As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many instructors were forced to adjust from in-person to emergency remote teaching; however, classroom observation protocols, like the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS), have only been developed and validated for in-person instruction. Therefore, we developed and validated an…

Genetics plays an increasing role in modern life as evidenced by the development of revolutionary techniques such as CRISPR-based genome editing and the rise of personalized genome services. However, genetics is difficult to learn; known issues include its abstract nature, different scales, and technical language. Pedigree analysis is a…

One of the main challenges higher educational institutions encounter amid the recent COVID-19 crisis is transferring assessment approaches from the traditional face-to-face form to the online Emergency Remote Teaching approach. A set of language assessment principles, practicality, reliability, validity, authenticity, and washback, which can be…

One consideration for selecting progress monitoring tools is the reliability in which the instrument measures student response to instruction. Researchers and vendors establish reliability of growth using two analytic methods: (a) calculating slopes to even and odd observations for each student and correlating the resulting slopes (split-half),…

In this study, we reviewed 76 journal articles on employing drawing assessment as a research tool in science education. Findings from the systematic review suggest four justifications for using drawing as a type of research tool, including assessment via drawing as (a) an alternative method considering young participants' verbal or writing…

Students' reflective essay writing can be stimulated by the formative assessments provided to them by their teachers. Such assessments contain information about the quality of students' reflective writings and offer suggestions for improvement. Despite the importance of formatively assessing students' reflective writings in teacher education…

Students and teachers play different roles and thus have different perceptions about the effectiveness of assessment including structure, feedback, consistency, fairness and efficiency. In an undergraduate Business Information Systems course, a rubric was designed and semi-automated through a learning management system (LMS) to provide formative…

During this decade there have been numerous efforts to identify instructional practices that improve students' writing. These include "Reading Next" (Biancarosa and Snow, 2004), which provided a set of instructional recommendations for improving writing, and "Writing Next" (Graham and Perin, 2007) and "Writing to Read" (Graham and Hebert, 2010),…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB, 2002) has produced an explosion of interest in the use of assessment to measure and improve student learning. Initially focused on annual state tests, educators quickly learned that results came too little and too late to identify students who were falling behind. At the same time, evidence from the…

This paper critically reviews the empirical research on the use of rubrics at the post-secondary level, identifies gaps in the literature and proposes areas in need of research. Studies of rubrics in higher education have been undertaken in a wide range of disciplines and for multiple purposes, including increasing student achievement, improving…

While research suggests that formative assessment can be a powerful tool to support teaching and learning, efforts to jump on the formative assessment bandwagon have been more widespread than those to assure the technical quality of the assessments. This report covers initial analyses of data bearing on the quality of formative assessments in…

While the potentials of virtual worlds to support experiential learning in medical education are well documented, assessment of student learning within these environments is relatively scarce and often incongruent. In this article, a conceptual framework is proposed for formatively assessing dispositional behaviours in scenario-based learning…

With the increasing popularity of peer assessment as an assessment tool, questions may arise about its measurement quality. Among such questions, the extent peer assessment practices adhere to standards of measurement. It has been claimed that new forms of assessment, require new criteria to judge their validity and reliability, since they aim for…

This report describes the purposes of benchmark assessments and provides recommendations for selecting and using benchmark assessments--addressing validity, alignment, reliability, fairness and bias and accessibility, instructional sensitivity, utility, and reporting issues. We also present recommendations on building capacity to support schools'…

Online collaboration exercises were used as part of a diverse assessment package for an undergraduate differential equations course. Online collaboration served as a highly effective method for promoting and assessing generic graduate capabilities such as writing in a context-relevant manner and the development of self-awareness with regard to…