Education Commons^™

Assessing Writing - What Doesn't Work, But Is Used Anyway, Andrew P. Johnson

Elementary and Literacy Education Department Publications

This is an excerpt from my book, Johnson, A. (2024). Being and becoming teachers of writing: A meaning-based approach. Routledge. It should be out in March/April of 2024.

https://www.routledge.com/Being-and-Becoming-Teachers-of-Writing-A-Meaning-Based-Approach-to-Authentic/Johnson/p/book/9781032355726

Deep Change Theory: Implications For Educational Development Leaders, Caitlin Martin, Elizabeth Wardle

Publications

While chapters 1 and 2 explore the promise of theoretical frameworks for making conceptual change that leads to innovative action around teaching and learning in higher education, they also point out the challenges to this kind of work as teams of faculty strive to lead change in their programs and departments after completing the program. To summarize our claims thus far: one of the goals for the HCWE Faculty Writing Fellows Program is to empower faculty who participate to return to their departments to make programmatic changes—changes they identify as central to their work and values and program culture. The …

It’S All About To Change: Implications Of Reforming Grading & Assessment Within A Public School District, Divonna M. Stebick, Megan L. Pilarcik, Daniel W. Hartman

Education Faculty Publications

Calls to reform grading systems and other assessment practices have been growing for several decades. There is consensus among many educators that grading and assessment practices that have been traditionally accepted as good practice are at best ineffective and at worst have a negative impact on raising achievement. Consequently, there is no single solution or methodology for grading that has emerged as the best practice. A variety of contemporary grading approaches have gained widespread popularity in recent years, typically being referred to as standards-based grading, standards-referenced grading, proficiency-based grading, or competency-based learning. A challenge, however, is that different school districts …

The Value Of The Useless: Erin Manning, Impact, Higher Education Research, Progress, Laura Elizabeth Smithers

Educational Foundations & Leadership Faculty Publications

This article brings the work of Erin Manning to bear on common sense practices and conversations of the value of a college education. Manning’s work provides a productive alternative to the neoliberal discourse of college impact that has dominated higher education research for the past half century. Neoliberalism produces the common sense of the value of education as privatized, datafied (or dividuated), and measurable outcomes. This common sense reduces American higher education to the sum of its parts. To produce worlds to which campus marketing departments on occasion gesture, worlds where college produces spaces of community transformation, we must come …

Empowering Salieri - Extracting The Genius In Our Students, Zachary C. Schafer, Lawrence C. Scharmann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Aesthetic Based Alternative Assessment (ABAA) is a type of project-based learning that extends beyond science content and places students’ interests at the forefront of the learning environment. ABAA is consistent with a holistic approach to science teaching and learning long advocated by former NSTA President Hans O. Andersen (1989–1990), in which students’ interests serve as the departure to more intensive involvement with the subject.

Assessments And Accommodations For English Language Learners: A Literature Review, Heidi Jo Bartlett

The Nebraska Educator: A Student-Led Journal

While research in how English language learners (ELLs) use assessment accommodations is lacking, there are some general conclusions that one can draw. First, teachers must know their students’ abilities. This includes knowledge of their English proficiency, knowledge of their first language skills, especially as it pertains to literacy skills, and knowledge of their content area understanding. If teachers are aware of areas of weakness in students’ assessments, they should work to compensate for them by either changing their instruction or providing assessment accommodations. Second, it is important for teachers to recognize the various types of assessment accommodations that are available …

Teachers’ Use Of Standardized Assessments To Monitor Learning And Its Impact On Student Reading Achievement, Eilyn Sanabria

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reading instruction must be “intentional, systematic, and explicit” and “implemented by a knowledgeable teacher” (Ruetzel & Cooter, 2019, p. 87). The era of accountability has brought standardized assessments to the forefront of reading instruction. However, gaps about assessment-related and instructional practices and their impact on student achievement exist in the literature. The present study aims to provide needed insights on how these practices help or hinder, specifically, historically low-performing students.

