Too often teachers and schools operate with grading systems that are vestiges of an antiquated educational model with little fresh thinking as to how grades affect student learning. In On Grades and Grading, Timothy Quinn addresses this problem head on, offering an in-depth and nuanced analysis of the purposes grades can serve, as well as their impact on student learning. Quinn takes a hard look at the three pedagogical purposes for grades - providing data about students, motivating students, and providing students with feedback on their work. He then goes on to address a number of specific and, at times, controversial grading related issues, including grade inflation, grading collaborative work, grading and failure, the grading of behaviors and dispositions, and the use of technology in grading. Educators will find both concrete strategies for improving their grading systems and policies and, perhaps most importantly, a rich resource for improving student learning. Ultimately, Quinn hopes to create a world in which students, parents, and teachers all pay more attention to learning and less to grades themselves.

Advancing Natural Language Processing in Educational Assessment examines the use of natural language technology in educational testing, measurement, and assessment. Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled large-scale educational applications, though scholars and professionals may lack a shared understanding of the strengths and limitations of NLP in assessment as well as the challenges that testing organizations face in implementation. This first-of-its-kind book provides evidence-based practices for the use of NLP-based approaches to automated text and speech scoring, language proficiency assessment, technology-assisted item generation, gamification, learner feedback, and beyond. Spanning historical context, validity and fairness issues, emerging technologies, and implications for feedback and personalization, these chapters represent the most robust treatment yet about NLP for education measurement researchers, psychometricians, testing professionals, and policymakers.

Criminal Justice Internships: Theory Into Practice, Tenth Edition, guides the student, instructor, and internship site supervisor through the entire internship process, offering advice and information for use at the internship site as well as pre-planning and assessment activities. With increasingly more programs offering or requiring internships, the need for guidance is answered by McBride's counsel, offering students a means of enhancing their credentials and gaining a foothold in a competitive job market. Divided into four sections Pre-internship Considerations, Professional Concerns, The Role of the Organization, and Assessment and Career Planning this book offers resources to enrich the student's experience and lay the foundation for future professional success. Students learn basics such as choosing an internship site at either a public agency or a private firm, resume-writing techniques, effective use of social networks, interviewing skills, and the importance of setting and developing goals and assessing progress. The book serves as a reference tool for professors and supervisory personnel who assist and supervise students during their internships. Suitable for all Criminal Justice, Justice Studies, Financial Crimes and Cybersecurity Investigations, and Pre-law undergraduate programs, Criminal Justice Internships is also useful in Social Sciences programs with a service-learning component.

This volume consists of a series of essays written by experts, most of whom participated in a conference conducted by the Educational Testing Service to explore how current fields of artificial intelligence might contribute to ETS's plans to automate one or more of its testing activities.
The papers presented in "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Testing" touch on a variety of topics including mathematics tutors, graph comprehension and computer vision, student reasoning and human accessing, modeling software design within a general problem-space architecture, memory organization and retrieval, and natural language systems. Also included: speculation on possible uses each AI specialty might have for a wide number of testing activities, and selective critical commentaries by two eminent AI researchers.
As Roy Freedle notes in his introduction, "We are at an exciting juncture in applying AI to testing activities." The essays presented in this collection conveysome of that excitement, and represent an important step toward the merging of AI and testing -- a powerful combination that has the potential to instruct and inspire.

Drawing upon experiences at state and local level project evaluation, and based on current research in the professional literature, Payne presents a practical, systematic, and flexible approach to educational evaluations. Evaluators at all levels -- state, local and classroom -- will find ideas useful in conducting, managing, and using evaluations. Special user targets identified are state department of education personnel and local school system administrative personnel. The volume can be used by those doing evaluation projects in the field', or as a text for graduate courses at an introductory level. The book begins with an overview of the generic evaluation process. Chapter Two is devoted to the criteria for judging the effectiveness of evaluation practice. Chapter Three addresses the all important topic of evaluation goals and objectives. Chapters Four, Five and Six basically are concerned with the approach, framework, or design of an evaluation study. Chapter Four contains a discussion of four major philosophical frameworks or metaphors and the implications of these frameworks for conducting an evaluation. Chapters Five and Six describe predominantly quantitative and qualitative designs, respectively. Design, implementation and operational issues related to instrumentation (Chapter Seven), management and decision making (Chapter Eight), and reporting and utilization of results (Chapter Nine) are next addressed. The final chapter of the book (Chapter Ten) considers the evaluation of educational products and materials.

