Recently graduated university students from all Australian Universities rate their overall departmental and university experiences (DUEs), and their responses (N = 44,932, 41 institutions) are used by the government to benchmark departments and universities. We evaluate this DUE strategy of rating overall departments and universities rather than…

A teacher evaluation system can be threatening to faculty, especially if used for summative decisions. Therefore, it is important to obtain valid and pertinent information. Since students are extensively exposed to course elements, students' evaluation of instruction should be one of several components in the teacher evaluation system. Since…

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' practices and beliefs related to the teaching of stringed instrument tuning in elementary and middle school group classes. The aspects examined included the following: (a) teachers' beliefs about teaching tuning in their string classes, (b) activities teachers used when teaching tuning in string…

This is a psychometric analysis of an instrument to assess the socio-emotional development of school students, How I Feel (HIF), developed as a situational judgment test, with scoring based on expert judgments. The HIF test was administered in grades 4-9, 1999-2005. Internal consistency, retest reliability, and year-to-year stability were…

Students' evaluations of teaching (SETs) are currently the most commonly used method for evaluating teaching effectiveness in higher education institutions. They aid in evaluating the quality of faculty teaching and provide useful information for administrators, faculty, and students. The majority of SET instruments were developed based on faculty…

The purpose of this study was to adapt the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) Survey developed by Schmidt and colleagues into Turkish and investigate its factor structure through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The participants were 352 elementary pre-service teachers from three large universities in northwestern…

The purpose of the present study was to examine validity aspects of teachers' judgements of pupils' reading skills. Data come from Sweden's participation in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2001, for Grades 3 and 4. For pupils at the same achievement levels, as measured by PIRLS 2001 test, teachers' judgements of…

Whenever one uses a composite scale score from item responses, one is tacitly assuming that the scale is dominantly unidimensional. Investigating the unidimensionality of item response data is an essential component of construct validity. Yet, there is no universally accepted technique or set of rules to determine the number of factors to retain…

Background: Empathy is an individual's capacity to understand the behavior of others, to experience their feelings, and to express that understanding to them. Empathic ability is an asset professionally for individuals, such as teachers, physicians and social workers, who work with people. Being empathetic is also critical to our being able to…

The increased capabilities offered by digital technologies offer new opportunities to evaluate students' deeper knowledge and skills and on constructs that are difficult to measure using traditional methods. Such assessments can also incorporate tools and interfaces that improve accessibility for diverse students, as well as inadvertently…

Standardizing aspects of assessments has long been recognized as a tactic to help make evaluations of examinees fair. It reduces variation in irrelevant aspects of testing procedures that could advantage some examinees and disadvantage others. However, recent attention to making assessment accessible to a more diverse population of students…

Many personnel committees at colleges and universities in the USA use student evaluation of faculty instruction to make decisions regarding tenure, promotion, merit pay or faculty professional development. This study examines the construct validity and internal consistency reliability of the student evaluation of instruction (SEI) used at a large…

The notion of knowledge internalization (KI), albeit a critical link in Nonaka's (1994) organizational knowledge creation theory, has not been rigorously conceptualized and defined, let alone operationalized. To strengthen the foundation for knowledge management (KM) research, we attempt to fulfill the following research objectives in the three…

Recent investigations challenge the construct validity of sustained silent reading tests. Performance of two groups of post-secondary students (e.g. struggling and non-struggling) on a sustained silent reading test and two types of cloze test (i.e. maze and open-ended) was compared in order to identify the test format that contributes greater…

This article describes the development and validation of the Family Influence Scale (FIS). The FIS is designed to assess perceptions of how one's family of origin influences career and work choices. The purpose of Study 1 was to identify the domains of family influence. A 57-item scale was completed by a sample of 205 college students. Results…