This article takes up Black critical geography, Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), and trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP) to argue that preventing rhetorical violence in our classrooms cannot be accomplished without ensuring students feel safe bringing their whole selves into the classroom. Specifically, Black theorizations of space and genre systems…

The authors describe the Analytic Writing Continuum, a scoring system developed by writing assessment experts and the National Writing Project that provides a powerful way for teachers to assess students' writing and see good next steps for writing instruction. They give examples of educators using the AWC both to help students self-evaluate their…

Volunteer teachers have been a significant factor in the success of the Seminary and Institute of Religion program (S&I) within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With over 40,000 teachers and 600,000 students world-wide, the educational program of S&I relies on the effectiveness of its volunteer teachers. The volunteer…

Written feedback provided by the teacher to his or her students is an important aspect of formative assessment. After a theoretical introduction to teacher prerequisites for giving feedback and to the quality of written feedback in general, results from an implementation of feedback methods in classrooms will be described for the cases of Germany,…

Manually grading the Response to Text Assessment (RTA) is labor intensive. Therefore, an automatic method is being developed for scoring analytical writing when the RTA is administered in large numbers of classrooms. Our long-term goal is to also use this scoring method to provide formative feedback to students and teachers about students' writing…

Scenario-based writing assessment has two salient characteristics by design: a lead-in/essay scaffolding structure and a unified scenario/topic throughout. In this study, we examine whether the scenario-based assessment design would impact students' essay scores compared to its alternative conditions, which intentionally broke the scaffolding…

The purpose of the student evaluations of teaching (SET) are to help instructors enhance the teaching and learning experience in their courses; however, student feedback can often be more unconstructive than useful because students are usually requested to evaluate instruction with little or no formal training. As a result, SET become missed…

It is important to examine the perceived relevance of edTPA, a nationally recognized summative performance assessment of teacher education program graduates, after those graduates enter the teaching profession. This study collected and analyzed responses from educator preparation program completers who passed edTPA as a licensure requirement and…

Instructors of online courses face unique challenges to ensure student interaction with course material. Sometimes, even the most exciting content is insufficient in an attempt to engage students. Online, asynchronous discussions offer promise as a means to increase student-to-student and student-to-content interaction and, ultimately, student…

Critical service-learning (CSL) enhances community-engaged service-learning and civic identity development, but are CSL principles congruent with assessments guided by the Civic-Minded Graduate Rubric 2.0? Using a CSL lens, I critique the rubric, noting areas of progress and recommendations to enhance its treatment of identity, power, and…

The purpose of this study was to test the effects of two metacognitive scaffolds on learners' cognition by evaluating student critical thinking skills performance in an asynchronous discussion board and achievement in a blended learning module. The two scaffolds included a systematic protocol for individualized facilitation prompts and an analytic…

Aim/Purpose: Within higher education, graduating students who are able to solve ill-structured, complex, open-ended, and collaborative, workplace problems is recognized as paramount. Because of this, there is a need to assess this skill across the curriculum. Background: This paper addresses this issue by assessing problem-solving across a…

This study examines transfer students in our teacher education programs and their comparative success on the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA®), a content pedagogy assessment currently required by many states for professional educator licensure and program completion. A two-sample t-test using edTPA scores from 2015 to 2019 revealed…

This paper provides a critical reflection on the academic writing ability of English second-language students in a South African university. Acquiring proficiency in academic writing is one of the essential skills that students at the tertiary level are expected to acquire. One challenge that has emerged after the outbreak of COVID-19 is that…

The primary goal of this project is to assess the students' better communication attainment after applying a series of five interactive strategies to an experiment group of subjects. This class will be compared with a control group of other participants, and in their class, the interactive approaches are not emphasized and practiced openly. The…