Assessment purposes and procedures in ESL/EFL classrooms

University instructors’ classroom assessments play a central role in and inevitably influence their teaching and their students’ learning. This paper reports on a comparative interview study conducted in a range of three ESL/EFL university contexts in Canada, Hong Kong and China. Six major aspects of ESL/EFL classroom assessment practices were explored: instructors’ assessment planning for the courses they taught, the relative weight given to course work and tests in their instruction, the type of assessment methods (selection vs. supply methods) that they used, the purposes each assessment was used for, the source of each method used, and when they used each method. University instructors were also asked to indicate what they saw as the advantages and disadvantages of the methods they used, and whether they took into account prior student knowledge when making decisions about what assessment methods to use. The findings contribute to a better understanding of ESL/EFL university instructors’ classroom assessment practices at the tertiary level in a range of three ESL/EFL university teaching contexts.     

Strategic CRM: Improving the Business of Academic Libraries

An argument can be made that libraries are businesses, with users as their customers. Given the increasing scarcity of funding and pressure for proving value, academic libraries could benefit from leveraging certain business practices to increase user satisfaction. Creating a comprehensive strategy for building long-term user relationships can solidify support for libraries by engaging with all stakeholders to improve their library experiences. The Customer Relationship Management philosophy described here provides an opportunity for institutions to show their total value to all users and stakeholders and in doing so, improve the business of academic libraries.     

Teaching Transgressive Representations of LGBTQ People in Educator Preparation: Is Conformity Required for Inclusion?

Abstract

One strategy used to teach about diverse populations is to edit their -curricular representations to minimize their transgressive nature in an effort to gain more acceptance among students. This article explores the implications of these -assimilationist narratives when used in educator preparation programs to -represent LGBTQ people. It examines the potential advantages of teaching more diverse and transgressive representations in the interest of inclusion and educator -preparation.     

Hold my calls: an activity for introducing the statistical process

Working with practicing teachers, this article demonstrates, through the facilitation of a statistical activity, how to introduce and investigate the unique qualities of the statistical process including: formulate a question, collect data, analyze data, and interpret data.     

Telecommunications in Teacher Education: reflections on the first Virtual Team Case Competition

ABSTRACT

In the spring of 1994, the University of Virginia piloted the first Virtual Team Case Competition. This event combined telecommunications and case‐method teaching to promote the use of technology and problem solving among teams of pre‐service teachers from three countries. Participating teams subscribed to a general mailing list to receive instructions, a schedule of events, and a case based on a real classroom situation. Teams had approximately ten days to email their analyses of the case to judges and to administrators of the competition. Judges scored each team's responses to the teaching case and to follow‐up questions and sent their evaluations by private email to the administrators. Results of the competitition were then posted over the mailing list. This paper describes both how the competition worked and what we learned from our experiment with the first Virtual Team Case Competition.     

Pedagogical Simulation of Sampling Distributions and the Central Limit Theorem

Students often find the fact that a sample statistic is a random variable very hard to grasp. Even more mysterious is why a sample mean should become ever more Normal as the sample size increases. This simulation tool is meant to illustrate the process, thereby giving students some intuitive grasp of the relationship between a parent population and the distribution of a sample mean.