“Now you know what you’re doing right and wrong!” Peer feedback quality in synchronous peer assessment in secondary education

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This study explores the effects of peer assessment (PA) practice on peer feedback (PF) quality of 11th grade secondary education students...     

Identifying the Best Buys in U.S. Higher Education

Which U.S. institutions of higher education offer the best value to consumers? To answer this question, we evaluate U.S. institutions relative to a data envelopment analysis (DEA) multi-factor frontier based on 2000?C2001 data for 1,179 4-year institutions. The resulting DEA ??best buy?? scores allow the ranking of institutions by a weighted sum of institutional characteristics per dollar of average net price. The net price is calculated as tuition, fees, room, and board less per student financial aid. Institutional characteristics include SAT score, athletic expenditures, instructional expenditures, value of buildings, dorm capacity, and student body characteristics. The DEA scores indicate the distance of each institution from the ??best buy?? frontier for the chosen characteristics, providing an objective means of ranking institutions as the best values in higher education.     

Problems in Scoring,Agreement among Raters,and Internal Consistency of Selected Marker Tests

Selected Marker Tests, of Educational Testing Service and Sheridan Psychological Services, Inc., were examined in terms of problems in scoring and internal consistency. The tests were administered orally to 116 sixth and seventh grade students. Problems in scoring were discovered and changes were suggested. The agreement between two independent judges on part scores was high. Twenty-one of 28 correlations were .90 and above. Item correlations with part and total scores, using Cureton’s correction, were frequently very low, and many items did not meet the desirable difficulty level for norm-referenced tests. The study suggests that, with the sample used, the problem is not one of agreement among judges but, rather, one of item reliability.     

Imposing a pause between the eccentric and concentric phases increases the reliability of isoinertial strength assessments

Abstract

This study analysed the effect of imposing a pause between the eccentric and concentric phases on the biological within-subject variation of velocity- and power–load isoinertial assessments. Seventeen resistance-trained athletes undertook a progressive loading test in the bench press (BP) and squat (SQ) exercises. Two trials at each load up to the one-repetition maximum (1RM) were performed using 2 techniques executed in random order: with (stop) and without (standard) a 2-s pause between the eccentric and concentric phases of each repetition. The stop technique resulted in a significantly lower coefficient of variation for the whole load–velocity relationship compared to the standard one, in both BP (2.9% vs. 4.1%; P = 0.02) and SQ (2.9% vs. 3.9%; P = 0.01). Test–retest intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were r = 0.61–0.98 for the standard and r = 0.76–0.98 for the stop technique. Bland–Altman analysis showed that the error associated with the standard technique was 37.9% (BP) and 57.5% higher (SQ) than that associated with the stop technique. The biological within-subject variation is significantly reduced when a pause is imposed between the eccentric and concentric phases. Other relevant variables associated to the load–velocity and load–power relationships such as the contribution of the propulsive phase and the load that maximises power output remained basically unchanged.     

Differing perspectives of non-native speaker students’ linguistic experiences on higher degree courses

We report a small-scale study investigating the perceptions of postgraduate students who are non-native speakers of English and those of academic staff with regard to those students. Previous research has focused only on the former and identified a number of linguistic and cultural challenges these students face in adapting to Anglophone institution environments. A sample of 43 students in one department at a Russell Group university were surveyed and a sub-sample interviewed. Six members of academic staff were interviewed and some observed in their teaching. Findings suggest that, despite the high linguistic admission requirements set by the university, this group of students faced a range of difficulties in all four language skills but particularly in skills needed for oral interaction in seminars. Students and staff provided differing accounts of the source of these difficulties and students expressed a desire for better integration with native speaker students. There were also differing accounts regarding the amount of linguistic support students should receive, particularly with regard to proofreading written work. The study suggests a need for further research of this comparative kind potentially leading to recommendations for additional support for students and staff development.