Teaching evaluation is a central process across institutions for faculty retention, promotion, and tenure. While there is a rich literature on methods for evaluating teaching, there is less scholarship on the goals and processes for reforming systems of teaching evaluation. Surprisingly, there is little to no information on teaching criteria at…

The rubric, a canonical matrix of criteria presented to students as the road map to academic success. An "Ah-ha" moment, "that is what I'm looking for" utopia for the instructor. While rubrics provide the possibility for solving the complexity of some teaching problems, we have come to know them as a tool that is as useful as…

Consider the top three concerns of students about teachers' assessment practices, along with some suggestions for addressing them.

Over the last few decades, there has been an increase in the number of large federally funded transdisciplinary programs and initiatives. Scholars have identified a need to develop frameworks, methodologies, and tools to evaluate the effectiveness of these large collaborative initiatives, providing precise ways to understand and assess the…

This article is excerpted from the book "Exemplars of Assessment in Higher Education, Volume Two" (Souza and Rose) and includes an excerpt from Howard University (Phillips). There is a complex relationship between institutional (formerly regional) accrediting bodies and institutions of higher education. Though we believe that accreditors…

Traditional teacher evaluations -- full-lesson observations, write-ups, and debriefs -- are time-consuming and largely ineffective. As a principal, Kim Marshall found that mini-observations -- short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits, each followed by a face-to-face coaching conversation and brief narrative summary -- actually improved…

This paper describes, and lays out an argument for, the use of a procedure to help groups of reviewers to judge the quality of prior research reports. It argues why such a procedure is needed, and how other existing approaches are only relevant to some kinds of research, meaning that a review or synthesis cannot successfully combine quality…

In this column, the author revisits who we are as assessment professionals, how we are trained, what our role is, and what our responsibilities are--to ourselves as a community, to our colleagues in education, at our institution, and to those we serve-- especially from an equity lens. They also share a few strategies to address the gaps they see.

Social cognition is a very important group of neurocognitive processes involved especially in social functioning; currently, the amount of research on this topic is increasing and suggests some considerations about its assessment, particularly in the child population. This article presents some of these considerations focussed on the theoretical…

As an educator, and a student myself, I believe that the current system of graded assessments used ubiquitously in education systems worldwide is quite flawed. Although certain issues arise in its implementation, a suitable alternative might be to consider gradeless assessments. Thus, rather than completely advocating for a change in the way…

Peer assessment plays an important part in education, fostering involvement and critical thinking skills for the students, while reducing the grading workload for the teacher. However, research on review allocation mechanisms in the context of peer assessment is relatively scarce in the literature. Although the first electronic peer assessment…

Evaluating a design studio course is a complex issue due to its practice-based, rich, and vague nature. This is an attempt to uncover this complex issue from students' viewpoints as they are the owners of learning processes. Based on a student evaluation template, we particularly focused on nine dimensions of a design studio course, which are…

Evaluation competency frameworks across the globe regard evaluation approaches as important to know and use in practice. Prior classifications have been developed to aid in understanding important differences among varying approaches. Nevertheless, there is an opportunity for a new classification of evaluation approaches, in particular one that is…

Assessment and evaluation both describe a process of gather and expound of verification for some purpose. They both involve decisions about what evidence to use, the collection of the evidence in a systematic and planned way, the explanation of the evidence to produce a judgement, and the communication and use of that judgement.…

The evaluation of teaching quality and practice is increasingly important in higher education and usually done via student surveys (quantitative data) alone. Much less attention is given to teachers' self-evaluations of teaching practice (qualitative data). This emphasis on quantitative over qualitative data can result in incomplete and biased…