We investigated the relationship between the scores assigned by an Automated Essay Scoring (AES) system, the Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA), and grades allocated by trained, professional human raters to English essay writing by instigating two procedures novel to written-language assessment: the logistic transformation of AES raw scores into…

Awarding gaps between various groups of students persist across the Higher Education sector, yet the responses designed to address the contributors remain localised. The sudden spread of COVID-19 led to various responses across the University sector creating an unprecedented natural experiment and offering the opportunity to compare outcomes from…

Much has been written in the grading literature regarding the continued use of traditional teacher grading practices that impede effective teaching and learning, yet teachers continue to assign grades using a mixture of factors. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to explore secondary teacher perceptions of their grading practices, the…

The American school system is funded, operated, and evaluated based on student academic achievement data that is generated by various assessment tools and grading practices. The most traditional grading practice, norm-referenced grading, assesses student academic achievement on a 100-point scale that is further broken into categorical levels (A-F)…

In the three essays which compose this dissertation, I use econometric tools to examine the relationships between various measures of school context and teachers' practice. I first study how a literacy curriculum intervention affects elementary teachers' advice seeking networks and how these advice seeking relationships moderate the impact of…

Objectives: Automatic assessment systems are widely used to provide rapid feedback for students and reduce grading time. Despite the benefits of increased efficiency and improved pedagogical outcomes, an ongoing challenge is mitigating poor student behaviors when interacting with automatic assessment systems including numerous submissions,…

This paper is in conversation with Dyer (2023). Grading and assessment are integrated elements of 21st-century higher education with many viewpoints, and the two papers are two of these perspectives. In this paper, I present a course structure that focuses on scaffolding with student empowerment, growth, and success at the forefront of the design.…

Students may not always be intrinsically motivated to complete learning activities in our courses. For these instances, we suggest taking advantage of heuristics, discovered through behavioral economics research, as one way to nudge students toward task completion. To date, most educational applications of behavioral economics' heuristics use…

When contemplating the introduction of mastery grading into the classroom, a fear of student resistance can prevent the implementation entirely. However, by taking a proactive stance against student resistance, instructors can give mastery grading the best chance of being successful. This paper focuses on the ways in which the instructor can…

Many colleges and universities nationwide use midterm grades to provide feedback to students about their academic performance at the midpoint of a course. In recent years, registrars have been challenged to collect accurate midterm grades. Numerous factors contribute to the challenge of collecting accurate assessments. This constellation of…

Homework gives students the opportunity to practice new skills in both familiar and unfamiliar situations, and to develop an understanding of related concepts. Although some of these goals can be easily accomplished in online homework, many systems are less useful for handling open-ended questions. Written homework, on the other hand, takes time…

Mathematics anxiety is a prevalent problem in many K-12 classrooms, and if not appropriately addressed can cause lasting educational harm to students as they enter adulthood. Researchers suggest that the finality of traditional grades has increased mathematics anxiety in today's classrooms. The extreme weight of grades, such as determining…

This study used a quantitative descriptive design and the CIPP model to evaluate the impact a co-requisite model had on students' passing rates in entry-level college math courses. The co-requisite model has become the alternative to the traditional developmental education sequence, and understanding how it impacts students' passing rates is…

Grades are perhaps the most widely used and universally accepted representation of a student's academic achievement. More importantly, they can be a vehicle to higher education, specialty programs, and access to highly competitive scholarship dollars. Given the wide disparity of grading practices from teacher to teacher and from district to…

Two of the central issues in comparative judgement (CJ), which are perhaps underexplored compared to questions of the method's reliability and technical quality, are "what processes do judges use to make their decisions" and "what features do they focus on when making their decisions?" This article discusses both, in the…