Relationships between student characteristics and self‐, peer and tutor evaluations of oral presentations

There are many influences on how assessors grade themselves and others. Oral presentations are useful for exploring such factors in peer, self‐ and tutor marked assessments, being rapidly completed and assessed, commonly used in HE and very difficult to anonymize. This opportunistic study examined the effects of gender and level of attainment on the triangulation of marks awarded to student presenters. Grades generated by peer assessment were associated more strongly with tutor‐awarded marks than those from self‐assessment. For self‐assessment there was a strong effect of gender (female students undervalued their performance compared with tutor grades). Peer assessment produced higher marks than from tutors, perhaps because of the close‐knit community developed during residential courses. For tutor marks, the greatest variability was at the lower end of the scale, whereas peer assessors were most variable when marking students who self‐evaluated or peer assessed highly. Students awarded a narrower range of marks to peers compared with tutors, but when self‐assessing used a larger range. Presentations by students who admitted to little sleep the night before received lower grades from both peers and tutors, but this was not reflected by self‐assessments, suggesting they were unaware of their poorer performances. Sessions with fewer talks (four rather than seven) reduced the ‘dip’ in marks previously observed in the middle of sessions. Findings are discussed in the context of bias in this mode of assessment.     

Contextual effects on predicting risk for reading difficulties in first and second grade

This study utilized early reading assessment data from a randomized trial of 210 urban and rural schools in Texas to examine contextual effects on risk prediction in first and second grade. The primary objective was to examine the roles of (a) individual differences, (b) the grade 1 classroom, and (c) the pairing of first and second grade teachers in determining grade 2 outcomes in word reading and fluency. A second objective was to investigate whether the administration format of the assessment (paper, paper plus desktop, handheld plus desktop) or the level of teacher support (web mentoring, no mentoring) moderated the prediction. These moderator variables proved not to be significant. Subsequent analyses found that a combination of student pretest and mean of pretest classroom was a better predictor than student pretest alone. Additionally, the effect of student scores varied by teacher-pair. On average, intraclass correlations (ICCs) ranged from 6% to 17%. Differences in ICCs at the classroom level were much greater than at the school level, and differences in urban schools were twice that of rural schools.     

Prepracticum Service‐Learning: Examining the Relationship With Counselor Self‐Efficacy and Anxiety

Prepracticum service‐learning is an integral part of the curriculum for counselor education students at a large southwestern university. Service‐learning is accomplished by placing novice students in school or community agency settings to acquire early, practical, field‐based experience. Activities are more structured and supervised than in an internship or practicum. Analysis indicated that prepracticum service‐learning had a positive significant relationship with counselor self‐efficacy and a significant negative relationship with student anxiety. However, substantial counseling course work and experience with counseling‐related work both had a stronger influence than did prepracticum service‐learning, indicating that the latter is more appropriate for novice students.     

A Project-Based Approach to Statistics and Data Science

Abstract

In an increasingly data-driven world, facility with statistics is more important than ever for our students. At institutions without a statistician, it often falls to the mathematics faculty to teach statistics courses. This paper presents a model that a mathematician asked to teach statistics can follow. This model entails connecting with faculty from numerous departments on campus to develop a list of topics, building a repository of real-world datasets from these faculty, and creating projects where students interface with these datasets to write lab reports aimed at consumers of statistics in other disciplines. The end result is students who are well prepared for interdisciplinary research, who are accustomed to coping with the idiosyncrasies of real data, and who have sharpened their technical writing and speaking skills.     

Comparing face-to-face and asynchronous online communication as mechanisms for critical reflective dialogue

Two mechanisms for engaging in critical reflective dialogue are discussed and compared: face-to-face meetings and asynchronous online discussion. The context is an umbrella action research project, with over 20 participants, which aimed to improve practices in online teaching and contribute to the development of graduate attributes. The article compares discussion using the two modes (face-to-face and online) of the nature of and development of problem-solving and other graduate attributes. Face-to-face discussion was wide ranging and quite loosely structured, so divergent aspects of a topic were uncovered. The asynchronous nature of online discussion, however, permitted topics to be explored more thoroughly. The two modes worked well in conjunction with one another, if aspects of face-to-face discussion topics were posted online as discussion threads. The asynchronous online discussions then allowed each thread to be explored in depth, so that collective understanding of a given topic could be enhanced.     

Peers'' Perceptions of the Consequences That Victimized Children Provide Aggressors

Fourth- through seventh-grade children (mean age 11.5 years) estimated the likelihood that various consequences would occur following hypothetical acts of aggression toward victimized and nonvictimized classmates. Children also indicated how much they would care if the consequences were to occur. When contemplating aggression toward victimized classmates, children were more likely to expect tangible rewards, more likely to expect signs of victim suffering, and less likely to expect retaliation than when considering aggression against nonvictimized classmates. Also, when considering aggression toward victimized classmates, children cared more about securing tangible rewards but were less disturbed by the thought of hurting their victims or by the thought of their victims retaliating than when imagining aggression toward nonvictimized classmates. The foregoing pattern was stronger for boys than for girls. Implications for theories of aggression and for intervention with aggressive and victimized children are discussed.     

Consequences and outcomes of policies governing medium-stakes large-scale exit exams

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability - Large-scale externally mandated exit exams are common in many education systems. Exit exams are considered medium stakes when exam scores are...     

Family Risk and Externalizing Problems in Chilean Children: Mediation by Harsh Parenting and Emotional Support

Latent class analysis and multigroup mediation were used with 8,860 families in Chile to identify risk groups varying in socioeconomic status, family structure, and maternal depression, to determine whether profiles differed in children’s development of externalizing problems (EP) from 35 to 61 months, and maternal parenting that predicted EP. Four groups were identified: one no-risk profile and three risk profiles, impoverished and undereducated, depressed and impoverished, and father-absent and impoverished. All classes differed in EP. Maternal emotional support and harsh parenting were differentially associated with the development of EP across the three risk groups, relative to the low-risk group. Thus, specific constellations of adversities differentially predicted children’s EP and socialization processes mediating links between risk and EP. Implications are discussed.