This paper makes two criticisms of dichotomously scored instruments. One is that dichotomous scoring restrains the scores to ipsative measures that should not be compared, and the other is that dichotomous scoring ignores the strength with which a subject endorses a response so that the resulting count may imply a different construct measure from…

The research literature on student evaluation of teaching (SET) is filled with criticisms of the process, its applications, and the student feedback questionnaire it uses. SETs are still used, however, because there has seemed to be no economical, valid, and reliable alternative. This paper reports on an alternative alignment process for…

The purpose of this paper is to report a successful technique for assessing cooperative group work reliably and validly. The paper demonstrates a simple-to-use assessment procedure that tracks individual accountability, energizes student interaction, and rewards cooperative learning, even as it uses fewer administrative resources than traditional…

This paper aims to make the techniques of cooperative learning more attractive to teachers by presenting a method of assessment that avoids the drawbacks associated with trying to extract valid and reliable individual marks from cooperative performances. The paper presents an easy-to-use method of assessing an individual's contribution to a…

This study examined the use of two locus of control instruments for teachers in the Caribbean: the Adult Nowicki-Strickland Internal-External Locus of Control (LOC) Scale (T. Wolf, M. Sklov, M. Hunter, and G. Berenson, 1982) and the Medway and Rose Teachers' LOC Scale (F. Medway and J. Rose, 1981). Participants were 183 teachers from 10 high…

Continuing education students are usually mature students who have a wealth of experience from which their peers and the lecturer could profit. An effective teaching method with such students is the use of cooperative work assignments, but a problem that prevents lecturers from using this method is the difficulty of assigning grades to individual…

A method for measuring the contribution an individual makes to group work is described, and its use is supported through a study of 57 university students aged from 20 to 46 years working in 8 groups of 4 to 10 members each. The method recognizes that the most valid sources of information on the contribution of each individual to the group work…