"Accelerated Math" software creates individualized assignments aligned with state standards and national guidelines, scores student work, and generates reports on student progress. The software can be used in conjunction with the existing math curriculum to add practice components and potentially aid teachers in differentiating…

Mobile Learning (M-Learning) is an approach to E-Learning that utilizes mobile devices. Learning Management System (LMS) should enable M-Learning. Unfortunately, M-Learning is not the same at each educational institution. Assessment is one of the learning activities that can be achieved electronically and via mobile device. Mobile assessment…

Many software development firms are now adopting the agile software development method. This method involves the customer at every level of software development, thus reducing the impact of change in the requirement at a later stage. In this article, the principles of the agile method for software development are explored and there is a focus on…

Descriptive statistics and appropriate visual representations of scores are important for all test developers, whether they are experienced testers working on large-scale projects, or novices working on small-scale local tests. Many teachers put in charge of testing projects do not know "why" they are important, however, and are utterly convinced…

Open source software has become a catchword in libraryland. Yet many remain unclear about open source's benefits--or even what it is. So what is open source software (OSS)? It's software that is free in every sense of the word: free to download, free to use, and free to view or modify. Most OSS is distributed on the Web and one doesn't need to…

If a person is on a presentation and he/she does not know how to go back to a previous PowerPoint slide, his/her credibility will be clouded and the audience will become frustrated. More sophisticated presenters use handheld remotes to control the basic navigation of slides. Even in this case, keyboard shortcuts can be an added benefit. For those…

An item model serves as an explicit representation of the variables in an assessment task. An item model includes the "stem", "options", and "auxiliary information". The "stem" is the part of an item which formulates context, content, and/or the question the examinee is required to answer. The "options" contain the alternative answers with one…

Individualized feedback is an important factor in fostering learning. However, it is often not seen in schools because providing it places considerable additional workload on teachers. One way to solve this problem is to employ critiquing systems. These systems, however, require significant development effort before they can be put into use. In…

More than ever, teachers are using digital video to enhance their lessons. In fact, the number of schools using video streaming increased from 30 percent to 45 percent between 2004 and 2006, according to Market Data Retrieval. Why the popularity? For starters, video-streaming products are easy to use. They allow teachers to punctuate lessons with…

A federal jury in Texas awarded Blackboard Inc. $3.1-million last month, saying that a smaller Canadian competitor, Desire2Learn Inc., had infringed Blackboard's patent for a system of delivering course materials online. The case has been closely watched by campus-technology officials, many of whom feared that a Blackboard win could stifle…

Today's adolescents are expected to read and write well at highly competent levels and the content area literacy skills they will acquire in adolescence are necessary for academic achievement as well as life-long learning. In the middle grades, content area literacy skills are perfected through work in various curricular areas, which are housed in…

The "emerging educational institutional decision-making matrix" is developed to allow educational institutions to adopt a rigorous and consistent methodology of determining which of the myriad of emerging educational technologies will be the most compelling for the institution, particularly ensuring that it is the educational or pedagogical but…

The UCLA National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) is under contract from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) to conduct research on assessment models and tools designed to support Marine Corps rifle marksmanship. In this deliverable, we first review the literature on known-distance rifle marksmanship…

Abundant research and literature suggest the unreflective use of PowerPoint (PPT)-type presentations to deliver core content in higher education classes may have a negative effect on student learning (Driessnack, 2005; Kinchin et al. 2008; Maxwell, 2007). Many students rely heavily on downloadable notes from electronic delivery to the exclusion of…

Recent assessments indicate that American students do not score well on tests of scientific problem solving, relative to students in other nations. IMMEX is a web-based virtual environment that provides students with opportunities to solve science problems by viewing information resources through a suite of menu options, developing a hypothesis…