This memo, which is the third in the series, highlights the work of Summit View Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona and its use of ideas and practices from a blended online course, Student Agency in Assessment and Learning (SAAL) developed by researchers at WestEd, also an ALP grantee. This memo describes how the school's participation in the…

This dissertation conducted a science classroom intervention using two instructional approaches, computational modeling and paper-based pictorial modeling, in the context of food webs. A series of research papers were written on the impact of the intervention on students' attitudes and learning, and on teachers via professional development and…

Education Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC) partnered with the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) to conduct a multi-year study of Michigan's implementation of competency-based education in K-12 schools. This mixed-methods study seeks to investigate the implementation and effectiveness of CBE using data from surveys administered to 21j…

The challenge of teaching Research Methods to frequently unwilling undergraduate psychologists has long been recognised. Whilst a number of studies have sought to investigate and address the barriers to its effective teaching, few have taken a quantitative approach and fewer still a longitudinal design in order to examine the efficacy of specified…

A distinguishing feature of all the formative assessment probes in the "Uncovering Student Ideas" series is that each probe has two parts: (1) a selected answer choice that usually mirrors the research on commonly held ideas students have about concepts or phenomena; and (2) an explanation that supports their answer choice. It is this…

As institutions continue to place value on developing leaders, it becomes increasingly important to effectively assess students' leadership skills. The development and subsequent use of a formative competency based leader assessment was used with (N = 124) sophomore students at a small military college in the Northeast United States with a mission…

There is increasing expectation that schools should be able to use tablets for a range of instructional and assessment purposes. This article considers the comparability of student writing on tablets and laptops to ensure that writing assessment is conducted in a way that is fair to all students. Data were collected from a sample of 826 students…

Supporting students to develop an understanding of the meaning of fractions is an important goal of elementary school mathematics. This involves developing partitioning strategies, creating representations, naming fractional quantities, and using symbolic notation. This article describes how teachers can use a formative assessment problem to…

Being proficient in mathematics involves having rich and connected mathematical knowledge, being a strategic and reflective thinker and problem solver, and having productive mathematical beliefs and dispositions. This broad set of mathematics goals is central to the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. High-stakes testing often drives…

Students engage in higher-order thinking as they read complex texts and perform complex reading-related tasks. However, the most consequential assessments, high-stakes tests, are currently limited in providing information about students' higher-order thinking. In this article, we describe higher-order thinking in relation to reading. We provide a…

To support elementary students' learning of core, standards-based life science concepts highlighted in the "Next Generation Science Standards," prospective elementary teachers should develop an understanding of life science concepts and learn to apply their content knowledge in instructional practice to craft elementary science learning…

In 2014, South Bend's Our Lady of Hungary Catholic School welcomed its third principal in four years: Kevin Goralczyk, an Indiana native and seasoned educator. Together with the parish's pastor, Reverend Kevin Bauman, Principal Goralczyk began exploring how OLH could raise its pre-K-8 student achievement and better support teachers and staff…

Advancements in technology and liberalization of educational opportunities have transformed the knowledge landscape into an emergent innovation incubator, where sense-making and creativity in and for ill-structured environments are especially relevant. In addition, opportunities are often "found" or "made." The quality of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on one UK secondary school English teacher and use his practice as a vehicle for exploring the classroom realities of dialogic assessment. Dialogic assessment, a term first proposed by Alexander (2004), is a position which seeks to synthesise the potentially powerful positions of both dialogic…

The present study seeks to investigate the role of portfolios in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writers' metacognition as well as their writing skill. Therefore, the participants were assigned to two groups (experimental and control). The students in both groups received a writing test, a researcher-made Metacognitive Writing Questionnaire…