This volume comprises of chapters that deal with language proficiency relating to a wide range of language program issues including curriculum, assessment, learners and instructors, and skill development. The chapters cover various aspects of a broad-based proficiency initiative, focusing on numerous aspects of foreign language learning, including how skills develop, how assessments can inform curriculum, how learners and instructors view proficiency and proficiency assessment, and how individual use of technology furthers language learning. The concluding chapter points the way forward for issues and questions that need to be addressed.

An adjunct to the increased emphasis on developing students' critical thinking and higher order skills is the need for methods to monitor and evaluate these abilities. These papers provide insight into current techniques and examine possibilities for the future. The contributors to Diagnostic Monitoring of Skill and Knowledge Acquisition focus on two beliefs: that new kinds of tests and assessment methods are needed; and that instruction and learning can be improved by developing new assessment methods based on work in cognitive science.

The goals and content for this book are derived from three important and ongoing efforts: to advance the institution of education and to promote educational opportunities to children and youth worldwide, to promote effective assessment policies and practices that enhance sound educational practice, and to address the need to develop tests and other assessment practices in less developed countries as well as to augment and alter a number of traditional assessment practices in developed nations. These three issues provided the focus for a four-day conference that was held at St. Hugh's College, Oxford University, in June 1993. The conference theme-Test Use with Children and Youth: International Pathways to Progress-underscores the importance of addressing testing issues as efforts to improve educational opportunities for children and youth move forward. Leaders from more than seventy nations met at the United Nations sponsored World Summit for Children in 1990 to support ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Worldwide recognition that every individual has the right to develop her or his potential led to the ratification of provisions setting minimum standards for children's education."

Technological and theoretical changes over the past decade have altered the way we think about test validity. This book addresses the present and future concerns raised by these developments. Topics discussed include: * the validity of computerized testing * the validity of testing for specialized populations (e.g., minorities, the handicapped) and * new analytic tools to study and measure validity

The Race To The Top (RTTP) federal education policy fostered a new generation of state tests. This policy advocated adopting common core standards which set a higher level of learning targets for students in the US K?12 education. These standards are intended to assess higher order thinking skills and prepare students ready for college and career. In the meantime, they are aligned with those for international assessments which keep US students abreast of their international peers. Furthermore, the new generation of state tests requires the use of technology enhanced items to align student assessments with student learning environment. Computer technology is indispensable to accomplish this goal. Computer based tests related to common core standards are different from previous state computer based tests in two important aspects, one is that the current version requires accurate assessment of students along all ability levels and the other is that it promotes the use of an efficient test delivery system, essentially the use of computerized adaptive assessment in K?12 state testing programs. In addition to providing summative information about student learning, the new common core tests add formative assessment component in the whole assessment system to provide timely feedback to students and teachers during the process of student learning and teacher instruction. As with its predecessor, the new assessment policy also holds teachers and schools accountable for student learning. With the requirements by the new federal education policy, states formed two consortia: Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter?Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) to develop assessments in alignment with the new common core standards. This book is based on the presentations made at the Thirteenth Annual Maryland Assessment Research Center's Conference on "The Next Generation of Testing: Common Core Standards, Smarter?Balanced, PARCC, and the Nationwide Testing Movement". Experts from the consortia and nationwide overviewed the intention, history and the current status of this nationwide testing movement. Item development, test design, and transition from old state tests to the new consortia tests are discussed. Test scoring and reporting are specially highlighted in the book. The challenges related to standard setting for the new test, especially in the CAT environment and linking performance standards from state tests with consortium tests were explored. The issues of utilizing the consortium test results to evaluate students' college and career readiness is another topic addressed in the book. The last chapters address the critical issue of validity in the new generation of state testing programs. Overall, this book presents the latest status of the development of the two consortium assessment systems. It addresses the most challenging issues related to the next generation of state testing programs including development of innovative items assessing higher order thinking skills, scoring of such items, standard setting and linkage with the old state specific standards, and validity issues. This edited book provides a very good source of information related to the consortium tests based on the common core standards.

