Author Randall Langston feels that mentoring should never be viewed as a chore but rather a dynamic and transformational opportunity to impact a student's life. Often, the legacy that some people leave is the professional relationships they have forged with others. In fact, it's not unusual to hear keynote and other conference presentations in…

When the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to do in-person, on campus testing, we were forced to create a new system to screen International Teaching Assistants (ITA) for Temple university. We used this opportunity to address many of the concerns and problems that we had identified with the previous test, and created a new test that could be…

In this article, Hartley notes the difficulties of using questionnaires to assess the efficiency of new instructional methods and highlights nine issues that researchers must consider. Hartley continues the discussion about the use of questionnaires and suggests that psychology teachers can help improve the teaching of psychology by drawing…

In the discussion of mean square difference (MSD) and standard error of measurement (SEM), Barchard (2012) concluded that the MSD between 2 sets of test scores is greater than 2(SEM)[superscript 2] and SEM underestimates the score difference between 2 tests when the 2 tests are not parallel. This conclusion has limitations for 2 reasons. First,…

Morgante et al. (in press) find inconsistencies in the time reporting of a Tobii T60XL eye tracker. Their study raises important questions about the use of the Tobii T-series in particular, and various software and hardware in general, in different infant eye tracking paradigms. It leaves open the question of the source of the inconsistencies.…

This article presents the author's critique of R. Stephen RiCharde's argument in his essay on the humanities and interrater reliability in the July-August 2008 issue of "Assessment Update." RiCharde suggests that the humanities' historical commitment to a dialectical pedagogy, a "nonlinear" process that values disagreement and debate, is at odds…

Most professors have mixed feelings about participating on peer-review panels. It's an honor. It helps the discipline. It's a waste of time. It's biased. Michele Lamont wanted to know whether it works: specifically, whether, and how, professors identify excellence. So the multi-titled Harvard University scholar--professor of European studies,…

As writing-program administrators and faculty are being called upon more frequently to help design and facilitate large-scale assessments, it becomes increasingly important for us to see assessment as integral to our work as academics. This article provides a framework, based on current historical, theoretical, and rhetorical knowledge, to help…

Fear is an interesting word. Especially, when contemplating the contemporary collegiate registrar. The registrar profession seemed to diverge over the last decade. There appears now to be two categories. One is a benevolent person who honors traditional registrar standards, yet does little to grow the profession. The second is an ambassador of…

People can use a variety of different strategies to perform tasks and these strategies all have two characteristics in common. First, they can be evaluated in comparison with either an absolute or a relative standard. Second, they can be used at varying levels of consistency. In the present article, the authors develop a general theory of task…

Summative measures of learning collected at the conclusion of an associate or bachelor's degree program are insufficient to help educators and students maximize learning and personal development across the college years. Managing the desired outcomes of college requires an understanding of when learning and growth occur during the educational…

The writer calls attention to the many traps associated with one of the most frequent uses of assessment: the technical difficulties of measuring changes in learning over time. Noting that psychometricians don't like "change" or "difference" scores in statistical analyses because they tend to have lower reliability than the original measures…