Education Commons^™

Diving Deeper With Assessment, Hilary Hollingsworth

Dr Hilary Hollingsworth

ACER is helping educators to understand and implement assessment practices for positive classroom change and improved learning.

Examining Student Course Outcomes In First Year Anatomy And Physiology Using E-Books Versus Traditional Textbooks, Howard Marquise

Theses & Dissertations

Over the last several years, use of e-books in higher education has increased significantly and is projected to continue through the next decade. Institutions of higher learning have implemented use of e-books without any data that verified the impact on student learning outcomes. The purpose of this ex post facto, quantitative study was to compare student learning outcomes in Human Anatomy and Physiology I courses using e-books versus using traditional textbooks at a two-year public community college in South Texas. With a participant population of 686 students, data were analyzed by their final grades comparing the differences between those who …

National Learning And Teaching Resource Audit And Classification Final Report, Philip Hider, Barney Dalgarno, Sue Bennett, Ying-Hsang Liu, Carole Gerts, Carla Daws, Barbara Spiller, Pru Mitchell, Robert Parkes, Raylee Macaulay

Information Management

The Australian Office for Learning and Teaching's (OLT) research repository is used to disseminate the results of higher education research. This is the final report of a project that investigated how the resources in the research repository should be described and indexed so that they could be accessed more effectively. The project team ascertained which attributes of the resources needed to be described and how they should be described, developed a metadata schema, selected and/or created appropriate indexing vocabularies and reindexed the resources.

An Exploration Of Performance-Based Funding At Four-Year Public Colleges In The North Central Association Of Colleges And Schools, Samuel Fincher

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Performance-based funding has been used to help alleviate state and public calls for higher education accountability and more states have adopted this type of funding model (Tandberg & Hillman, 2014; Dougherty, Natow, & Vega, 2012). The purpose of this study was to explore performance-based funding and examine the relationship between types of funding and performance indicators in the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA). The state funding trends were examined for all of the states in the NCA. The correlations for state funding and four performance outcomes for all four-year higher education institutions were compared for three states …

Year Four Of The Qep: So Close Yet So Far, Kelly Whealan George, Aaron D. Clevenger

Aaron D. Clevenger

Academic Department Indicators 2014-2015, Uno Office Of Institutional Effectiveness

Program Review

The audience is the Academic Planning Council (APC), college and department heads, and faculty. The purpose is to report instructional productivity measures useful for making comparisons and observing trends. Selected departmental information in this report is submitted annually to the Delaware Study, a National Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity.

This Instructional Productivity information corresponds to the UNO state- and tuition-funded budget. The Supplemental Information at the end of the document provides counts and statistics for campus-wide programs embedded in most colleges. Only Dual Enrollment instruction is excluded from the productivity report since it is a fee-based instructional program for …

Enrollment Management: Structure And Decision Participation, Lauren Haddad Friedman

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Once a novel strategy adopted by a limited number of private colleges, enrollment management (EM) is now a standard practice for most institutions in American higher education. The units engaged in EM and strategic enrollment management (SEM) serve as change agents in support of student recruitment, retention and graduation. Over time, the units supporting EM have expanded from admissions to include financial aid, advising, the registrar and institutional research. As a result of this expansion, structural models developed in the 1980s provide little insight into the team organization that EM has become. Using data collected in a survey instrument administered …

Michels Named As Director Of University Assessment, Steven Michels

Steven Michels

Professor Steven Michels has been named director of University assessment for Sacred Heart University. In this newly created position, Michels will oversee a University-wide assessment committee dedicated to continuously improving teaching and learning through the use of evidence-based assessment tools.

Yakimowski Named Assistant Dean For Assessment In Its College Of Education, Mary E. Yakimowski

Mary E. Yakimowski

Mary E. Yakimowski has been named assistant dean for assessment at Sacred Heart University’s Isabelle Farrington College of Education (FCE). In this new role, Yakimowski will provide leadership in the development, implementation and administration of a comprehensive assessment system for FCE students and programs.

Quality Assurance In Gp Training, Daniel Edwards

Dr Daniel Edwards

An annual survey is collecting information about the postgraduate training experiences of General Practice registrars across Australia.

