Each classroom has its own assessment environment perceived by the students and springs from the teacher's assessment practices. Although students' perceptions of the assessment environment may influence their achievement-related outcomes, little attention has been given to the measurement of perceived classroom assessment environment. This study…

As an extension of the effort devoted to updating the questionnaires for TIMSS and PIRLS 2011, this dissertation explored a new reporting strategy for contextual questionnaire data. The study investigated the feasibility of constructing "global indicators" from a large number of diverse background variables, which could provide policy…

This cross-sectional descriptive study of the Model of Domain Learning, which describes learners' progress from acclimation through competence to proficiency through the interplay of knowledge, interest and strategic processing/critical thinking (CT), examined its extension to maternity nursing. Based on the identified need for valid, reliable…

The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of reading test items that may differentially impede the performance of students with disabilities. The findings suggest that there are certain revisions that can be done on current assessments to make them more accessible for students with disabilities. Features such as words per page,…

Educational reforms and standards have been a topic of public debate for decades, with the latest go-round being the State Common Core Curriculum Standards. But time and again those reforms have failed, and each set of standards, no matter how new and different, has had little impact on improving student achievement. Why? The textbooks. Textbooks…

The notion of knowledge internalization (KI), albeit a critical link in Nonaka's (1994) organizational knowledge creation theory, has not been rigorously conceptualized and defined, let alone operationalized. To strengthen the foundation for knowledge management (KM) research, we attempt to fulfill the following research objectives in the three…

Elementary educators searching for strategies to improve student achievement may benefit from examining the relationship between parents and classroom teachers. The literature indicates that parent involvement may be linked to student achievement, attendance, student motivation, and student self-esteem. Likewise, parents who have a positive…

Background: Care and service trajectories for people with intellectual disabilities are routes within the health care delivery system that consist of all the steps that people with intellectual disability and their families have to take in order to realize needed care and services. In contrast to the growing body of system-orientated knowledge…

Aim: The purpose of this study was to create and validate the Communication Function Classification System (CFCS) for children with cerebral palsy (CP), for use by a wide variety of individuals who are interested in CP. This paper reports the content validity, interrater reliability, and test-retest reliability of the CFCS for children with CP.…

Understanding students' prior beliefs in nuclear physics is a first step towards improving nuclear physics instruction. This paper describes the development of a diagnostic survey in nuclear physics covering the areas of radioactive decay, binding energy, properties of the nuclear force and nuclear reactions, that was administered to students at…

Assessment partnerships between staff and students are considered a vital component of the student-centred educational process. To enhance the development of this partnership in a problem-based learning curriculum, all first-year students were involved in generating a bank of formative assessment questions with answers, some of which were included…

Teachers' general pedagogical/psychological knowledge (PPK) can be defined as the knowledge needed to create and optimize teaching-learning situations across subjects, including declarative and procedural knowledge of classroom management, teaching methods, classroom assessment, and student heterogeneity. Although PPK is thought to be an important…

Given the continued growth in online learning as well as reports of high attrition rates in it, understanding student readiness for online learning is necessary. Over the years several surveys have been developed to assess student readiness as a predictor of success in online programs; however, a review of the literature yielded limited results of…

Rubrics are scoring guides, consisting of specific pre-established performance criteria, used in evaluating student work. iRubric is a comprehensive rubric development, assessment, and sharing tool. It shows the major skills and sub skills to be mastered, the different mastery levels, and marks allocated to each level. Rubrics can be…

It is imperative that teachers need to assess their learners' reading proficiency. Incidentally, most assessments developed and conducted by teachers merely discriminate who among their learners are performing better than the other. These assessments deplorably provide nothing more than norm reference data. Nonetheless, this is the only…