This article describes how a traditional biology lecture course was transformed into an interactive class. A review the activities used, changes made to grading policy, and practical tips for integration of active learning in the classroom are provided. Analysis of student responses to course assessments indicated that active learning experiences…

Organizing a classroom around principles of democracy is not new to American education. The principles that provide a background for this type of organization are found in classical Greek thought and more recently in the American colonial period (Smith 1984). This article discusses three principles of democracy: (1) liberty and freedom; (2)…

There is no single program for improving student writing, but there are common elements of programs that help kids learn to write well. Likewise, there is no professional development program that provides all the skills and knowledge a teacher will need to improve student writing--and, ultimately, student learning--but there are common elements…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

Author Lyn Lesch advocates that learning cannot be measured by empirical results like testing and grading. As the founder of Chicago's The Children's School, Lesch didn't give grades or submit students to standardized testing. Such conditions may seem blasphemous to most educators, but the results spoke for themselves. Without the high-stakes…

Today, there are about four nonnative-speaking English teachers for every teacher who is a native speaker. More English teachers work in non-English-speaking settings than in English-speaking settings, and most are natives of the countries in which they teach. This volume focuses on the challenges faced by English teachers for whom English is a…

In this article, the author presents a case study of three fourth grade teachers in New York, a state that administers an elementary social studies test, constructed by teachers, that relies on the use of documents in the majority of its questions. Throughout the 2002-2003 school year, the three teachers were observed during every unit of social…

Building upon a related 2005 panel presentation at the 25th annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, the authors, several tenure-track assistant professors and tenured associate professors who have participated in a Research and Teaching Faculty Learning Community at Bowling Green State University, share their…

Concerns over equity, access, and fairness of placement testing have resulted in state regulations requiring validity evidence of the placement test with respect to a criterion variable, such as final course grades. A study was conducted to assess the validity of placement tests used to place students in pre-collegiate and college-level English…

This paper is the report of a year-long study of a mathematics teacher's attempts to document her observations of students. One goal of the project is to determine whether it is feasible for a teacher to keep a record of informal assessments such as observations and interviews. Another goal is to determine how useful such information could be to…

Over the past decade, faculty in the Humanities department at Raritan Valley Community College, in New Jersey, have developed two interdisciplinary, team-taught courses organized on a thematic basis. To determine student and faculty perceptions of these courses, the college distributed questionnaires to students in one of the courses, conducted…

While teachers traditionally have been evaluated by school administrators, the call for multiple and variable lines of evidence in teacher evaluation has had many proponents. To evaluate the use of multiple judges, teacher ratings from four judges using a common evaluation instrument were compared for 93 teachers from grades three and above.…

Most freshman composition instructors have to field student inquiries and complaints about grades. Research and thought about alternative methods of evaluation can help lessen this burden. Grading holistically, team and partner grading, and portfolio grading are all effective methods. Often the instructor's evaluation "language" can…

While it is generally accepted that people working in groups can accomplish more than people working individually, it is equally accepted that parasites will attempt to feed on the other group members. Group work has been called by several names--group learning, cooperative learning, collaborative learning--all of which carry slightly different…

This book provides a guide for early childhood educators in implementing and using portfolio assessment to measure children's learning. Chapter 1 focuses on, "How Young Children Learn." It explains that children are active learners who learn by doing things repeatedly, by making mistakes, and by being exposed to varying approaches,…