Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Commons^™

Perceptions Of Community College Of The Air Force Graduates Regarding The Degree's Influence On Employability: A Case Study, Kimberly Castillo

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this single embedded case study was to answer the central question: How do CCAF graduates perceive the impact of their degree in enhancing their employability for the civilian workforce? Because veterans have historically suffered from high unemployment (Kleykamp, 2013), veteran employment is a highly politicized problem considering the large number who will soon be discharged (Burnett-Zeigler, Valenstein, Ilgen, Blow, Gorman, & Zivin, 2011; Humensky, Jordan, Stroupe, & Hynes, 2013; Kleykamp, 2013; Loughran, 2014). This study used a theoretical framework of the transition theory to better understand the issues airmen faced when leaving the Air Force as well …

When Internationalization Funding Feels Tight: Satisfaction With Funding And Campus Internationalization Strategies, Chris R. Glass, Jenny J. Lee

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

This study investigated predictors of satisfaction with an institution’s strategy for campus internationalization among international affairs staff (N = 1,520) and compared the varying perceptions of their institution’s funding to fulfill this mandate. This study identified factors that influenced these individuals’ sense of their institution’s internationalization strategy. Among international affairs staff who were most dissatisfied with their institution’s funding, satisfaction with how their institution managed the outsourcing of university functions, and perceived competition with other universities most influenced their perceptions of strategy. For those moderately satisfied with funding, retention of senior university leadership most influenced their perceptions of strategy. …

The Long Journey For Afghan Teacher Training Colleges: Accreditation And Quality Assurance, Tim Goddard, Mohammad A. Bakhshi, Jim Frideres

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

The authors, having spent five years working in Afghanistan provide a first-hand description of the processes that evolved over that time in the development of an accreditation and quality assurance policy and program for Teacher Training Colleges. The paper provides a brief historical sketch of the educational system in Afghanistan and the steps taken by the Technical Advisors in helping the Ministry of Education formalize a policy for accreditation and quality assurance. The second part of the paper focuses on the structure and content of the accreditation process that was successfully piloted on three Teacher Training Colleges. The Ministry of …

Grading Policies In Canada And China: A Comparative Study, Liying Cheng, Christopher Deluca, Heather Braund, Wei Yan

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

The current trend towards globalization, immigration, and internationalization of schools and universities around the world has led to the increased use of grades across educational systems. Given the use of grades for student promotion, mobilization, and admission into educational programs internationally, there is an urgent need to understand how grades are constructed differently in diverse systems of education. This study specifically examines grading policies across two educational contexts – Canada and China – to gain a nuanced understanding of how grades are constructed in these two systems where we see a large fast increase of Chinese students studying at Canadian …

The Role Of Evidence In Teaching And Learning, Geoff Masters

Teacher columnist – Geoff Masters

Much discussion of evidence-based teaching is based on a narrow definition that would benefit from a broader recognition of the role of evidence in teaching and learning. Professor Geoff Masters explores the role of evidence in teaching and learning at the 2018 Research Conference . Evidence-based teaching involves the use of evidence to: (1) establish where students are in their learning; (2) decide on appropriate teaching strategies and interventions; and (3) monitor student progress and evaluate teaching effectiveness.

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of A Focused Debate On The Development Of Ethical Reasoning Skills In Pharmacy Technician Students., Seana Hogan, Julie Dunne

Articles

Objective. To evaluate the effectiveness of debating an ethical dilemma on the development of ethical reasoning skills in pharmacy technician students.

Methods. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods was used. This included analysis of before and after 5-minute papers, a sentiment survey, thematic analysis of student reflective writing and a qualitative questionnaire by an independent observer.

Results. Twenty-five students participated in the study. The 5-minute papers showed improvement in student learning. In the sentiment survey, 83% of students agreed or strongly agreed that they had a better understanding of ethical dilemmas following the debate. The main theme identified from …

School Shouldn’T End When The Bell Rings: An Exploratory Homeschooling Study, Mackenzie Dukelow

MA Research Paper

Homeschooling has experienced significant growth over the last several decades, yet little to no research has explored the relationship between homeschoolers and the public education system. Being the first to explore this relationship, the current study collected and examined data from 3 semi-structured interviews and 15 online homeschooling blogs in order to understand the growth of homeschooling in Ontario and the relationship between homeschooling and the public education system. The results of this study reveal the relationship between homeschoolers and the public education system varies significantly over time and locale, the challenges within each system and the difficulty of transitioning …

Note-Taking And Science Inquiry In An Open-Ended Learning Environment, Yang Jiang, Jody Clarke-Midura, Bryan Keller, Ryan S. Baker, Luc Paquette, Jaclyn Ocumpaugh

