Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Education Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 11 of 11

Full-Text Articles in Education

Lifting Achievement Levels And Improving The Return On Australia’S Investment In Schooling : Submission To The Review To Achieve Educational Excellence In Australian Schools (Chair: Mr David Gonski), Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer) Nov 2017

Lifting Achievement Levels And Improving The Return On Australia’S Investment In Schooling : Submission To The Review To Achieve Educational Excellence In Australian Schools (Chair: Mr David Gonski), Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

Policy Analysis and Program Evaluation

Many students in our schools are not learning as well as they could because they are not being given learning opportunities at an appropriate level of challenge. Instead, students are grouped by year level (age) and teachers deliver curricula assumed to be appropriate for all students in the same year of school. However, the most advanced ten per cent of students in any year of school are five to six years ahead of the least advanced ten per cent. For less advanced students, the year-level curriculum is often too far ahead. Many are judged to be underperforming year after year, …


Assessing Career Planning Courses Without Using Test Scores: Another Neglected Issue?, Alison Holmes Phd, Loren Collins Ma Oct 2017

Assessing Career Planning Courses Without Using Test Scores: Another Neglected Issue?, Alison Holmes Phd, Loren Collins Ma

Career and Curriculum Connections: integrating career education across the disciplines

Twenty years ago, in an article entitled “Assigning Grades in Career Planning Courses: A Neglected issue”[1], Rex Filer posed several important questions in terms of the practicalities of how we design and grade career planning courses. The challenge, he suggested, is that while teaching pedagogy often relies on Bloom’s traditional taxonomy where information and understanding act as an ‘anchor’ while synthesis and evaluation are goals achieved later, career course activities are naturally geared to the top of the pyramid – regardless of when the class is taught. This, he argues, poses particular issues in terms of career course …


Multi-Choice Questions And Their Problems When Used For Assessment Of Aircraft Engineers Education, Ian R. Mcandrew, Ken L. Witcher, Elena Navarro, Peter Foreman Jul 2017

Multi-Choice Questions And Their Problems When Used For Assessment Of Aircraft Engineers Education, Ian R. Mcandrew, Ken L. Witcher, Elena Navarro, Peter Foreman

Publications

Licensed aircraft engineers under the European Aviation Safety Agency, EASA, undertake academic training to complement their practical and type specific studies. These exams are mainly Multi-Choice Questions, MCQ, and four 20-minute essays. The MCQ exams are as few as 16 questions to a maximum of 140 questions. A score of 75% is needed to pass each exam, and each question has three possible answers. This authors of this paper reviews the theory and design of the MCQ and asks if the assumptions are valid and that it achieves the academic level assumed for engineers who will be maintaining some of …


Design And Assessment Of Deep And Active Learning In Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics (Stem) Education, Juhong Christie Liu Ph.D., Elizabeth Johnson Ph.D., Jin Joy Mao Ph.D. Jun 2017

Design And Assessment Of Deep And Active Learning In Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics (Stem) Education, Juhong Christie Liu Ph.D., Elizabeth Johnson Ph.D., Jin Joy Mao Ph.D.

Libraries

This presentation draws academic significance from a focused literature review and initial data for learning design in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. The presenters will discuss strategies of fostering deep, active learning, alignment with assessment, and development of assessment instruments and methods. The presenters will share the design and development of an assessment kit to measure learning outcomes that matter in the 21st century STEM education. Through shared evidence and interactive reflection, the audience will take away up-to-date design strategies for deep and active learning as well as assessment in STEM education. The project is sponsored by National …


Assessment-Orientated Instructional Design Using Dream Approach, Juhong Christie Liu Ph.D., Andrea H. Adams, Wei Wang Jun 2017

Assessment-Orientated Instructional Design Using Dream Approach, Juhong Christie Liu Ph.D., Andrea H. Adams, Wei Wang

Libraries

This presentation proposes an assessment-oriented instructional design approach to enhancing student learning with blended learning environments and report its pilot implementation. Students gain significant learning experience through understanding the relationship between learning outcomes and learning process, connecting acquired knowledge, being able to tackle problems individually or on teams, and learning how to learn (Entwistle, Tait, & McCune, 2000; Fink, 2013; Suskie, 2010; Wiggins, 1998). These components ought to be designed in learning activities to educate learners through formative assessment such as self-reflection, peer evaluation, and constructive feedback from instructor (Angelo & Cross,1993; Wiggins, 1998). In blended learning with online environments, …


Real Data Is Messy... And Manageable, Beverly Wood, Carl Clark Jan 2017

Real Data Is Messy... And Manageable, Beverly Wood, Carl Clark

Publications

Using real data in an introductory statistics course is a delicate balance between reality and manageability. The internet is awash with data that is useful for students to answer questions of interest to them but it is not always formatted as neatly as textbook data. The ASA's recently endorsed GAISE College Report 2016 points to the plausibility of considering multivariable thinking even if only at a rudimentary level. With both messy and multivariable data in mind, we present some activities/projects and sources for data to give introductory students the opportunity to engage with real data.


Multimodal K-12 Assessment Frameworks And The Interactive Audience: An Exploratory Analysis Of Existing Frameworks, Ewa Mcgrail, Nadia Behizadeh Jan 2017

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 Jan 2017

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 Jan 2017

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.


Evaluating Centers For Teaching And Learning: A Field-Tested Model, Susan R. Hines Jan 2017

Evaluating Centers For Teaching And Learning: A Field-Tested Model, Susan R. Hines

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This paper provides a program evaluation model, along with field-testing results, that was developed in response to the need for an evaluation model able to support systematic evaluation of teaching and learning centers (CTLs). The model builds upon the author’s previous studies investigating the evaluation practices and struggles experienced at 53 CTLs. Findings from these studies attribute evaluation struggles to contextual issues involving evaluation capacity, ill- structured curricula, and ill-conceived evaluation frameworks. This field-tested Four-Phase Program Evaluation Model addresses these issues by approaching evaluation in a comprehensive manner that includes an evaluation capacity analysis, curricular conceptualization, evaluation planning, and plan …


Assessment From An Educational Development Perspective, Mary C. Wright, Molly Goldwasser, Wayne Jacobson, Christopher Dakes Jan 2017

Assessment From An Educational Development Perspective, Mary C. Wright, Molly Goldwasser, Wayne Jacobson, Christopher Dakes

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

As assessment, already well established in higher education, gains attention in the field of educational development (ED), we ask: What does it mean to practice assessment from an ED perspective? In response, we examine four principles that are central to this endeavor: (a) bridging work across communities and multiple institutional levels; (b) collective, collaborative ownership; (c) action-oriented focus on student-centered learning; and (d) intentionality about inclusiveness to recognize diverse experiences of participants and stakeholders. We apply these principles to four examples of assessment practice at different institutions and offer a rationale for why this lens has utility for the improvement …