The aim of this companion dissertation in practice (DiP) was to address the need to facilitate a culture of community engagement through service-learning at an academic medical center. The integration of the philosophy of community engagement is needed to prepare health care students with the knowledge, skills, and attributes needed to practice…

Competency-based education, also referred to as mastery-based, proficiency-based or performance-based education, is a system of education designed to equitably ensure all students develop the success skills they will need for college, career and life. Competency-based education is gaining momentum and visibility. Districts and schools turn to…

The purpose of this study was to examine the course design and pedagogical decision-making processes of English teachers at liberal arts colleges. Principles of course design iterated by Fink (2013) through the Integrated Course Design (ICD) model provided a framework for the study. The participants in this study were full-time English department…

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…

During the last decade, universities have endeavoured to continually improve the level of student satisfaction and learning experience. Student evaluative feedback is therefore critical to measure and track progress, and questionnaires are the principal means of collecting this data. In the UK, although the National Student Survey is used to…

Feedback is central to successful teaching and learning. Despite extensive research on the relationship between feedback, pedagogy and learning, there remain no conclusive answers as to how feedback can be effectively utilized by learners. Recently, there is emerging research exploring how feedback is conceptualized as dialogic processes to…

In response to the commentaries to their original article, the authors thank the commentators for their remarks and note that there is some general consensus across the commentaries around some major themes: (1) the lack of articulation between assessment and learning theories, particularly in relation to large-scale testing used for…