden transformation quite challenging. This makes it more challenging for first year university students, especially in difficult courses…