Social innovations (SIs) frequently bring previously unrelated actors, ideas, and practices together in new configurations with the goal of addressing social needs. However, the dizzying variety of definitions of SI and their dynamic, exploratory character raise dilemmas for evaluators tasked with their evaluations. This article is based on a…

Although there is a growing body of research that suggests the mental health of graduate students differs from that of their undergraduate counterparts, studies examining international students at the graduate level are scarce. This study therefore compares mental health diagnoses, challenges and stressors experienced, and use of mental health…

Student learning outcomes assessment examines whether programs cover the material stated in their learning goals, whether students are learning the material, and the impact on student retention, graduation, post-graduation outcomes, and institutional accreditation, with the aim of providing faculty with data that can be used to help programs…

Background: Some data call into question the persistence of developmental language disorders (DLDs) identified during the preschool period. For this reason, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) often reassess children. However, it is unclear if the instability of the profiles documented in community sample studies is present in children referred to…

Academic reviews take on new directions in an ever-increasing fast-paced development. Unit reviewers should be provided different samples, with varied cultural contents also providing nuances, as related to the 'object' of the evaluation, as well as a final overall product, i.e. more of a synthesis, through which one will check the degree of…

Explanatory typologies have recently experienced a renaissance as a research strategy for constructing and assessing causal explanations. However, both the new methodological works on explanatory typologies and the way such typologies have been used in practice have been affected by two shortcomings. First, no elaborate procedures for assessing…

Many institutions of higher education increasingly place a focus on various forms of experiential education, including personal reflections. While much work has been done in this and related areas, the resources currently available are not sufficient to effectively guide, assess, and evaluate student learning through reflection. Guiding students…

Background: Previous research has shown that pre-service teachers have low responsibility for student motivation and feel underprepared to deal with motivational issues. As an extension, researchers have designed interventions to shift teachers' beliefs about motivation or equip them with approaches to instruction, but never both. Aims: Following…

English as a subject used to be assessed using course-based or portfolio assessments but now it is increasingly examined through terminal tests. Canada is an exception to this rule. This paper compares the way English is assessed in England and Canada and looks to the ways in which the kind of assessment undertaken affects the practices of English…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a cheating prevention strategy employed for a professional credentialing exam that involved releasing over 7,000 active and retired exam items. This study evaluated: 1) If any significant differences existed between examinee performance on released versus non-released items; 2) If item…

In children with a hearing loss who receive cochlear implants (CIs) under the age of 2, regular assessments are conducted to monitor auditory and linguistic progress. However, the collection of authentic, representative, and reliable expressive language data on young children with CIs remains a challenge. The purpose of the study was to determine…

Given that few studies have formally examined pedagogical design considerations of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), this study explored variations in the pedagogical design of six MOOCs offered at the University of Toronto, while considering disciplinary characteristics and expectations of each MOOC. Using a framework (Neumann et al., 2002)…

In this paper, I argue for more and better learning metrics in higher education, eventually through an international, comparative assessment of students' learning outcomes. Better learning measures may help to improve transparency in the system by addressing the information asymmetry problem. If not addressed adequately, the lack of transparency…

A variety of differential item functioning (DIF) methods have been proposed and used for ensuring that a test is fair to all test takers in a target population in the situations of, for example, a test being translated to other languages. However, once a method flags an item as DIF, it is difficult to conclude that the grouping variable (e.g.,…

This paper analyses the returns to education of specific occupations in Canada. The purpose is to scrutinize whether and in how far academic and vocational education do differ in monetary benefits regarding individual returns. Therefore, two different methodologies of calculation are used to compute the concrete returns to education. As a result…