This refreshingly frank handbook shows teachers how to close the achievement gap in their classrooms by teaching students innovative paths to academic success. Drawing on over 20 years' experience, Kelley presents straightforward strategies for helping learners improve their grades and test scores and experience greater school engagement--all…

E-portfolios have the potential to transform students' learning experiences. They promote reflection on the significance of what and how students have learned. Such reflective practices enhance students' ability to articulate their knowledge and skills to their peers, teachers, and future employers. In addition, e-portfolios can help assess the…

For communication instructors charged with safely and constructively educating students, incorporating social media in communication coursework presents a variety of problems. Among them are how to grade social media and how to respond to students' social media mistakes, knowing these mistakes and corrections could follow students into their…

Students in Chemistry 254: Organic Chemistry for Majors were required to write a paper about an organic name reaction. Before turning in this assignment, students had the option of attending a one-hour library instruction session covering SciFinder, sources for spectra, ACS Style, and print resources about organic name reactions. Twenty-five…

This paper explores the potential of technology to enhance the assessment and feedback process for both staff and students. The "Making Connections" project aimed to better understand the connections that students make between the feedback that they receive and future assignments, and explored whether technology can help them in this…

An assignment incorporating posters into a second-year analytical chemistry lab is described. Students work in groups and are assigned one of the application-themed weekly laboratories as a topic. Course data acquired for these weekly laboratories are compiled into spreadsheets that the poster group then analyzes to present in an on-campus poster…

This study explores the possibilities for learning content that might accompany the use of an historically accurate graphic novel as part of a language arts instructional unit. During a 6-day unit, 16 sixth grade students engaged in graphic novels in ways that support comprehension, both in the context of a graphic novel text set and a specific…

Small group work is common practice in higher education. However, empirical research on students' emotions related to group work is still relatively scarce. Particularly, little is known about students' appraisals of a group task as antecedents of emotions arising in the context of group work. This paper provides a first attempt to systematically…

This article considers the influence that assessment exerts on poetry education. By means of research conducted in a post-16 educational context in Malta, it shows that teachers' and students' practices in the poetry lesson are determined by the kind of examinations that candidates sit for. When the mode of assessment is constituted solely by the…

Spanning the 2015-2016 academic year, Cal Poly Communications Studies Sr. Lecturer, Martin Mehl, and Lead Instructional Designer, Luanne Fose, from the Cal Poly Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, conducted a formal, institute-wide research pilot on whether or not video assessment can improve faculty feedback for student assignments.…

Students appear to have an almost insatiable appetite for receiving feedback and the scholarly literature has acknowledged its central importance for learning. And yet there is no widely accepted definition of feedback, most definitions reflecting the perspective of the teacher rather than student. When staff at the University of New South Wales…

The links students make among chemistry content is considered essential for a robust, enduring understanding in multiple learning theories. This article describes the development and implementation of an assessment technique, termed a Measure of Linked Concepts, designed to inform instructors on students' understanding of linking content…

In this paper, the effect of continuous assessment on the learning outcomes of two chemical engineering courses is studied over a several-year period. Average grades and passing percentages of courses after the final examination are reported and also student feedback on the courses is collected. The results indicate significantly better learning…

This article reports on a case study of how an experienced EFL teacher assessed her students in her oral English course at a university in China. Data were collected over one semester through document analysis, classroom observation and recording, interviews, and student journals. Analysis revealed that the teacher assessed her students through…

This paper outlines how a discrete choice experiment (DCE) can be used to learn more about how students are willing to trade off various features of assignments such as the nature and timing of feedback and the method used to submit assignments. A DCE identifies plausible levels of the key attributes of a good or service and then presents the…