In project-based learning (PBL) courses, which are common in design and technology education, instructors regard both the process and the final product to be important. However, conducting an accurate assessment for process feedback is not an easy task because instructors of PBL courses often have to make judgments based on a limited view of group…

Institutions of higher education both value and need student assessment data. Faculty, as seen in numerous studies, however, have generally negatively received the formalization and reporting of student assessments to gather this assessment data. If we could better understand faculty experiences and perceptions of student assessment data within…

Assessment and testing have become accepted practices in US schools today, to the point where teachers, parents, and students consider it excessive at the expense of instructional time in the classroom. Formative assessment programs have been implemented to improve academic performance for well over a decade. The problem that was examined by this…

Scientific explanations, which include a claim, evidence, and reasoning (CER), are frequently used to measure students' deep conceptual understandings of science. In this study, we developed an automated scoring approach for the CER that students constructed as a part of virtual inquiry (e.g., formulating questions, analyzing data, and warranting…

This report grew out of an effort by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education's (CPRE's) Center on Continual Instructional Improvement (CCII) to extend its evaluation of the usefulness of the concept of "Learning Progressions" for the fields of mathematics and science education, to include literacy teaching and learning. Herein,…

The PISA for Development (PISA-D) project aims to make PISA more accessible and relevant to middle- and low-income countries by introducing new features to the assessment, including tests that are specially designed to measure lower levels of performance, contextual questionnaires that better reflect the situations of 15-year-olds across a diverse…

Educational innovations often involve intact subgroups, such as school classes or university departments. In small-scale educational evaluation research, typically involving 1 to 20 subgroups, differences among these subgroups are often neglected. This article presents a mixed method from a qualitative perspective, in which differences among…

Background: International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) are a much-debated phenomenon in education. Increasingly, their outcomes attract considerable media attention and influence educational policies in many jurisdictions worldwide. The relevance, uses and consequences of these assessments are often the focus of research scrutiny. Whilst some…

This article presents a four-tiered framework for the development of advocacy skills among teacher preparation professionals that reflects grassroots advocacy efforts and endorses the value of the physical and health education disciplines.

This column focuses on promoting learning through assessment. Formative assessment probes are designed to uncover students' ideas about objects, events, and processes in the natural world. This assessment information is then used throughout instruction to move students toward an understanding of the scientific ideas behind the probes. During the…

In this article the authors propose that biliteracy is a more challenging and rigorous form of literacy than the English-only orientation of the Common Core State Standards. Because learning to read and write in two languages differs from learning to read and write in one, they argue that biliteracy requires its own pedagogies, methodologies, and…

Traditional assessments of public speaking skills rely on human scoring. We report an initial study on the development of an automated scoring model for public speaking performances using multimodal technologies. Task design, rubric development, and human rating were conducted according to standards in educational assessment. An initial corpus of…

In partnership with both formal and informal learning institutions, researchers have been building a suite of online games, called choicelets, to serve as interactive assessments of learning skills, e.g. critical thinking or seeking feedback. Unlike more traditional assessments, which take a retrospective, knowledge-based view of learning,…

Over the past few years, opposition to statewide assessments around the nation has grown. A U.S. News & World Report article noted that as many as 500,000 students are opting out of state tests, including approximately one in five New York students. More commonly known as the opt-out movement, parents concerned about the quality and use of…

We present a logistic function of a monotonic polynomial with a lower asymptote, allowing additional flexibility beyond the three-parameter logistic model. We develop a maximum marginal likelihood based approach to estimate the item parameters. The new item response model is demonstrated on math assessment data from a state, and a computationally…