Learners intending to enter some higher education (HE) institutions in South Africa write the National Benchmark Tests (NBTs) that are expected to provide a measure of their readiness for HE. A large gap exists between the quantitative literacy competencies of many of these learners and expectations at HE level. In this article I explore the…

The development and use of assessment systems to measure the performance and progress of teacher candidates and inform the continuous improvement of teacher education programs has been a longstanding priority in teacher education for the past 30 years. Teacher educators in the School of Education at a small public midwestern university revised and…

The National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools (NSBECS) were published in 2012 to serve as both a guide and assessment tool for PK-12 Catholic school effectiveness and sustainability. The NSBECS rest on the conviction that adhering to these standards and benchmarks with fidelity will result in highly…

This study reports on an adaptation of the course experience questionnaire (CEQ) to the Arab learning context. An Arabic version of the CEQ was used to test the perceptions of a random sample of students at a public university in the UAE as regards their learning environment. The participants were 488 women students who study at nine different…

The study was designed as a linked two-phase investigation, aiming to psychometrically develop and validate a Chinese version of the "Organizational Climate Diagnostic Instrument for Junior High Schools" (OCDI-JH) for use in Taiwan. Through extensive literature reviews, the complex phenomena of school climate were decomposed into a…

In educational applications, "Knowledge Tracing" (KT) has been widely studied for decades as it is considered a fundamental task towards adaptive online learning. Among proposed KT methods, Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT) and its variants are by far the most effective ones due to the high flexibility of the neural network. However, DKT…

This paper quantifies the learning gain that accrues to 15-year-old students over one year of schooling in 18 countries and economies, where the cohort eligible to sit the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)ISA test overlaps with two distinct school cohorts. School-entry regulations are used as an exogenous source of…

Recent literature places more emphasis on assessment comments rather than relying solely on scores. Both are variable, however, emanating from assessment judgements. One established source of variability is "contrast effects": scores are shifted away from the depicted level of competence in a preceding encounter. The shift could arise…

Recent trends in higher education have increased interest in improving accountability in U.S. higher education beyond current accreditation practices. Many proposed solutions include using quantitative-performance measures like graduation and default rates to assess performance, but questions remain about how such a system could fit-in with…

Advise TX programming, established in the 2011-12 school year, is a collaboration between the College Advising Corps and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) intended to increase students' college enrollment rates. This annual report, required by the General Appropriations Act, House Bill 1, Article III, Rider 44, 88th Texas…

Since its implementation in 2004, the Canadian English Language Benchmark Assessment for Nurses (CELBAN) has been accepted as evidence of language ability for licensure of internationally educated nurses (IENs) in Canada. This article focuses on the complexities of sustaining an occupation-specific assessment over time. The authors reference the…

Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

The Early Literacy Program focuses on the development of early literacy skills, with additional emphasis placed on intervention for students at risk of not meeting grade-based reading benchmarks. Resources available to aid these students include interventions and supports for students in grades kindergarten through third grade, standards and…

Comprehensive exams, or "comps," are a staple of doctoral programs as a way for students to express their understanding of material, synthesize their learning, and apply that learning to their fields of study; further, comps are deemed a rite of passage prior to advancing to the dissertation stage of the doctoral degree. Literature…

The Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) has been used extensively to investigate children's understanding of emotion. The present study aimed at investigating the TEC's factorial structure, its measurement invariance across age and gender, and defining age-referred TEC scores, in a large sample of 1,478 children (755 males, 723 females) aged…