Beginning as soon as the spring of 2015, the ACT college admissions test will be administered digitally. Digital testing can provide faster results — in minutes versus two to six weeks — for both students and colleges. Since the ACT is designed to test students’ high school learning and reasoning skills, it is already well [...]
How would you feel about having your essays or short written test answers graded by a software program? Instead of getting results back days or weeks later from an instructor, you’d get instant feedback — and a chance to rewrite the piece for a better grade.
The SAT was revamped as recently as 2005. Changing it again now is potentially risky, in that it may be “off-putting to the biggest stakeholders involved – the students” who are trying to prepare for it.
David Coleman, the new president of the College Board, the nonprofit that owns the SAT college admissions exam, announced on February 25 in an e-mail to the organization’s members that the test will be redesigned in “an ambitious effort” to more comprehensively address “the core set of knowledge and skills” that are most important to success in college.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no “guessing penalty” on the SAT. There is, however, a penalty for wrong answers – and the whole point of that penalty is to help ensure that students who guess randomly won’t improve their scores as a result.
The ability to successfully pace yourself — knowing how much time you have left and how much time to spend on a given question – is a key success factor for standardized test-takers. Here are 8 tips to pass along and work on with your students:
Though it was introduced perhaps 30 years ago, contract grading has recently grown increasingly popular among (mostly) high school and university educators and students alike. There are two primary reasons for this trend. First, contract grading helps streamline the grading process and the questions and issues of subjectivity that go with it. Second, contract grading is increasingly perceived as facilitating both better teaching and better learning.
MOOC type courses, such as those that leverage the Coursera platform, are inherently conceived to empower learners to educate each other, such as through posts and responses in course forums. This form of “crowd-sourced commentary” helps create a learning community – so why not build the community even further by empowering learners to evaluate one another?
With the rapidly growing popularity of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and online education in general, peer evaluation by students is coming to the fore as a way to assess student performance in online courses.
Most learning analytics systems center on online learning scenarios, where software can collect the data automatically. Using activities that are part of the online learning process — like logins, assignment completion, quiz scores and so on — learning analytics seeks to analyze the “digital breadcrumbs” that students leave as they interact with the online learning environment (and potentially other online spaces, too, such as Facebook).