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Note-taking is important for academic success and has been thoroughly studied in traditional classroom contexts. Recent advancements of technology have led to more students taking notes on computers, and in different situations than are common in traditional instructional contexts. However, research on computer-based note-taking is still an emerging area, and findings from these studies are mixed. In this exploratory study, we conducted multilevel analysis to comprehensively investigate the relationship between note-taking measures and subsequent student success at science inquiry among middle school students, using two scenarios of an open-ended learning environment named Virtual Performance Assessments. Analysis revealed an advantage for …

Teaching To Assess: An Evaluation Of Assessment Education For Secondary Teacher Candidates, Daniel M. Frederking

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the assessment instruction of a four-year undergraduate secondary education program and its alignment to the teaching standards and the summative teacher licensure assessment. Document analyses were conducted on the program’s syllabi as well as the assessment portions of the InTASC standards and the handbook of the edTPA. Results highlighted several areas of misalignment in the areas of categorical concurrence, depth of knowledge, and range of knowledge. Also of note, preservice teachers in different secondary subject areas are receiving different amounts of assessment instruction. Additionally, local edTPA data was examined to highlight areas of strength and weakness. Students …

Theme-Based Lessons: Teacher Perceptions Of A Theme-Based Approach And Its Influence On Student Engagement In Grades 3-8, Robin Penna-Baskinger

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The purpose of this study was to explore how teachers in Grades 3-8 in one New Jersey school district perceive theme-based lessons on student level of engagement and teaching pedagogy when using their own initiatives to develop a theme-based approach. Research was conducted using a qualitative design to investigate the perceptions and observations of those directly involved in developing theme-based lessons in the classroom. Twelve participants, all experienced teachers within the district of study, participated in a pre-selection questionnaire and an interview process. Increased student engagement, good teaching practices, and teaching pedagogy were dominant themes in this study. The study …

An Examination Of Online Discussions In Higher Education: Leveraging Technology To Increase Learner Engagement And Collaboration, Bettina M. Mrusek Ph.D., Felix De Brito Neto Ph.D.

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

The online learning environment continues to evolve, seeking to meet the needs of students and researchers alike. The role of discussion boards in this process, however, continues to be an area of concern and research, particularly in aviation and aerospace higher education. While it has been argued that convenience should not replace quality, scholarship shows that many online discussion boards fail to achieve the intended transfer and collaborative construction of knowledge among students, which is of utmost importance for the education of aviation and aerospace professionals. Research also suggests that learner engagement and collaboration are necessary in order to achieve …

Writing, Developing, And Publishing Your Aviation Book, Suzanne K. Kearns Ph.D.

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

As the aviation industry faces a projected shortage of aviation professionals internationally, it is increasingly important to guide and support the next generation on their path towards competence. Part of this support will require skilled teachers and researchers to contribute to aviation education through the publication of their knowledge and expertise within books.

A challenge is that, through their educational journey, most aviation academics are taught the process of writing and publishing their research within academic journals. Very little direct guidance on the process, types, and publication venues of books is available.

The purpose of this presentation is to outline …

Enhancing Teaching And Learning Through Design Practice, Lori Lockyer

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Design is part of a teacher’s practice on a daily basis. Teachers are constantly designing and redesigning learning experiences for their students. However, the notions of the teacher as designer or ‘teacher design practice’ are rarely used as frameworks within teacher education or continuing professional learning. In fact, ‘teacher design thinking’, that is, how school teachers think about and engage in design practice has been an under-researched area. Design thinking has the potential to provide teachers with a scaffold to reflect upon contextual and evidence-based factors when designing learning experiences for their students. However, we need to know how teachers …

Equipping Teachers With Tools To Assess And Teach General Capabilities, Claire Scoular

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

There is wide recognition that students need to be equipped with appropriate social and cognitive skills demanded by society and the workforce. The unresolved question is how to do this. Many education systems globally are addressing this demand by including skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and creativity into curriculum documents or supplementary materials. However, there is little research to guide educators in teaching such skills at school level. The need to develop practical solutions for assessing and teaching social and cognitive skills, broadly classified under the umbrella ‘21st-century skills’ or ‘general capabilities’, is ever increasing. An integrated approach …

Using Measures Of Quality To Improve The Learning Outcomes Of All Children, Dan Cloney

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

There is compelling evidence that high-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs can act to narrow achievement gaps attributed to social inequality. This evidence is typically observed in model programs, designed by experts and offered to vulnerable families outside the market. In everyday settings, where market forces may price families out of certain programs or poor local availability may preclude attendance, ECEC programs do not appear to deliver these significant gains or close these gaps. There is a need to continually improve quality in all ECEC settings to deliver on the potential of early education. It is unclear, however, …

