This study explores the effectiveness of an intervention involving formative assessment in a first-year core business subject. Students were invited to receive feedback on a draft of their first written assessment during the early weeks of the semester. Consideration is given to the economic and ethical issues raised by the intervention. A…

One of the main features of globalization is the increasing mobility of population. As an immigrant society, Hong Kong has witnessed waves of Mainland Chinese arrivals and assimilation into her mainstream, particularly around the change of sovereignty period. School-aged children constitute a substantial fraction of the new population. Given their…

Multiple-choice (MC) reading comprehension test items comprise three components: text passage, questions about the text, and MC answers. The construct validity of this format has been repeatedly criticized. In three between-subjects experiments, fourth graders (N[subscript 1] = 230, N[subscript 2] = 340, N[subscript 3] = 194) worked on three…

Secondary education in Fiji ends with the Form 7 examination. Predictive validity for academic success of Form 7 scores which form the basis for admission into the Bachelor of Medicine Bachelor of Surgery programme of the Fiji School of Medicine was examined via a cohort of 129 students. Success rates for year 1 in 2008, 2009, and 2010 were 90.7…

In 2006 a new type of tutorial, called Map Meeting, was successfully trialled with novice first year physics students at the University of Sydney, Australia. Subsequently, in first semester 2007 a large-scale experiment was carried out with 262 students who were allocated either to the strongly scaffolding Map Meetings or to the less scaffolding…

We report an investigation of the validity of teachers' ratings of children's progress in "phonics" as a screener for dyslexia. Seventy-three 6-year-olds from a whole school population were identified as "at risk" of dyslexia according to teacher judgements of slow progression through phonic phases. Six months later, children's attainments in…

Second-year undergraduate students from 2008, 2009, and 2010 cohorts were asked to respond a questionnaire to determine their learning style preferences, the VARK questionnaire (where V is visual, A is aural, R is reading-writing, and K is kinesthetic), which was translated into Spanish by the author. The translated questionnaire was tested for…

Typical validation studies on standard setting models, most notably the Angoff and modified Angoff models, have ignored construct development, a critical aspect associated with all conceptualizations of measurement processes. Stone compared the Angoff and objective standard setting (OSS) models and found that Angoff failed to define a legitimate…

Direct measures (tests) of the pedagogical effectiveness of team testing and indirect measures (student surveys) of pedagogical effectiveness of team testing were collected in several sections of an undergraduate marketing course with varying levels of the use of team testing. The results indicate that although students perceived team testing to…

In this study, 123 children with a diagnosis of developmental dyslexia were assigned to different treatment groups, either variations of Bakker's intervention program based on the balance model or a control, a specific reading training group. Thorough cognitive and neuropsychological assessment allowed determination of the subtype of dyslexia…

This study used a pre-post, nonequivalent control group design to examine the impact of an in-district, after-school tutoring program on eighth grade students' standardized test scores in language arts and mathematics. Students who had scored in the near-passing range on either the language arts or mathematics aspect of a standardized test at the…

The aim of the present research was to compare the use of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) as an examination method against the oral examination (OE) method. MCQs are widely used and their importance seems likely to grow, due to their inherent suitability for electronic assessment. However, MCQs are influenced by the tendency of examinees to guess…

The purpose of the paper is to review some previous researches examining ICT efficiency and the impact of ICT on educational output/outcome as well as different conceptual and methodological issues related to performance measurement. Moreover, a definition, measurements and the empirical application of a model measuring the efficiency of ICT use…

Oral reading fluency is a critical feature and outcome of early literacy instruction and it has amassed great attention as a powerful predictor of success at all levels of schooling. We examined relationships between second grade oral reading fluency scores and third grade end-of-grade reading achievement scores for students (N = 9562) in a large…

As a result of enrollment expansion, increasing numbers of students are entering into medical school in China. This combined with a shortage of teachers, means that the learning environment typically consists of a large classroom setting with traditional lecture-based learning (LBL) as the major mode to teaching and learning. In this article, we…