In this book the author introduces a novel approach to securing exam systems. He provides an in-depth understanding, useful for studying the security of exams and similar systems, such as public tenders, personnel selections, project reviews, and conference management systems. After a short chapter that explains the context and objectives of the book, in Chap. 2 the author introduces terminology for exams and the foundations required to formulate their security requirements. He describes the tasks that occur during an exam, taking account of the levels of detail and abstraction of an exam specification and the threats that arise out of the different exam roles. He also presents a taxonomy that classifies exams by types and categories. Chapter 3 contains formal definitions of the authentication, privacy, and verifiability requirements for exams, a framework based on the applied pi-calculus for the specification of authentication and privacy, and a more abstract approach based on set-theory that enables the specification of verifiability. Chapter 4 describes the Huszti-Petho protocol in detail and proposes a security enhancement. In Chap. 5 the author details Remark!, a protocol for Internet-based exams, discussing its cryptographic building blocks and some security considerations. Chapter 6 focuses on WATA, a family of computer-assisted exams that employ computer assistance while keeping face-to-face testing. The chapter also introduces formal definitions of accountability requirements and details the analysis of a WATA protocol against such definitions. In Chaps. 4, 5, and 6 the author uses the cryptographic protocol verifier ProVerif for the formal analyses. Finally, the author outlines future work in Chap. 7. The book is valuable for researchers and graduate students in the areas of information security, in particular for people engaged with exams or protocols.

Policy makers tend to deal with future risks by increasing the standardisation of national educational systems, a process supported by global educational policy ideas, quality assurance mechanisms and governing instruments and practices. This book presents the reader with tools to challenge accepted ideas about the standardising forces transforming educational reality, by discussing standards and standardisation from a range of different theoretical perspectives and contexts and posing questions such as: Why do we think about education through the lenses of standards? What are the assumed conditions underpinning the idea of standards? Organised into three sections, the historical, theoretical, and philosophical discussions in the first and third sections of the book underscore how educational standards as a phenomenon can be understood in a variety of ways, giving readers insight in to the ambiguous and situated aspects of the phenomenon. Six case studies in the middle section provide an international approach to the study of standards, illuminating how standards simultaneously represent a global and a context specific phenomenon. Across the diversity of theoretical and empirical writings, the book not only provide readers with insight but also broadens the scope of future empirical analyses of the historical, political, and social embeddedness of standards in education.

This timely collection explores the role of digital technology in language education and assessment during the COVID-19 pandemic. It recognises the unique pressures which the COVID-19 pandemic placed on assessment in language education, and examines the forced shift in assessment strategies to go online, the existing shortfalls, as well as unique affordances of technology-assisted L2 assessment. By showcasing international examples of successful digital and computer-assisted proficiency and skills testing, the volume addresses theoretical and practical concerns relating to test validity, reliability, ethics, and student experience in a range of testing contexts. Particular attention is given to identifying lessons and implications for future research and practice, and the challenges of implementing unplanned computer-assisted language assessment during a crisis. Insightfully unpacking the 'lessons learned' from COVID and its impact on the acceleration of the shift towards online course and assessment delivery, it offers important guidelines for navigating assessment in different instructional settings in times of crisis. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, educators, and faculty with interests in educational measurement, digital education and technology, and language assessment and testing.

Teachers in their first few years of their teaching career require high quality, structured support to begin the journey towards becoming experts. Establishing research-based best practices and working habits set up early career teachers for a fulfilling and successful career. The requirements of teachers are constantly changing, and teachers need to continually adapt their knowledge and practices to fit schools' changing demographics. Having a toolbox of research-based best practices to draw upon can support early career teachers as they move from theory to practical application when the learning curve is the steepest. Strengthening the system of support includes increasing teachers' influence over their day-to-day work and developing positive and supportive cultures of learning. Supporting Early Career Teachers With Research-Based Practices presents both theoretical and practical research to support the conceptual understanding of educational praxis for common areas with which early career educators may require additional expertise or support. This book is intended to be a valuable contribution to the body of literature in the field of education by supplying research-based teaching practices for modern education. Primary topics covered include professional learning, classroom management, student-teacher relationships, teaching diverse students and inclusive educational practices, and teacher self-care strategies. This book is a valuable reference tool for early career teachers of all subject areas and grade levels, school administrators, teacher mentors and guides, education faculty in higher education, educational researchers, curriculum developers, instructional facilitators, practicing teachers, pre-service teachers, professional development coordinators, teacher educators, researchers, academicians, and students interested in teaching practices and support for the early career teacher.