Assessing Accomplished Teaching With Reliability And Validity: The Acer Portfolio Project, Lawrence Ingvarson

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

We know that good teachers are worth their weight in gold. But if good teaching is to be truly valued, the teaching profession must be able to demonstrate that it can evaluate itself in ways that are reliable, valid and fair. This capacity is central to any profession. It is also central to lifting the status of teaching, rewarding accomplished teaching and enabling teaching to complete with other professions for our ablest graduates. Recent OECD reports emphasise the necessity of strengthening the teaching profession, which depends upon widespread use of evidence-based teaching practices. Building the capacity for evaluation is the …

Communicating Student Learning Progress: What Does That Mean And Can It Make A Difference?, Hilary Hollingsworth, Jonathan Heard

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Traditionally in schools, the main method of communicating students’ academic performance has been the summative end-of-semester report, and the focus of much of this communication has centred on reporting achievement against year-level standards. While semester reporting largely remains established practice, the advent of new school management systems has seen schools embrace a practice known as ‘continuous reporting’. Though well-intended, early analysis would suggest that the potential benefits of this relatively new process are inconsistently understood, and reveal a confusion between progressive instalments of feedback versus feedback on student progress. Such confusion may be indicative of other gaps in the organisational …

The Role Of Evidence In Teaching And Learning, Geoff N. Masters Ao

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Highly-effective teaching requires evidence-informed decision making at crucial points in the teaching process. First, effective teachers use quality evidence to establish the points individual learners have reached in their learning. This enables teachers to identify starting points for further teaching and learning and to ensure that each student is given learning opportunities at an appropriate level of challenge. In contrast, much teaching instead assumes all students will be appropriately challenged by common year-level curricula. The process of establishing and understanding where students are in their learning often requires detailed diagnostic evidence of individual misunderstandings and obstacles to learning progress. Second, …

Holographic Micro-Simulations To Enhance Aviation Training With Mixed Reality, Lori Brown Fraes, Msc, Hfavn

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

Mixed reality technologies present a new medium, a new paradigm of augmented reality, where for the first time we have the ability to take the analog world and superimpose digital training artifacts and create a ‘mixed reality’ to enhance aviation training. Digital computing headsets such as Microsoft HoloLens are intuitive and offer a natural means of interaction with no computer, wire or touch-screen. This approach has several practical advantages to overlay holographic elements onto real-world crew environments which makes holographic micro-simulations particularly suited to aviation training and education. Unlike virtual reality—the user is not isolated from their surroundings. MR allows …

Acer Research Conference Proceedings (2018), Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

There is no shortage of opinion about more and less effective ways of teaching. Schools are continually presented with strategies, programs and approaches that claim to be ‘research-based’, ‘evidence-based’ or even ‘brainbased’. Vocal advocates of particular teaching methods promote their proposed solutions in the media. But how many of these programs and methods have solid foundations in research? And how can teachers and school leaders distinguish exaggerated marketing claims from teaching strategies shown through research to be effective in improving student outcomes? Research Conference 2018 examines research evidence around teaching practices that make a difference. It brings together leading international …

Inclusion For A Student With Vision Impairment: “They Accept Me, Like, As In I Am There, But They Just Won’T Talk To Me.”, Jill L. Opie, Jane Southcott

The Qualitative Report

We explore the experiences of Nick, a secondary school student with vision impairment in an Australian mainstream school in this study, and we particularly focus on whether he perceived his education as inclusive. We have used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis in this single individual case as this approach explores our participant’s understandings which may be revealed by close examination of mindful experiences. The “gem” spoken by Nick (pseudonym), our 16-year old participant, was “They accept me, like as in I am there, but they just won’t talk to me.” This statement summarises his sense of not belonging, of being other, and …

Rise: An R Package For Rise Analysis, David Wiley

Entrepreneurship Faculty Research

rise is an R package that implements the resource inspection, selection, and evaluation (RISE) technique described in (Bodily, Nyland, & Wiley, 2017). rise combines information about course learning outcomes, student use of learning materials aligned with learning outcomes, and student performance on assessments aligned with learning outcomes in order to automatically identify places where learning materials are not effectively supporting student learning. Automating the process of identifying areas for improvement allows designers to spend less of their time determining which learning materials need to be improved and more time actually making improvements to learning materials.

