Background: Social comparisons between pupils are especially relevant at school. Such comparisons influence self-perception and performance. When pupils evaluate themselves more negatively and perform worse after an upward comparison (with a better off pupil) than a downward comparison (with a worse-off pupil), this is a contrast effect. On the…

Many children are attending after-school programs for various reasons, such as academic support, recreational play, and social interaction. Accompanied by high parental demands for affordable child-care, after-school program participation has increased significantly. The issue of quality care becomes important as the number of children enrolled in…

This analysis explores the essential criteria necessary to define standards-based grading (SBG) and to judge its effectiveness. Findings reveal that although many schools today are initiating SBG reforms, there's little consensus on what "standards-based grading" actually means. As a result, SBG implementation is widely inconsistent due…

Co-curricular and extra-curricular activities have traditionally been part of the student's application of knowledge and skills outside the structured curriculum. Co-curricular learning, in particular, is viewed as part of the student's authentic and real-life engagement with content often directed and administered by the program of study.…

In this study, various statistical indexes of agreement were calculated using empirical data from a group of evaluators (n = 45) of early childhood teachers. The group of evaluators rated ten fictitious teacher profiles using the North Carolina Teacher Evaluation Process (NCTEP) rubric. The exact and adjacent agreement percentages were calculated…

Videos are an engaging medium for learning as they provide affordances beyond text or audio-only, thereby allowing the creator more flexibility for content generation. Easy access to videos on the Web and their popularity within everyday discourse has made them an accepted medium for teaching and learning. However, this increase in the…

Researchers, federal and state policy leaders and administrators, and center directors all seek to understand what drives high quality Early Care and Education (ECE). The Assessing the Implementation and Cost of High Quality Early Care and Education, or ICHQ (pronounced I-check) project, led by Mathematica and funded by the Office of Planning,…

The statewide program review process for Illinois community colleges required by the Illinois Community College Board (ICCB) is scheduled on a five-year cycle, however, the value of program review is lost without regular opportunities for engagement and reflection on what has been learned through the process (Eggleston, 2020). Furthermore, one of…

Teaching quality has long been a critical issue concerned by both educators and researchers in higher education. Many studies have proved that peer review of teaching (PRT), as one subtype of educational evaluation, can be an effective means to improve faculty teaching practices. This study aims to examine how PRT works to improve teaching quality…

Market-based reforms, such as high-stakes teacher evaluation models aimed at improving teacher instructional practice, have not addressed student achievement concerns, especially among marginalized student demographic groups. Research contends that principal instructional feedback to teachers is a worthy strategy to improve teacher instructional…

This full paper concerns the use of gesture analysis to guide instructional approaches in engineering education. Engineering is rife with abstract mathematics and processes for quantifying physical phenomena. In engineering instruction, "formalisms first" is a practice that privileges formalisms over grounded and applied ways of knowing…

As universities around the world have begun to use learning management systems (LMSs), more learning data have become available to gain deeper insights into students' learning processes and make data-driven decisions to improve student learning. With the availability of rich data extracted from the LMS, researchers have turned much of their…

Walsh University's process of seeking more effective assessment practices has identified an overarching theme of university-wide continuous improvement resulting in several initiatives. The categories of these initiatives can be described as new formats in leadership, unique and collaborative improvements across campus, strategies in alignment…

In this study of 211 teacher work samples derived from a professional development programme, teachers' conceptualisations of student inquiry were revealed by examining the nature of perceived outcomes and the role of critical thinking that animated teachers' student inquiries collected over nine years. Using a schema adapted from the literature,…

In this article, we describe the process of revising our writing program's teaching observation forms and processes over the last several years, drawing from descriptions of best practices in conducting teaching observations in writing programs (Comer; Jackson). We analyze the teaching observation form as it functions in a structurational nexus to…