Despite the strong criticisms, mass student surveys play an important role in the quality assurance process of national higher education systems. While some national higher education systems have a long history of using student surveys to inform teaching and course quality improvement (e.g. the UK, Australia), in Italy, where the quality assurance…

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the relative efficiencies of the state universities in Sri Lanka from 2017 to 2019 and their capacity to enroll more students. Design/methodology/approach: Data envelopment analysis (DEA) method was used to measure the relative efficiencies. Annual data on expenditure, academic staff, non-academic staff,…

Whereas many scholars have emphasized the relative importance of "comprehensibility" as an ecologically valid goal for L2 speech training, testing, and development, eliciting listeners' judgments is time-consuming. Following calls for research on more efficient L2 speech rating methods in applied linguistics, and growing attention toward…

The objective structured practical examination (OSPE) is a reliable assessment of practical skills in anatomy teaching. It is often administered as low-stake assessments to track progress at multiple time points in anatomy curricula. Standard-setting OSPEs to derive a pass mark and to ensure assessment quality and rigor is a complex task. This…

Though dynamic assessment (DA) has gained strong theoretical and empirical support over the last decades, second language (L2) practitioners have blamed it for its applicability in large classes. To ameliorate this limitation, peer-dynamic assessment (peer-DA), rooted in the conceptualization of zone of proximal development (ZPD), can be…

Background: Some data call into question the persistence of developmental language disorders (DLDs) identified during the preschool period. For this reason, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) often reassess children. However, it is unclear if the instability of the profiles documented in community sample studies is present in children referred to…

This research was carried out to comparatively study the impacts of portfolio-based assessment, self-assessment, and scaffolded peer assessment on reading comprehension, vocabulary learning, and grammatical accuracy of Afghan English as a foreign language learners. To accomplish this, 172 learners enrolled at a language institute, through an…

The present study aimed to explore the neural-related mechanism of the creative evaluation process in individual with different levels of creativity. The time course of evaluation process for creative objects was monitored by event-related potentials (EPRs). Forty-five participants were divided into the high-creativity performance (HCP) group and…

Assessing cases of child welfare requires the ability to engage with different sources of information systematically. This study examined how case-based learning (CBL) can be used to support social work students (N = 104) acquire knowledge crucial to assessing cases of child welfare and whether benefits of CBL could be maximized by structuring the…

University rankings have gradually become an issue for concern in the academic community worldwide. Several mechanisms with different methodologies have been developed to rank the universities appropriately. However, some ranking tools have notable issues, especially with the indicators adopted. Some are based merely on research performance,…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to study the use of FIS Response Analysis for Critical Thinking Assessment (FRACTA) method to assess critical thinking in STEM problem solving. The use of FIS (facts, ideas and solutions) chart as a tool to elicit student critical thinking responses and the method of scoring the responses are investigated. Method:…

This study investigates how American and Iraqi writers utilize the evaluative resources in newspaper opinion articles (henceforth, op-eds) from a critical discourse analysis perspective. It explores how American and Iraqi writers of op-ed pieces draw on the evaluative resources to establish their attitudes, create rhetorical effects, and serve…

The tenure and promotion system influences whether, how, and the extent faculty members produce creative scholarship. A thematic analysis of 69 media and communication departments' documents was carried out to systematically assess creative scholarship standards. The results showed most documents formally recognized creative scholarship and…

Recent research provides evidence that an intersectional approach to defining reference and focal groups results in a higher percentage of comparisons flagged for potential DIF. The study presented here examined the generalizability of this pattern across methods for examining DIF. While the level of DIF detection differed among the four methods…

Nations, states, and districts must choose among an array of different approaches to measuring school effectiveness in implementing their accountability policies, and the choice can be difficult because different approaches yield different results. This study compares two approaches to computing school effectiveness: a "beating the odds"…