Hacking Assessment, Phillip Dawson

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Hackers exploit weaknesses in a system to achieve their own goals. In this paper I argue that hacking presents a significant threat to the growing world of online assessment. This threat needs to be addressed through a variety of means; technological anti-hacking approaches will not be sufficient. The most effective ways to prevent hacking may be changes to the assessment tasks themselves to make hacking less tempting; these approaches also have a range of positive side effects in terms of authenticity, transparency of criteria, and ensuring tasks involve work beyond the exam. I conclude with a brief exploration of the …

Exceeding The Limits: Teaching And Assessing Information Literacy Within Blackboard, Jon Ritterbush

Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings

Many librarians can relate to the pedagogical limitations of one-shot classes and the challenges of reaching large numbers of first-year students. The Library Research Tutorial at the University of Nebraska-Kearney was designed to go beyond time and space constraints to orient new undergraduate students to library resources and research methods using self-paced modules within a Blackboard course. Since Fall 2011, over 2,400 students have been enrolled in the Tutorial at the request of their course instructors, who in turn receive students’ Tutorial quiz scores for use as graded credit. This paper describes the Tutorial’s contents, enrollment and grading processes, instructor …

Extensibility - Validation Of Workplace Learning In Higher Education - Examples And Considerations, Deirdre Goggin, Stephen Cassidy, Irene Sheridan, Phil O'Leary

Conference Papers

The importance of effective curriculum design and development in structuring and supporting learners in their knowledge attainment has been outlined in the writings of Tyler (1949) [1] which supports the approach adopted in European Higher Education stemming from the 1999 Bologna Declaration (European Commission, 2009). These structures are assisted in part by national and European qualification frameworks and the Dublin descriptors which are explicit of the variances in knowledge, skill and competence as one progresses in higher education and training. In addition, the inclusion of learning outcomes and programme objectives in the development of comprehensive curricula has been linked to …

Work Integrated Learning: A Lesson In Good Wil, Daniel Edwards

Dr Daniel Edwards

Successful and sustainable work integrated learning programs share a number of key elements, as Daniel Edwards explains.

How Can We Accurately Measure Whether Students Are Gaining Relevant Outcomes In Higher Education?, Tatiana Melguizo, Gema Zamarro, Tatiana Velasco, Fabio Sanchez

Education Reform Faculty and Graduate Students Publications

The main objective of this study is to empirically test a number of theory-based models (i.e. fixed effects (FE), random effects (RE), and aggregated residuals (AR)) to measure both, the generic knowledge as well as the degree attainment rates and early labor outcomes, gained by students in different programs and institutions in higher education. There are four main findings: First, the results of the paper confirm the need of using models that address the issue of student selection into programs and institutions in order to avoid biased estimates. Second, our findings provide suggestive evidence in favor of using FE models. …

Differences In Post-Secondary Persistence, By Gender: A Phenomenological Study Of Traditional College Students, Karen Louise Clark

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore persistence differences by gender, among traditional-age college students at a private, residential, liberal arts college in a Mid-Atlantic state. The number of students attending college has steadily increased. However, females have increasingly outnumbered males in college enrollment and persistence. This is a growing concern for higher education. The following research questions guided the research: How do traditional-age college seniors describe persistence? How do traditional-age college seniors describe experiences or beliefs that contributed to their persistence? What are the persistence differences, by gender? Twenty females and thirteen males (n=33) participated in …

Improving Student Learning In Higher Education: A Mixed Methods Study, Megan R. Good

Dissertations, 2014-2019

To improve quality, higher education must be able to demonstrate learning improvement. To do so, academic degree program leaders must assess learning, intervene, and then re-assess to determine if the intervention was indeed an improvement (Fulcher, Good, Coleman, and Smith, 2014). This seemingly “simple model” is rarely enacted in higher education (Blaich & Wise, 2011). The purpose of this embedded mixed methods study was to investigate the effectiveness and experience of a faculty development program focused on a specific programmatic learning outcome. Specifically, the intervention was intended to increase students’ ethical reasoning skills aligned with a university-wide program. The results …

The Effect Of Examinee Motivation On Value-Added Estimates, Laura M. Williams

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Questions regarding the quality of education, both in K-12 systems and higher education, are common. Methods for measuring quality in education have been developed in the past decades, with value-added estimates emerging as one of the most well-known methods. Value-added methods purport to indicate how much students learn over time as a result of their attendance at a particular school. Controversy has surrounded the algorithms used to generate value-added estimates as well as the uses of the estimates to make decisions about school and teacher quality. In higher education, most institutions used cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data to estimate value-added. …

Learning Outcomes Assessment At American Library Association Accredited Master’S Programs In Library And Information Studies, Win Shih

Win Shih

There is an increasing emphasis on learning outcomes assessment in the accreditation process in higher education in general and in library education specifically. This mixed methods study investigated the practice of outcomes assessment at master’s programs in library and information studies accredited by the American Library Association in the United States and Canada. Six salient themes emerged from the survey responses of Accreditation Liaison officers and the content analysis of 12 program presentations of MLIS programs. First, outcomes assessment has taken hold at MLIS programs in which 93% of programs have adopting a common set of learning goals and outcomes, …

Faculty Perceptions Of The Adoption And Use Of Clickers In The Legal Studies In Business Classroom, Denise M. Farag, Susan Park, Gundars Kaupins

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The use of clickers in the classroom can improve student engagement and motivation. However, few studies have been conducted on faculty opinions of the use of clickers. This paper measures clicker use amongst legal studies in business faculty and investigates perceptions and factors associated with adoption of clickers in the discipline. Survey results indicate that most legal studies in business faculty have either never or rarely use clickers, and very few faculty members in the discipline use clickers regularly. Instructors perceive clickers to improve teaching, but may be reluctant to adopt them because of time constraints.

