Introduction: Assessing teaching effectiveness is relevant for improving one's teaching and for moving through the tenure process; however, the validity of assessment methods, such as Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET), have been heavily criticized. Statement of the Problem: Using a one-group pretest-posttest design and assessing learning over…

Criteria are briefly proposed for final conclusions, research problems, and research hypotheses in quantitative research. Moreover, based on a proposed definition of applied and basic/general research, it is argued that (1) in applied quantitative research, while research problems are necessary, research hypotheses are unjustified, and that (2) in…

Refutation texts, rhetorical tools designed to reduce misconceptions, have garnered attention across four decades and many studies. Yet, the ability of a refutation text to change a learner's mind on a topic needs to be qualified and modulated. In this critical review, we bring attention to sources of constraints often overlooked by refutation…

Recently, Nissen et al. argued in this journal for the use of Cohen's d, in place of the more commonly used normalized gain, in the analysis of preinstruction and postinstruction scores on concept inventories used to measure the effectiveness of instruction. Their reason for advocating such a change is that they say normalized gains are…

Exactly what is a pre-assessment, and how are they best used? In this article, Thomas R. Guskey explores the theoretical underpinnings of pre-assessments and provides an overview of the research. He also details the three forms that pre-assessments take: prerequisite, present, and preview.

Previous meta-analyses on peer tutoring have mainly included studies using treatment-control/comparison design and excluded studies that adopted pre-test-post-test design. However, some recent meta-analyses on other interventions adopting pre-test-post-test design revealed that certain crucial intervention moderators should be considered when…

We evaluated the effectiveness of Boston vs. Bullies, a short-term, free, bullying prevention program that uses celebrity athletes to present content. Fifth-grade students in 10 schools were randomized to either complete the Boston vs. Bullies intervention (n = 388), or to a wait-list control group (n = 266). Pre- and post-surveys assessed…

Teaching blackbody radiation within the framework of astrophysics can motivate students to learn and obtain a more profound and qualitative understanding of the subject. In this paper we present a teaching module that intertwines teaching blackbody radiation via the continuous spectrum of hot objects, especially the stars. The module's approach…

To explore the best structure for a dedicated marketing ethics course, two field experiments were conducted in which two case types (i.e., small business/personal decision-making versus corporate-wrongdoing) and the timing of logic and critical thinking instruction were manipulated. Results show undergraduates can identify and apply ethical…

Jim Greer and his colleagues argued that student modelling is essential to provide adaptive instruction in tutoring systems and showed that effective modelling is possible, despite being enormously challenging. Student modelling plays a prominent role in many intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that address problem-solving domains. However,…

Performance of engineering degree students often becomes an important concern for lectures. Using classical teaching methodologies in practical lectures may be behind the problem. The present work develops a couple of innovative student-response-system based methodologies designed to be implemented during engineering practical lessons in higher…

This article offers a methodological synthesis spanning 35 years of instructed second language acquisition research on the efficacy of form-focused instruction. Eighty-eight (quasi-) experimental studies were sampled from six academic journals: "Applied Linguistics," "Language Learning," "Language Teaching Research,"…

Assessment is one of the key elements in the development of the curriculum since it forms a cycle of interdependence with the other curricular areas (content, methods, etc.). This work presents the changes detected in the conceptions about assessment in science that a sample of 311 prospective primary teachers had before and after a training…

We evaluated the effects of tact and listener instruction on the emergence of bidirectional intraverbal relations with 6 typically developing Brazilian children, using an adapted alternating treatment design with pretest and posttest probes. In listener instruction, participants selected pictures that corresponded to spoken foreign-language words.…

This article provides an illustrative description of the pre-post difference index (PPDI), a simple, nontechnical yet robust tool for examining the instructional sensitivity of assessment items. Extension educators often design pretest-posttest instruments to assess the impact of their curricula on participants' knowledge and understanding of the…