This book starts with the premise that beauty can be an engine of transformation and authentic engagement in an increasingly complex world. It presents an organized picture of highlights from the 13th European Science Education Research Association Conference, ESERA 2019, held in Bologna, Italy. The collection includes contributions that discuss contemporary issues such as climate change, multiculturalism, and the flourishing of new interdisciplinary areas of investigation, including the application of cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and digital humanities to science education research. It also highlights learners' difficulties engaging with socio-scientific issues in a digital and post-truth era. The volume demonstrates that deepening our understanding is the preferred way to address these challenges and that science education has a key role to play in this effort. In particular, the book advances the argument that the deep and novel character of these challenges requires a collective search for new narratives and languages, an expanding knowledge base and new theoretical perspectives and methods of research. The book provides a contemporary picture of science education research and looks to the theoretical and practical societal challenges of the future.

This edited volume presents a systematic analysis of conceptual, methodological and applied aspects related to the validation of educational tests used in Latin American countries. Inspired by international standards on educational measurement and evaluation, this book illustrates efforts that have been made in several countries to validate different types of educational assessments, including student learning assessments, measurements of non-cognitive aspects in students, teacher evaluations, and tests for certification and selection. It gathers the experience of validity studies from the main international assessments in Latin America (PISA, TIMSS, ERCE, and ICCS). Additionally, it shows the challenges that must be taken into account when evaluations are used to compare countries, groups or trends of achievement over time. The book builds on the premise that measurements in the educational field should not be used if there are no studies that support the validity of the interpretation of their scores, or the use made of such tests. It shows that, despite the recognition given to validity, relatively few educational measurement assessments have accumulated enough evidence to support their interpretation and use. In doing so, this volume increases awareness about the relevance of validity, especially when assessments are key component of educational policies.

Marketing text: This book combines theory and research from educational and organizational psychology to provide guidance on improving the teacher selection process and, subsequently, educational outcomes for all students. The book identifies the characteristics of effective teachers, analyzes research on selection practices, and examines new approaches to teacher selection, recruitment, and development. The central premise of the book is that improving the effectiveness of teachers - and, thus, students' educational outcomes - can be achieved by making the recruitment and selection process more effective and more efficient. Accordingly, the book describes how to identify and select individuals for the teaching profession who display both strong cognitive attributes (e.g., subject knowledge) and essential non-cognitive attributes such as resilience, commitment to the profession, and motivation for teaching. Key topics Teacher selection practices from the viewpoint of organizational and educational psychology Teacher effectiveness and the role of individual attributes Situational judgment tests (SJTs) and multiple mini-interviews (MMIs) for teacher selection Implementation of teacher selection programs Teacher recruitment and development Given its scope, the book represents an essential reference guide for scholars, educational leaders and policymakers, and graduate students in educational leadership programs, as well as professionals in child and school psychology, educational psychology, teaching and teacher education.

These conference proceedings focus on "Assessment for Learning: Within and Beyond the Classroom" in recognition of the power of assessment for learning as a way of boosting student performance. They explore the breadth, depth and quality of the best models and practices, strategies, lessons learnt and discuss cases of successful implementation of assessment within the classroom and beyond, including the virtual space. They also provide fertile ground for stimulating and comparing responsive assessment approaches and practices in relatively new areas of assessment such as graduate capability assessment in view of the need for educational institutions to evidence graduate employability.

In 1976, the first session on the teaching of evaluation was held at an annual meeting of evaluators. A few hardy souls gathered to exchange ideas on improving the teaching of evaluation. At subsequent annual meetings, these informal sessions attracted more and more participants, eager to talk about common teaching interests and to exchange reading lists, syllabuses, assignments, and paper topics. The ses sions were irreverent, innovative, lively, and unpredictable. Eventually the group for malized itself with the American Evaluation Association as the Topical Interest Group in the Teaching of Evaluation (TIG: TOE). As word of TIG: TOE's activities spread, instructors from all over the country clamored for assistance and advice. It became apparent that a handbook was need ed, a practical interdisciplinary guide to the teaching of evaluation. Donna M. Mertens, a long-standing member of TIG: TOE and an accomplished teacher of evaluation, volunteered to edit the book, and her skills, sensitivity, and experience in the craft of teaching are apparent throughout."

