The Spring 2020 semester will be marked in our history as one of the most challenging semesters for higher education, although through the adversity, we were presented with opportunities for classroom innovation. A reflective account of the teaching insights gained from implementing a COVID-19 miniunit and utilizing remote oral examinations is…

As Illinois schools moved toward reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools (IARSS) identified a need for coordinated statewide COVID-19 forums for district leaders to discuss immediate challenges faced by educators as schools reopened in fall 2020. IARSS and the Illinois State Board of…

This study examined trends in how psychology internships are supervised compared to current experiential learning best practices in the literature. We sent a brief online survey to relevant contact persons for colleges/universities with psychology departments throughout the United States (n = 149 responded). Overall, the majority of institutions…

One critically important step in the instructional process is providing feedback to students, and yet, providing timely and thorough feedback is often lacking due attention. Reasons for this oversight could range from several factors including increased class sizes, vast content coverage requirements, extracurricular responsibilities, and the…

First-year students often become discouraged during introductory biology courses when repeated attempts to understand concepts nevertheless result in poor test scores. This challenge is exacerbated by traditional course structures that impose premature judgments on students' achievements. Repeated testing has been shown to benefit student ability…

Learner-centered teaching (LCT) has been found to be a more effective pedagogy for online students, as traditional teaching methods do not work well in online courses. Professors in an upper-level technology management class revised their online introductory course to incorporate cafeteria-style grading. This LCT approach allowed students to…

In 2011, Southampton Solent University, a post-1992 university in southern England, introduced a new marking scheme with the aims of changing marking practice to achieve greater transparency and consistency in marking, and to ensure that the full range of marks was being awarded to students. This paper discusses the strategic background to the…

Writing essays and receiving feedback can be useful for fostering students' learning and motivation. When faced with large class sizes, it is desirable to identify students who might particularly benefit from feedback. In this article, we tested the potential of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for identifying poor essays. A total of 14 teaching…

The ultimate communicative purpose of literature reviews is to convince the reader of the worthiness of the writer's research, which is realized stage by stage and evaluation plays an important role in achieving this end. However, concerns about evaluation demonstration in novice academic writers' literature reviews have been repeatedly voiced in…

This article provides a meta-analysis of experimental research findings on the existence of bias in subjective grading of student work such as essay writing. Twenty-three analyses, from 20 studies, with a total of 1935 graders, met the inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis. All studies involved graders being exposed to a specific type of…

We know from research across all levels of education that feedback and interactive teaching have the greatest positive effect on students' achievement. However, in higher education, teachers' constructive feedback often logistically cannot be delivered in time for all students to apply to future tasks. In this article, we report on a study of an…

When grading students' quizzes and exams, I find that students are seemingly always changing their answers from the right answer to the wrong answer. In fact, I have cautioned students against changing their answer. Colleagues have made similar observations and some books on test-taking strategies advise against answer-changing. In an effort to…

Authentic experiences of research are seen as valuable elements of undergraduate science, providing motivation for students and linking the research and teaching activities of academics. But as such experiences are made available to increasing numbers of students as formal, graded parts of the curriculum, important questions are raised about their…

Instructors often use spreadsheet software (e.g., Microsoft Excel) in their statistics courses so that students can gain experience conducting computerized analyses. Unfortunately, students tend to make several predictable errors when programming spreadsheets. Without immediate feedback, programming errors are likely to go undetected, and as a…

Three field studies tested the hypothesis that anticipating a graded test as opposed to a pass-fail test enhances metacognitive monitoring. Participants were teacher candidates who completed a mid-term and a final test in psychology courses. Each participant chose whether the result of the final test should be evaluated with one of five grades or…