Using student achievement and teacher survey data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: Kindergarten 2011 (ECLS-K), and through the lens of data use theory (Hutchins, 1995; Spillane, 2012), hierarchical multiple …

Difficulty And Distance In Educational Encounters With Historical Violence, Grant Scribner

The Nebraska Educator: A Student-Led Journal

This article reviews recent literature that addresses historical violence, difficult history, and the production of historical distance in teaching and learning about past violence. The author argues that based on the literature, the processes by which certain violent histories become “difficult” while others are aestheticized deserve greater attention. As violent histories become more or less difficult, the production of nuanced, contextually contingent historical distances may have serious implications for teachers’ pedagogical decisions as well as students’ reactions and understanding. The author argues further that historical violence not considered difficult or traumatic in a given moment and context deserves greater attention …

The Current State Of Assessing Historical Thinking: A Literature Analysis, Taylor S. Hamblin

The Nebraska Educator: A Student-Led Journal

In American schools since the mid 2000’s, social studies departments and state departments of education have created goals and updated standards prioritizing critical thinking engagement. Promotion of critical thinking has created a wealth of scholarship on developing a specific type of critical thinking, or cognition, called historical thinking. Imperative to the promotion of teaching historical thinking is in how teachers can assess the inquiries that make it up. Unfortunately, standardized social studies assessments have failed to measure the acquisition of the new historical thinking standards. In order to improve the assessment practices of history teachers, I wish to do two …

Development Of A Faculty Appreciation Of Pedagogy Scale, Carol A. Hurney, Jordan D. Troisi, Lori H. Leaman

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Evidencing the value of programs and services challenges educational developers to measure a range of outcomes. While direct measures of faculty use of effective teaching behaviors and student learning are desirable, these methods are time consuming and resource intensive. We provide a scale that is easy to deploy and can be adapted to different programs. Our psychometrically sound scale measures one facet of faculty learning about teaching—appreciation of pedagogy. The scale measures awareness, knowledge integration, emotions, beliefs, and self-reported behaviors related to the appreciation of pedagogy. We also examine scale correlates, including teaching identity, confidence, and control.

Students Helping Students Provide Valuable Feedback On Course Evaluations, Adriana Signorini, Mariana Abuan, Gautam Panakkal, Sandy Dorantes

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

The purpose of the student evaluations of teaching (SET) are to help instructors enhance the teaching and learning experience in their courses; however, student feedback can often be more unconstructive than useful because students are usually requested to evaluate instruction with little or no formal training. As a result, SET become missed opportunities for students to effectively communicate their learning needs and for instructors to collect actionable information about how the course is perceived. This project aims to improve the quality of student responses to the open-ended questions that instructors receive by partnering with undergraduates in demonstrating to their peers …

Assessment Literacy In College Teaching: Empirical Evidence On The Role And Effectiveness Of A Faculty Training Course, Kyle D. Massey, Christopher Deluca, Danielle Lapointe-Mcewan

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This research explores how faculty members’ conceptions of assessment and confidence in assessment change as a result of an instructor training course. Based on a sample of 27 faculty members enrolled in a semester-long instructional development course, this survey-based study provides initial evidence that faculty members can develop confidence in assessment while adopting increasingly complex conceptions of assessment. Based on this study’s findings, we argue that instructional development programs for college faculty have a critical role to play in stimulating faculty learning about assessment of student learning and are an important component in promoting a positive assessment culture.

Cultivating And Sustaining A Faculty Culture Of Data-Driven Teaching And Learning: A Systems Approach, Marsha Lovett, Chad Hershock

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

A prominent goal of colleges and universities today is to enact data-driven teaching and learning. Faculty clearly play a key role, and yet they tend to have limited time, a lack of training in assessment or education research, and few incentives for engaging in this work. We describe a framework designed to address the practical and cultural aspects of these challenges via a cycle of educational development and support: motivate, educate, facilitate, disseminate. We illustrate this systems approach with concrete examples and conclude with lessons learned from our experiences that should translate to a variety of institutional contexts.

Teac 413m: Teaching Multilingual Learners In Content Areas – A Peer Review Of Teaching Benchmark Portfolio, Lydiah Kananu Kiramba

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

The purpose of this benchmark portfolio was to trace the process of designing, teaching and assessing TEAC 413M: Teaching Multilingual Learners in Content Areas, a required course for the B.Ed secondary education major. My objectives for this portfolio are to: a) document the impacts of different instructional strategies employed in TEAC 413M, and to b) reflect on the course success and shortcomings and develop pathways for the future course design and development. A secondary goal was to examine translation of course content into students’ own teaching and planning for their students through a variety of activities and assessments throughout the …

A Friday Afternoon Reflection: Random Memorandums, Dr. Deborah Bracke

Education: Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works

One means of distinguishing ourselves as College Professors is by communicating with our students in an open, honest manner. The Random Memorandum is one way of accomplishing this.