Improving Writing and Thinking through Assessment is designed to help individual faculty and administrators select assessment approaches and measures to maximize their students' writing and thinking. The book offers useful guidance, through presentation of recommended assessment guidelines and measurement principles in Part 1 and applications from a variety of contributors in Part 2. It addresses a wide range of audiences, including instructors who want to assess and thus foster writing and thinking in their courses, administrators and instructors planning to assess writing and thinking at the program or institutional level, and graduate students interested in improving students' writing and critical thinking. This book is more guide than "cookbook." By providing comprehensive standards and criteria that help individuals or teams develop plans and measures to improve writing and thinking, the book should be helpful for academic and Student Affairs administrators and faculty - as the principles apply equally to all engaged in assessment. Contributors, representing a wide range of educators, illustrate many of the approaches and methods described in the theoretical section of the book using a variety of assessment strategies at both classroom and program levels. Readers will see how different types of institutions, both private and public as well as undergraduate and graduate, have designed assessment strategies and plans to gauge and enhance writing and thinking growth in the classroom and across programs. They candidly describe challenges encountered and solutions they adopted or suggest. These chapters reflect approaches and perspectives from various discourse communities - including writing program administrators, composition faculty, assessment professionals, and individual faculty representing several disciplines. The author argues the urgent need to develop strong writers and thinkers. She discusses challenges and obstacles, but underscores the necessity for more faculty involvement and institutional commitment. This book will help institutions and individual faculty design and implement sound, meaningful assessment strategies to foster effective writing and thinking that will both advance the goals of the institutional mission and meet faculty's disciplinary objectives and scholarly concerns.

This book offers an important overview of technology-enhanced education in Southern Africa. With original research from Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, this book provides in-depth scientific scholarship focused on the dynamic multimodal learning environments in the region. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has largely had to adjust to remotelearning. Hence, the editors and contributors pull together important research on digital pedagogies and assessment to demonstrate how technology can be effectively employed for multimodal learning environments within the Southern African context. This book will be of interest and value to scholars of digital education, multimodal learning and education within Southern Africa and beyond.

Researcher Coach has been written with a sole purpose in mind: to give researchers sufficient theoretical and practical support so that they gain a sense of self-direction and autonomy in the process of formulating and conducting their research. From the core notions of paradigm, ontology, epistemology, axiology, methodology, methods, and research questions; researchers are guided through the fundamental elements involved in planning and executing their research. This book is not only concerned with supporting researchers in the process of formulating a valid and sound inquiry that is viable and methodologically rigorous, but it also emphasizes the importance of community impact. The reader will learn how to conduct the literature review that grounds their inquiry as well as provides context and justification for the execution of the study. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including methods and data analysis techniques, are presented in great detail as well as describing the sequential approach for presenting the study's results and how to support those with tables and/or figures. The book closes with chapters devoted to the interpretation and discussion of the results, as well as general items related to formatting and project completion for publication.

Bridging the gap between research and practice A Little Guide for Teachers: Formative Assessment gives teachers practical tried and tested strategies to put formative assessment into action in their classrooms. The Little Guide for Teachers series is little in size but BIG on all the support and inspiration you need to navigate your day to day life as a teacher. * Authored by experts in the field * Easy to dip in-and-out of * Interactive activities encourage you to write into the book and make it your own * Fun engaging illustrations throughout * Read in an afternoon or take as long as you like with it!

This book focuses on the assessment of English language writing in China mainland, the territories of Hong Kong and Macau, and Taiwan. The first part of the book describes how writing in English has been assessed in Chinese contexts in the past 25 years, and how it continues to be assessed at present. The second part of the book presents reports of work such as formative classroom-based assessment, feedback-based or feedback-led approaches, learning-oriented assessment, portfolios, as well as the important issue of teacher professional development in writing assessment. This two-part division relates to and reflects what has been happening in writing assessment internationally, in the UK from the 1940s, and in the US in the past 25 years. The use of English for international business communication, for international political negotiations and its rapidly increasing use as a medium of instruction in some subject areas has led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Chinese L1 speakers who are learning and being assessed in English. This is often done with an emphasis on reading and writing. The vast majority of assessments of English language writing are done through large-scale direct testing that uses simple prompts/tasks and short writing samples. This book explores best practices in assessing the writing in English of native speakers of Chinese. Assessing the English Language Writing of Chinese Learners of English edited by long-time experts Liz Hamp-Lyons and Yan Jin clearly demonstrates the authors' collective years of writing and teaching about writing assessment. The book's 13 chapters, written by recognized experts in assessment of Chinese speakers learning English, represent a wide array of important topics written in reader friendly language and offering evidence for pedagogical practices as well as high-stakes testing of writing. Teachers, researchers, administrators of writing programs in China, and test developers who seek counsel about this population need look no further than to add Assessing the English Language Writing of Chinese Learners of English to their reading list. Deborah Crusan, Wright State University, USA