This mixed methods research study examined the use of art-based teaching methods in master's level art therapy graduate education in North America. A survey of program directors yielded information regarding in which courses and how frequently art-based methods (individual in-class art making, dyad or group art making, student art projects as…

Growing enrollment in distance education has increased student-to-lecturer ratios and, therefore, increased the workload of the lecturer. This growing enrollment has resulted in mounting efforts to develop automatic grading systems in an effort to reduce this workload. While research in the design and development of automatic grading systems has a…

Four-year colleges and universities that espouse teaching as their primary mission bear a responsibility to safeguard the welfare of their students as clients of teaching. This responsibility takes the form of a moral imperative. Faculty members hold considerable autonomy in the professional choices they make in their teaching. As a consequence,…

Learning outcomes for introductory college-level science classes include content knowledge and a range of critical thinking and analysis skills. In this context, rich writing assignments that engage students in researching content, constructing arguments, and critiquing other students' work are highly desirable but unwieldy due to large…

The inclusion of college preparation programs promote and forecast academic success in postsecondary studies among individual at-risk, African American urban high school students. Past research has shown ongoing, college acceptance, performance, and graduation gaps between at-risk, African American urban high school students when compared to…

Allowing students to improve their grade by revising their written work may help students learn to revise, but it gives them no incentive to turn in quality work from the start. This article proposes a way to invert the process, thereby teaching students how to revise, while enforcing a more disciplined approach to good writing. (Contains 3…

Since 1940, when the AAUP formally defined academic freedom (AAUP, 1984), most faculty members believe they have the final authority in assigning course grades to their students. Faculty members may be surprised that several recent court decisions have concluded that college and university administrators have the right to change grades initially…

Recollection has long been thought to play a key role in associative recognition tasks. Evidence that associative recollection might be a threshold process has come from analyses of the associative recognition receiver operating characteristic (ROC). Specifically, the ROC is not as curvilinear as a signal detection theory requires. In addition,…

A grade-reference curve (GRC) can be constructed for any course based on the grades of a course in the last several years. Among other things, the reference curve of a course can be used to test for any abnormality in the current semester's grades of a course. It can be a very important document about the course that serves students, teachers and…

Students spend much of their time in college seated in a classroom. Their seating choice can indicate something about students' general perceptions regarding seat selection and academic achievement. However, actual seat location may also play a role in student performance. This preliminary research focused on the seating choices of 373…

Mastery learning is an instructional method based on the idea that students learn best if they fully understand, or master, one concept before moving on to the next and has been shown to be extremely effective in math and science curricula. Competency-based grading is an evaluative tool that allows the faculty member to determine the level of…

The central role that assessment plays is recognised in higher education, in particular how formative feedback guides learning. A model for effective feedback practice is used to argue that, in current schemes, formative feedback is often not usable because it is strongly linked to external criteria and standards, rather than to the processes of…

Nearly all states have standards for student learning and they have assessment programs to measure students' proficiency on those standards. But schools within each state nonetheless are left to develop their own standards-based student report cards as the primary means of communicating information about students' performance. To address the…

The issue of who has the final say on academic standards (grading), academics or managers, has hitherto not arisen in Greece. Professors entitled to research, to teach and to inquire is a freedom expressed by the Greek Constitution. This article presents a contemporary view and raises concerns about the future and the longevity of academic freedom…

It can be quite alarming (and eye-opening) to see exactly how many of the grades students receive are based on their behaviors rather than their learning. Students should be assessed on what they know and can use rather than on their behavior. The reality, unfortunately, is that the opposite is often the case. Grades for students who work hard are…