The Double-Edged Sword Of Standardized Testing, Barbara Meyer, Christine Paxson

Faculty Publications - College of Education

Assessment in Pk-12 schools has always been a challenge. Measurement and comparison of students, schools, school districts and states provides accountability for all stakeholders in education. Standardized testing has become the norm, but it is overused. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers is one test adopted on a large scale to measure whether students are prepared for college and career. Parents are one of the stakeholders who had had concerns about another standardized test, but they also recognize the need. A survey was conducted of parents whose children took PARCC to learn their expectations of the …

“How Can He Be So Cruel?” Examining Issues Of Trust In School Improvement Efforts, Jacqueline R. Wettlaufer, Steve Sider

Education Faculty Publications

In this case, a high school vice-principal encounters tension and anger when she rewrites a staff member’s report card comments without his knowledge. The case narrative examines the conflict that arises when, under time constraints and pressures to produce student reports, the vice-principal acts on a decision she believes is ethically correct only to find that she incurs a significant setback with staffing relationships largely due to wavering of trust. The analysis examines how transformational leadership builds self-efficacy in all staff founded on trusting relationships. Professional reflection provides a conduit through which educational leaders can assess their own practice and …

Comparison Of Two Approaches To Interpretive Use Arguments, Michele Carney, Angela Crawford, Carl Siebert, Rich Osguthorpe, Keith Thiede

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, & NCME, 2014) recommend an argument-based approach to validation that involves a clear statement of the intended interpretation and use of test scores, the identification of the underlying assumptions and inferences in that statement—termed the interpretation/use argument, and gathering of evidence to support or refute the assumptions and inferences. We present two approaches to articulating the assumptions and inferences that underlie a score interpretation and use statement, also termed the interpretation/use argument (Kane, 2016). One approach uses the five sources of validity evidence in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing …

Broaching Threshold Concepts: The Trouble With “Skills” Language In Defining Student Learning Goals, Angela J. Zito

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This essay argues that description of student learning goals as various “skills” presents a conceptual threshold lying between and connecting routinely dichotomized characterizations of student learning—most notably, “concrete” versus “abstract.” Qualitative analysis of instructor interviews shows that “skills” language tends to conceal abstract (that is, affective) learning goals behind more concrete (that is, cognitive) ones. Ultimately, this essay proposes that cognitive and affective student learning goals might be more clearly articulated using threshold concepts within and across disciplines, and that the recognition of “skills” as both affective and cognitive is itself a threshold concept in educational development.

The Fearless Teaching Framework: A Model To Synthesize Foundational Education Research For University Instructors, Alice E. Donlan, Sandra M. Loughlin, Virginia L. Byrne

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

There is often a disconnect between the unit of analysis in rigorous education research, and the types of recommendations that instructors find the most useful to improve their teaching. Research often focuses on narrow slices of the student experience, and university instructors often require broad recommendations. We present the Fearless Teaching Framework to address this gap between research and practice. In this framework, we define four pieces of effective teaching: classroom climate, course content, teaching practices, and assessment strategies. We argue that these are appropriate areas of focus for instructor growth, based on their relations to student engagement.

Faculty Development Initiatives: A Prerequisite For Capacity Building And Enhanced Productivity In A Medical Institution, Rehana Rehman, Hassan Mehmood, Syeda Fatima, Irfanullah Baig, Zohaib Rana, Mohammad Iqbal

Department of Biological & Biomedical Sciences

Objective: To determine the contribution of teaching, learning and assessment forum's initiatives on professional development of faculty and staff.
Methods: This retrospective study was conducted at the Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Aga Khan University, Karachi, from July to December 2016, and comprised teaching, learning and assessment activities carried out from 2012 to 2015. The responses acquired from feedback evaluation were recorded at the end of activity on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1-5. Positive responses were presented for each variable with respective activity type across the study years. The association of the effectiveness of teaching, learning …

Getting To The Why: Exploring Early Career Physical Science Teachers' Discourse And Assessment Practices., Aaron Alfred Musson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Formative assessment, or assessment for learning, is an essential component of the interactions between teachers and learners. Teachers elicit statements of understandings to decide their next instructional steps. Similarly, students communicate what they know, and apply teachers’ responses. Formative assessment is as much assessment as discourse; teachers use both to determine and respond to student needs. When teachers use formative assessments effectively, they can guide student understanding, extend discussions, probe for deeper meanings, and provide feedback. Formative assessment provides an understanding of how students are growing (or struggling), which teachers can use to adjust instruction. Frequent formative assessment is strongly …

Short Case Study: The First Year Experience: Students’ Perceptions On Assessment, Fiona Mcsweeney, Roisin Donnelly

Other resources

This case study reports on the results of a pilot study with first year students in the Department of Social Sciences in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) in Ireland. It discussed the findings in relation to student perceptions on the assessment process for first years.

