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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Assessing Proxies Of Knowledge And Difficultywith Rubric-Based Instruments, Ben O. Smith, Jadrian J. Wooten Sep 2023

Assessing Proxies Of Knowledge And Difficultywith Rubric-Based Instruments, Ben O. Smith, Jadrian J. Wooten

Economics Faculty Publications

The fields of psychometrics, economic education, and education have developed statistically-valid methods of assessing knowledge and learning. These methods include item response theory, value-added learning models, and disaggregated learning. These methods, however, focus on multiple-choice or single response assessments. Faculty and administrators routinely assess knowledge through papers, thesis presentations, or other demonstrations of knowledge assessed with rubric rows. This paper presents a statistical approach to estimating a proxy for student ability and rubric row difficulty. Moreover, we have developed software so that practitioners can more easily apply this method to their instruments. This approach can be used in researching education …


Measuring Faculty Teaching Effectiveness Using Conditional Fixed Effects, Maia K. Linask, James Monks Jan 2018

Measuring Faculty Teaching Effectiveness Using Conditional Fixed Effects, Maia K. Linask, James Monks

Economics Faculty Publications

Using a dataset of 48 faculty members and 88 courses over 26 semesters, the authors estimate Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) ratings that are conditional on a multitude of course, faculty, and student attributes. They find that ratings are lower for required courses and those where students report a lower prior level of interest. Controlling for these variables substantially alters the SET ratings for many instructors. The average absolute value of the difference between the faculty ratings controlling just for time effects and fully conditional ratings is nearly one-half of a standard deviation in the students’ rating of how much …