Journey Into Shame: Implications For Justice Pedagogies, Roger C. Bergman

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

Being formed for justice can be a painful experience. Sometimes that pain takes the form of shame and contributes to the formation and exercise of conscience. But shame in other forms can be opposed to human flourishing and social justice. Psychologist James Fowler provides a spectrum of two forms of healthy shame and four forms of unhealthy shame, to which the author adds four other varieties, strategic shame and spiritual shame, at one end of the spectrum, and murderous shame and genocidal shame, at the other. Various experiences of shame are dramatically illustrated in Black Like Me, John Howard …

Multidimensional Resilience In Honors Students At Bryant University, Haley Nicol

Honors Projects in Applied Psychology

College level honors programs are continuously working towards improvement of their programs and working towards improving the college experience for their students. Apart from recognition and developing a positive reputation for the university, the goals for these selective academic programs include better serving their students from both academic and professional perspectives, as well encouraging and increasing program completion retention rates. There are various ways of testing students to assess their mindset and personal drive as well as gauge the possibility of students graduating with successful completion of their Capstone project or thesis in their senior year. To better understand how …

Assessing Student Learning: Growing The Culture, Cultivating Buy-In, Improving Quality, Paul Force-Emery Mackie

Social Work Department Publications

All institutions face the common challenge of developing, conducting, and maintaining high quality, purposeful, and relevant student learning assessment processes and protocols. In 2012 Minnesota State University, Mankato created the University Assessment Coordinator position as a reassigned faculty line. This position initially focused on strengthening linkages between institutional, academic, and co-curricular/service program assessment needs through the development of training opportunities, program assessment of learning model development, reporting assistance, data interpretation, and information integration. This presentation highlights how the process and position was structured, challenges identified and addressed, and successes that emerged from the process.

Improving Assessment Processes And Quality In Medical Specialisations, Daniel Edwards

Dr Daniel Edwards

ACER’s work for a number of specialist colleges in medicine is contributing to higher quality education, as Daniel Edwards explains.

Tenure: A Communal Privilege For Service, Not An Individual Privilege For Research, Steven Kessler

Journal of Educational Leadership in Action

Tenure is commonly understood as a privilege earned by individuals in higher education guaranteeing a lifetime appointment barring gross negligence. To individuals outside of higher education, the tenure process is less clear. Contemporary tenure is earned today largely for research and teaching with the heaviest emphasis on research. The third leg of tenure, service, is often neglected or discouraged in the rewards structure. While this information is widely known in higher education, the irony of this system is not. This paper aims to explore higher education’s historical roots as a medieval corporation in explaining the origins of tenure. Tenure originally …

An Exploration Of Rpl In Higher Education In Ireland With Particular Focus On Quality Assurance, Deirdre Goggin, Irene Sheridan, Phil O'Leary

Conference Papers

This paper focuses on examining the practice of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) a provision which allows a learner present previously acquired relevant learning for assessment for credit. In general all forms of learning are formally recognised within an RPL system which includes informal, non formal and formal learning. The key misconception within higher education can be that RPL requires a different quality assurance system than that of conventional assessment methods.

This paper explores current assessment policies and practices in Ireland with a particular focus on the structural realities required to deliver good practice with RPL provision for summative purposes. …

Remember The Students: Lessons For Learning Outcomes Assessments, Jacob Pearce, Daniel Edwards

Dr Jacob Pearce

Assessments of student learning outcomes are important for institutional and system-level quality assurance, but should also help students improve their knowledge and skills.

Remember The Students: Lessons For Learning Outcomes Assessments, Jacob Pearce, Daniel Edwards

Dr Daniel Edwards

Assessments of student learning outcomes are important for institutional and system-level quality assurance, but should also help students improve their knowledge and skills.

Pathways To University: Beyond Prior School Achievement, Daniel Edwards

Dr Daniel Edwards

Daniel Edwards explores whether Australia’s university admissions pathways adequately meet the needs of students and society.

An Empirical Study Of Critical Success Factors Of Mobile Learning Platform From The Perspective Of Instructors, Muasaad Alrasheedi, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Mobile learning is newest learning platform and based on the rapid rate of proliferation of mobile technology throughout the world is expected to grow at a rapid rate. However, the adoption of m-Learning is proceeding at a cautious rate. This mismatch in the rate of growth of the technology itself and the use of the technology in learning is a subject of extensive interest to researchers. However, research in the area has been mostly focused on understanding the success factors of the platform from learners’ perspective. In this research, we have conducted an extensive analysis of the extent to which …