Navigating The Contested Terrain Of Teacher Education Policy And Practice: Authors Respond To Scale, Nick Henning, Alison G. Dover, Erica Dotson, Ruchi Argwal Rangnath, Christine Clayton, Martha K. Donovan, Susan Ophelia Cannon, Stephanie Behm Cross, Alyssa Dunn

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) provided a commentary on the manuscripts in the first part of this special issue, which highlighted the benefits of edTPA and the necessity for such assessment programs to improve teacher education and strengthen teaching practices. In turn, the authors responded to the SCALE commentary. The authors’ responses raise concerns about equity, fairness, and unintended consequences of teacher performance assessments. These responses highlight the need for continued dialogue on ways to improve teacher education and strengthen the teaching profession.

Improving Performance On Task Three Assessment: Strategies And Supports, Terryl Rock, Norma Hogan

ETSU Faculty Works

In this session presenters will demonstrate specific strategies and supports that have helped our teacher candidates
improve their performance on Task Three: Assessment. Topics include helping teacher candidates:

• Identify and state objectives clearly and effectively.
• Align standards/objectives, instruction, and assessment.
• Develop deeper understandings of evaluative criteria, cognitive feedback, and helping their students to use feedback.
• Organize and display assessment data.
• Conduct meaningful analysis of assessment data
• Use assessment data to modify instruction and to plan next steps

Examples of strategies/activities/supports, as well as guidance for others to develop their own will be provided.

Informed And Uninformed Naïve Assessment Constructors’ Strategies For Item Selection, Helenrose Fives, Nicole Barnes

Department of Educational Foundations Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a descriptive analysis of 53 naïve assessment constructors’ explanations for selecting test items to include on a summative assessment. We randomly assigned participants to an informed and uninformed condition (i.e., informed participants read an article describing a Table of Specifications). Through recursive thematic analyses of participants’ explanations, we identified 14 distinct strategies that coalesced into three families of strategies: Alignment, Item Evaluation, and Affective Evaluation. We describe the nature of the strategies and the degree to which participants used strategies with frequency and effect size analysis. Results can inform teacher education on assessment construction through explicit instruction in …

Vmed 646: Animal Physiology Ii—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Renee M. Mcfee

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This Peer Review of Teaching Project portfolio focuses on the Animal Physiology II course which is required for first year veterinary medicine students. Weekly quizzes assess baseline knowledge and had been administered individually and in groups. I hypothesized the discontinuation of group quizzes would increase student effort when preparing for quizzes. Unit exams involve scenario-based questions and require students to apply information. I hypothesized the implementation of group exams would help under-performing students improve their ability to apply information they had learned. Exams were still taken individually prior to being taken in groups to encourage adequate preparation. Student impacts were …

Multimodal K-12 Assessment Frameworks And The Interactive Audience: An Exploratory Analysis Of Existing Frameworks, Ewa Mcgrail, Nadia Behizadeh

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

Multimodal writing often occurs through membership in an online, participatory culture; thus, the audience for student writers potentially can shift from imagined readers to actual, accessible readers and responders. In this article, we thoroughly review the idea of audience and then report results from an exploratory review of K-12 assessment frameworks and analyze how key frameworks address the need for consideration of an interactive audience. We found that multimodal composition is being defined consistently across all frameworks as composition that includes multiple ways of communicating, but the majority of multimodal composition examples were texts that were non-interactive composition types (as …

Educational Development Efforts Aligned With The Assessment Cycle, Phyllis Blumberg

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Using an assessment cycle as an organizing framework, this article illustrates how educational development and assessment mutually complement each other. It describes an assessment study conducted to determine if two colleges at a small university met their strategic goals to increase the adoption of learning-centered teaching. This study served the parallel function of assessing the impact of sustained educational development efforts by the Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) to promote learning-centered teaching. The majority of interviewed faculty reported using learning-centered approaches. The data collection method itself also served as a teachable moment for faculty who do not attend CTL …

The Aspirational Curriculum Map: A Diagnostic Model For Action-Oriented Program Review, Eric Metzler, George Rehrey, Lisa Kurz, Joan Middendorf

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

When the process of curriculum mapping begins with the faculty’s articulations of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students should master upon graduation, a curriculum map results that enables faculty to review the curriculum for effectiveness, see the workings of the whole curriculum at a glance, plan assessments, and recognize where adjustments or changes need to be made. This article explains these benefits and lays out a step by step process for building such a curriculum map that can be adapted to any institutional context. We also describe a variety of outcomes from and reactions to our process.