How Mother And Father Support Affect Youths’ Interest In Computer Science, Jody Clarke-Midura, Frederick J. Poole, Katarina Pantic, Chongning Sun, Vicki Allan

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Parental support is a predictor of children’s career interest and aspirations. However, mother and father support affects youth career choices differently. To understand how perceived mothers’ and fathers’ support affect career interest in computer science (CS), we developed two path models using both mother and father support gains to predict youths’ interest in CS. We hypothesized that perceived father’s and mother’s support would relate to youths’ interest in CS via youths’ perception of CS utility value as a mediator. We found that both mother and father support leads to interest in CS. However, father support was found to affect CS …

Understanding Campus Spaces To Improve Student Belonging, Michelle Samura

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Michelle Samura demonstrates that we can gain insight into students’ experience of connectedness with a campus community by considering how they use physical, human-built spaces and the meaning they attribute to them.

Research On University Faculty Members Reasoning About How Departments Change, Gina Quan, Joel Corbo, Courtney Ngai, Daniel Reinholz, Mary Pilgrim

Faculty Publications

Research on institutional change says that effective change agents are able to flexibly reason with multipleperspectives on change, depending on their local context and their goals. However, little is known about whatthis flexible reasoning looks like. In this exploratory work, we conducted and analyzed interviews in whichfaculty discussed departmental change. This work is part of an ongoing study to understand how to supportdepartmental change through Departmental Action Teams (DATs). Our preliminary analyses suggest that facultyhave multiple context-dependent ways to reason about change. This work will lead to a better understanding ofhow productive lines of reasoning can be leveraged in faculty …

Young People’S Attitudes Towards Freedom Of Movement And Immigration In Europe. Results From Iccs 2016, Wolfram Schulz, Sladana Krstic

Civics and Citizenship Assessment

This paper will describe in a comparative perspective the extent to which young people endorse freedom of movement and equal rights and opportunities for immigrants, both across countries as well as with results from the previous ICCS survey in 2009 (Kerr, Sturman, Schulz, & Burge, 2010). The analyses presented in this paper will be based on surveys of lower-secondary students (13-15 years of age) across 14 European countries participating in ICCS 2016. They will be conducted in two stages. In a first step, descriptive results will be presented in comparative perspective across countries as well as with the previous survey …

The Influence Of An Electronic Attendance Monitoring System On Undergraduate Academic Success, Charles Childress

Dissertations

Investing in human capital development increases education levels, workplace skills, and boost individual abilities. Undergraduate students who attend class and perform well are more likely to get jobs, due to their development of workplace skills. State governments, as the funding bodies for public universities, are finding it beneficial to increase the number of college graduates because a citizenry that is prepared for the job market is ultimately good for the state. States recognize that an increase in education can produce job opportunities for citizens. University administrators can employ tactics to increase graduation rates, one of which is monitoring students’ class …

An Examination Of The Relationships Among Organizational Support, Self-Efficacy Beliefs, And Engagement In Data-Driven Decision-Making, Kristal Pollard

Dissertations

A culture of accountability in K-12 education has created demand for teachers and administrators to closely examine student performance on assessments. A number of schools have embraced data-driven decision-making as an approach to meeting this need. Data-driven decision-making refers to the systematic process of collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and making instructional decisions based on data (Schildkamp & Kuiper, 2009; Mandinach, 2012). Generally, educators analyze data collected on assessments at the classroom level and on benchmark or interim assessments at the school-wide level. However, teachers generally feel unprepared to engage in data-driven decision-making. Few studies have examined the psychological aspect of engagement …

Assessment Of Multiple-Form Structure Designs Of Multistage Testing Using Irt, Hanan M. Alghamdi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current study investigated multistage testing (MST) as an alternative to classical linear testing (CLT) for the General Aptitude Test (GAT). The aim was to assess the effects of two assembly methods (narrow vs. wide range—NR vs. WR), two routing methods (Defined Population Intervals—DPI— and the Approximate Maximum Information method—AMI), and two panel structures (two-stage and three-stage) on precision of ability estimates and accuracy of classification for both sections of the GAT (Verbal and Mathematics). Thus, eight conditions were examined and compared: 2 (assembly conditions) * 2 (panel structures) * 2 (routing methods).

The dataset that included a sample of …

Perceptions Of Missouri School Superintendents And School Resource Officers Regarding Preparedness For Multi-Hazard Events, Jennifer Renae Wheeler Lofton

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to garner the perceptions of superintendents and school resource officers in regard to district preparedness for multi-hazard events. Nationwide, schools are facing dramatic changes in the area of safety and security due to natural disasters, and more commonly, manmade hazards (Schaffhauser, 2013). Routinely, school personnel do not have the mindset, nor are they equipped, to respond to a major crisis (Trump, 2012). Recent mass murders and natural disasters in the United States have prompted districts to reach beyond the walls of their schools and into local communities for support (Gereluk, Donlevy, & Thompson, 2015). …