Education Commons^™

Equitable Assessment For Elementary Dual-Language Learners, Joliette Mandel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis points out the contradictions between the goals of standardized testing and the goals of dual-language elementary education. I argue that dual-language elementary schools in the New York City Department of Education would be better served by a performance assessment model to measure student and school accountability for several reasons. Performance assessment is more equitable for students who are marginalized by their race, language, or class. Many students who attend dual-language schools in the NYCDOE fall into all these categories. I will discuss in depth why standardized testing is failing students, particularly those in dual-language elementary programs. Next, I …

Diseño De Una Prueba De Clasificación De Español No Estandarizada, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Resumen

El presente estudio propone una nueva prueba de clasificación en línea específicamente creada para los estudiantes de español de New York City College of Technology (NYCCT), una institución caracterizada por la elevada diversidad de su comunidad educativa. En 2017 el Departamento de Humanidades decidió crear su propia prueba de clasificación de lenguas. En el caso del idioma español, esta se creó y se pilotó en 2018 con una muestra de 144 alumnos distribuidos en 3 niveles: inicial, intermedio y avanzado alto. Los resultados de esta práctica mostraron datos relevantes que permitieron identificar factores inesperados en el análisis, como la …

A Psychologist’S Perspective For Coordinating Interdisciplinary Courses, Amanda L. Almond

Publications and Research

Developing a student evaluation for interdisciplinary teaching revealed a clearer goal for interdisciplinary course assessment. This chapter summarizes how interdisciplinary course assessment is a cooperative and reflexive process. Using professional judgment and a working group of peers, interdisciplinary courses maintain their integrity through regular reviews. A reflection on experiences with team-teaching, guest lecturing, and learning-communities is also included. Best practices for interdisciplinary course maintenance and concepts of validity are applied to the debate between evaluation and assessment methods. By fostering transparency, accountability, and peer-led critiques, interdisciplinary learning objectives within courses are sustained each semester. Recognizing concerns regarding evaluation, flexible approaches …

Improving Measurement And Expanding Meta-Analytic Knowledge: Social And Emotional Learning In Elementary And Early Childhood, Dana M. Murano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the last several decades, the development of student social and emotional skills in educational contexts has received much attention, both domestically and internationally. Whereas previous school-based educational practices had primarily focused on the teaching and testing of cognitive skills, we now recognize that there are constituents of academic success beyond the cognitive skills that are traditionally taught and tested, and the field of social and emotional learning (SEL) has emerged as a result. This two-study dissertation attempted to fill existing gaps in the development of SEL practices by exploring new horizons in both intervention and measurement with preschool and …

Critical Skills For Special Educator Effectiveness: Which Ones Matter Most, And To Whom?, Sara B. Woolf

Publications and Research

Special education teachers are expected to fulfill diverse teaching and non-teaching tasks in comparison to their general education peers. However, their performance is evaluated with measures that were normed for use with general education teachers. These specialty teachers are also routinely evaluated by professionals who may lack formal special education training or experience. These conditions render special educators vulnerable for inaccurate performance evaluation. Explicit research is needed to clarify the professional skills that are most critical to special educators’ professional effectiveness and ensure continuity of focus on these skills in preservice teacher education and employment contexts. This qualitative study builds …

Future Goals And Actions Of Faculty Development, Catherine Haras, Margery Ginsberg, Eva Fernández, Emily Daniell Magruder

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Institutional Investment In Teaching Excellence, Steven C. Taylor, Catherine Haras, Emily Daniell Magruder, Eva Fernández, Margery Ginsberg, Jake Glover

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Introduction: History And Conceptual Basis Of Assessment In Higher Education, Peter Ewell, Tammie Cumming

Publications and Research

Assessment and accountability are now inescapable features of the landscape of higher education, and ensuring that these assessments are psychometrically sound has become a high priority for accrediting agencies and therefore also for higher education institutions. Bringing together the higher education assessment literature with the psychometric literature, this book focuses on how to practice sound assessment.

This volume provides comprehensive and detailed descriptions of tools for and approaches to assessing student learning outcomes in higher education. The book is guided by the core purpose of assessment, which is to enable faculty, administrators, and student affairs professionals with the information they …

What Impacts Do Oer Have On Students? Students Share Their Experiences With A Health Psychology Oer At New York City College Of Technology, Cailean Cooney

Publications and Research

This article reports findings from a study conducted with students in three sections of a Health Psychology course that replaced a traditional textbook with open educational resources (OER) as the primary course material. The purpose of the study was to learn how OER impacted students. Data were collected in Fall 2015 with students from New York City College of Technology (City Tech), of the City University of New York (CUNY), a comprehensive college located in Brooklyn. Students were assigned the OER by their course instructor, who developed it as part of a library funded OER pilot initiative. Two research instruments …

The Future Of Natural Selection Knowledge Measurement: A Reply To Anderson Et Al. (2010), Ross Nehm, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

The development of rich, reliable, and robust measures of the composition, structure, and stability of student thinking about core scientific ideas (such as natural selection) remains a complex challenge facing science educators. In their recent article (Nehm & Schonfeld 2008), the authors explored the strengths, weaknesses, and insights provided by a detailed exploration of three commonly used measures of student thinking about natural selection in a large sample of underrepresented minority students. One of their core findings was that all of the tools they studied--including the CINS--have strengths and weaknesses that must be carefully taken into consideration by those …

Measuring Knowledge Of Natural Selection: A Comparison Of The C.I.N.S., An Open-Response Instrument, And An Oral Interview, Ross Nehm, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

Growing recognition of the central importance of fostering an in-depth understanding of natural selection has, surprisingly, failed to stimulate work on the development and rigorous evaluation of instruments that measure knowledge of it. We used three different methodological tools, the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS), a modified version of Bishop and Anderson's (Bishop and Anderson [1990] Journal of Research in Science Teaching 27: 415-427) open-response test that we call the Open Response Instrument (ORI), and an oral interview derived from both instruments, to measure biology majors' understanding of and alternative conceptions about natural selection. We explored how these instruments …

A Rotating Panel Survey To Assess Quality Of Hunter College Education, Jennifer Sousa Brennan, William (Bill) H. Williams

Publications and Research

A rotating sample design is proposed to most accurately measure the perceived quality of a Hunter College education. A representative sample of Hunter College students will belong to one of six rotating panels. Students will be contacted during four rotation periods and report their assessment of the two most recent months. It is advantageous to use a rotating panel design as opposed to a fixed panel design in order to guard against the negative effects of a deteriorating response rate. Stratified sampling will help to ensure representation across major departments and academic year of study. Methods for sampling procedures, stratification, …