Background/Context: From two decades of research on the grading practices of teachers in secondary schools, researchers discovered that teachers evaluated students on numerous factors that do not validly assess a student's achievement level in a specific content area. These consistent findings suggested that traditional grading practices evolved…

When students fail an examination at the end of their first year, they are offered a resit examination, which they merely need to pass to progress into the second year. These resits anecdotally provide a dual purpose of testing that students have achieved the required level of attainment to progress, and incentivising additional effort. This paper…

We report one teacher's response to a top-down shift from external examinations to internal teacher assessment for summative purposes in the Republic of Ireland. The teacher adopted a comparative judgement approach to the assessment of secondary students' understanding of a chemistry experiment. The aims of the research were to investigate whether…

A group of postgraduate accounting and finance students were asked to participate in a three-phase exercise: sit an unseen past examination question; mark a fully anonymised previous student solution (exemplar); and then mark their own work. The marking process was facilitated by explaining and discussing the marking guide, assessment systems and…

A growing band of teachers, schools, and entire districts have put their faith in standards-based grading, an innovative, albeit complex and sometimes controversial, method that aims to make grades more meaningful. A standards-based report card contains an overall grade for each course but also indicates how well a student has mastered each of the…

Enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when one thinks about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. Collect information about how students are doing, then share that information with the students and their parents. Gather and report--that's pretty much it. Collecting…

Professors often give members of a group project the same grade or they use peer evaluations to provide individualized grades. Unfortunately, both these methods have shortcomings. This article describes the segment manager method (SMM), a method for assigning individualized grades on the group project that does not rely on peer evaluations. A…

Historically speaking, students were judged long before they were marked. The tradition of marking, or scoring, pieces of work students offer for assessment is little more than two centuries old, and was introduced mainly to cope with specific problems arising from the growth in the numbers graduating from universities as the industrial revolution…

The purpose of the "Evidence to Practice" commentary is to highlight an issue or research finding in selected articles, emphasizing the relevance to practice. This article introduces a new tool designed to summarize the most up-to-date evidence in an easily readable format, in order to provide clinically useful answers within minutes for assisting…

Problem Statement: There have been many attempts to research the effective assessment of writing ability, and many proposals for how this might be done. In this sense, rater reliability plays a crucial role for making vital decisions about testees in different turning points of both educational and professional life. Intra-rater and inter-rater…

Research shows that teachers' grading is influenced by non-achievement factors in addition to official criteria, such as knowledge and skills. Some grading criteria are internalised by the teacher, who is sometimes unable to verbalise the criteria used and refers to what is called a "gut feeling". Therefore, transparency, validity and…

This paper is based on research undertaken on the supervised practice of an undergraduate programme of study which leads to both BA (Hons) degree and a professional qualification in youth work in a university in England. Youth work, for those unfamiliar with it, is a form of informal and experiential educational practice with young people often…

This paper explores the challenges and strengths of teachers with a visual impairments teaching in Nepal's mainstream schools, using qualitative interviews of teachers and principals, as well as a student survey data set. Results showed that teachers with visual impairments tend not to teach subjects such as science and mathematics that require…

Many researchers have highlighted the central role that assessment plays in second language (L2) classrooms and have expressed the need for research into classroom-based language assessment (CBLA), an area that is gradually coming into its own in the field of language testing and assessment (e.g., Hasselgreen, 2008; Leung, 2014; Hill &…

In the fiercely competitive, global job market, solid preparation in core skills matters a lot. Will college graduates write with the clarity, grace, and accuracy that employers (and everyone else) expect? Will they have the basic mathematical and scientific skills--regardless of their majors--that equip them to navigate an increasingly…