Today's grading practices mirror those of the early 1900s, and despite myriad research suggesting they are invalid, unreliable, and a hindrance to student learning, many teachers continue detrimental practices such as using 100-point percentage scales averaging all academic and nonacademic factors together into a single grade, and using grades to…

"What Will They Learn?"™ evaluates every four-year public university with a stated liberal arts mission as well as hundreds of private colleges and universities selected on the basis of size, mission, and regional representation. All schools in the "What Will Will They Learn"™ study are regionally-accredited, nonprofit…

This guide is designed to help adult educators and administrators better understand the content of the GED® test. This guide is tailored to each test subject and highlights the test's item types, assessment targets, and guidelines for how items will be scored. This 2016 edition has been updated to include the most recent information about the…

Nursing programs have embraced distance learning in their curricula, but discussion is ongoing about course assignments and grading criteria to increase examination scores in nursing distance learning courses. Because course examinations are a predictor of success on the postgraduate licensing examination (NCLEX-RN), the purpose of this study was…

Getting a large, urban school district to use standards-based education and standards-based grading is challenging. Doing so in one year is monumental. During the 2009-10 school year, Omaha (NE) Public Schools began to study the feasibility of making changes to its traditional grading system. The more closely district personnel investigated the…

Two experiments examined whether framing effects, in terms of losses and gains, can be extended to student learning and grading preferences. In Experiment 1, participants rated psychology course syllabi to investigate preferences for differently framed grading systems: a loss versus gain grading system. The results showed a clear framing effect…

Factors influencing student perceptions of academic grading were examined, with an emphasis on furthering understanding of the relevance of effort to students' conceptualization of grading. Students demonstrated a conceptualization of grading where effort should be weighted comparably to actual performance in importance to the composition of a…

The design, delivery and assessment of a complete educational scheme, such as a degree programme or a professional qualification course, is a complex matter. Maintaining alignment between the stated aims of the curriculum and the scoring of student achievement is an overarching concern. The potential for drift across individual aspects of an…

One of the main challenges in large undergraduate courses in higher education, especially those with multiple-sections, is to monitor what is going on at the section level and to track the consistency across sections in both instruction and grading. In this paper, it can be argued that a combination of both formative and summative assessment is…

This summary reports on a pilot of a novel, ontology-based e-assessment system in accounting. The system, OeLe, uses emerging semantic technologies to offer an online assessment environment capable of marking students' free text answers to questions of a conceptual nature. It does this by matching their response with a "concept map" or…

This study explores the Advanced Placement® Statistics reading as a source of professional development for teachers. The study was conducted to capture the motivation for and benefits from attending the collective grading. Research has shown that examining student work during professional development has implications for teaching. The premise of…

In this lesson, the teacher begins by reviewing some key energy topics with the students. Next, students are asked to focus closely on nuclear energy as a viable resource by closely reading, highlighting, and annotating an article regarding the future of nuclear energy. The culminating activity and evaluation of students understanding of energy…

Classroom-based learning has great value, but online classes are becoming quite popular in the academic world because of the tremendous opportunities they offer. This article outlines the author's journey through the planning, development and execution of an online statistics course.

Standards-based grading (SBG) is an approach to assessment and reporting in which scores are attached to the specific learning objectives of a course, rather than to assignments or tests. Each score represents a student's mastery of that learning objective, and may change over time in response to evidence that her level of understanding has…

The process by which an assessor evaluates a piece of student work against a set of marking criteria is somewhat hidden and potentially complex. This judgement process is under-researched, particularly in contexts where teachers (rather than trained examiners) conduct the assessment and in contexts involving extended pieces of work. This paper…