This study constructs indicators and weights that can be used in the professional development evaluation (PDE) of elementary school teachers. The indicators were constructed using data collected from literature reviews, interviews with experts, and questionnaire surveys. The Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAPH) was used to analyze the collected…

The practice of grading student writing often seems arbitrary and unfair to students. It is important to students and educators that writing is fairly and accurately assessed in order to facilitate demonstrable improvement in their composition. This research addressed a specific writing rubric as a method to mitigate implicit or subconscious…

Student responses to the West Virginia Educational Standards Test (WESTEST) 2 Online Writing Assessment are scored by a computer-scoring engine. The scoring method is not widely understood among educators, and there exists a misperception that it is not comparable to hand scoring. To address these issues, the West Virginia Department of Education…

This analysis of 83 scoring rubrics and grade definitions from writing programs at U.S. public research universities captures the current state of the struggle to define and measure specific writing traits, and it enables an induction of the underlying theoretical construct of "academic writing" present at these writing programs. Findings suggest…

This paper examines the growing emphasis on measurement of course competencies by individual college students through two course examples, an undergraduate course in managing change and conflict and a graduate course in human resource management. The author explains how standardized curriculum and assignment rubrics are being used to measure…

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of the Pathways to STEM Initiative (PSI) on students and science teachers and to describe the level of PSI implementation. One group of middle schools participated in PSI, which included project-based science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) coursework; extra-curricular STEM opportunities…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important…

Various state and national forces are influencing principal preparation programs, including competition from online for-profit institutions, teacher evaluation, school accountability, equity, and Response to Intervention mandates that require university-based leadership preparation programs to re-examine and revise program delivery and content.…

A random national sampling of primary grade teachers in the United States were surveyed to determine how they teach revising to writers in the elementary grades. Our findings suggest that in our sample of teachers, little time is dedicated in the school day to writing and especially revising. The teachers believed that more time spent revising did…

The authors investigated the impact of the Deaf Student Editing Rubric (DSER) as a self-editing tool on the writing performance of prelingually profoundly deaf adolescent students whose first language is American Sign Language. The DSER was developed by the first author. The study participants included 15 Deaf students in 4 classrooms in grades…

Committed to being a charter school with a professional learning community that empowers teachers, New Mexico's South Valley Academy (SVA) staff transformed its state evaluation process into a practitioner action research process (Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 2007). While teachers self-diagnose growth needs and play active roles in improving…

Sociologists and instructors who teach about community service share an affinity for understanding and addressing social problems. While many studies have demonstrated the benefits of incorporating community service into sociology courses, we examine the benefits of incorporating sociological content into community service classes. The authors…

This study identifies multiple profiles of successful essays via a cluster analysis approach using linguistic features reported by a variety of natural language processing tools. The findings from the study indicate that there are four profiles of successful writers for the samples analyzed. These four profiles are linguistically distinct from one…

This study explores the construct of a summarization test task by means of single-group and multigroup structural equation modeling (SEM). It examines the interrelationships between strategy use and performance, drawing on data from 298 Taiwanese undergraduates' summary essays and their self-reported strategy use. Single-group SEM analyses…

Concurrent and predictive validity between the Retell Reading Rubric (RRR), Oral Reading Fluency (ORF), an adaptation of the DIBELS Retell Fluency (RTF-A), and a state assessment emphasizing reading comprehension were examined across students in grades 3 and 5. Results showed the RRR to have moderate and statistically significant relationships to…