Faculty Perspectives on Course and Teacher Evaluations

Student ratings of instruction have been the subject of numerous studies with much of the research focusing on the validity and reliability of the ratings themselves. Comparatively little empirical investigation has been devoted to the perceptions of the individuals who are the subjects of the ratings, that is, the faculty. The current study explored faculty perspectives on the usefulness of student ratings for formative and summative purposes, and the actual use of student ratings for summative purposes. Contrary to what might have been deduced from the anecdotal literature, the results of this study do not portray a great deal of resistance to student ratings in general or to their use for formative and summative evaluation. It was also found that student ratings are actually being used for the latter purpose. The usefulness of the student feedback was viewed differentially by the faculty, with feedback on their interaction with students seen as most useful, followed by feedback on their grading practices, global ratings of instructor and course, and finally structural issues of the course.     

To see or not to see: analyzing difficulties in geometry from the perspective of visual perception

In this paper, we consider theories about processes of visual perception and perception-based knowledge representation (VPR) in order to explain difficulties encountered in figural processing in junior high school geometry tasks. In order to analyze such difficulties, we take advantage of the following perspectives of VPR: (1) Perceptual organization: Gestalt principles, (2) recognition: bottom-up and top-down processing; and (3) representation of perception-based knowledge: verbal vs. pictorial representation, mental images and hierarchical structure of images. Examples given in the paper were mostly taken from Gal's study (2005) which aimed at identifying and analyzing Problematic Learning Situations (after Gal & Linchevski, 2000) in junior high school geometry classes. Gal's study (2005) suggests that while this theoretical perspective became part of teachers' pedagogic content knowledge, the teachers were aware of their students' thinking processes and their ability to analyze and cope with their students’ difficulties in geometry was improved.     

Validating human and automated scoring of essays against “True” scores

ABSTRACT

In the current study, two pools of 250 essays, all written as a response to the same prompt, were rated by two groups of raters (14 or 15 raters per group), thereby providing an approximation to the essay’s true score. An automated essay scoring (AES) system was trained on the datasets and then scored the essays using a cross-validation scheme. By eliminating one, two, or three raters at a time, and by calculating an estimate of the true scores using the remaining raters, an independent criterion against which to judge the validity of the human raters and that of the AES system, as well as the interrater reliability was produced. The results of the study indicated that the automated scores correlate with human scores to the same degree as human raters correlate with each other. However, the findings regarding the validity of the ratings support a claim that the reliability and validity of AES diverge: although the AES scoring is, naturally, more consistent than the human ratings, it is less valid.     

Academic expectations and actual achievements: the roles of hope and effort

This study sought to extend the research on adolescents' hope, academic expectations, and average grades. The hope theory (Snyder, Psychological Inquiry 13(4):249–275, 2002), the salutogenic paradigm (with a focus on sense of coherence (SOC) (Antonovsky 1987)), and Bandura's (Journal of Management 38(1):9–44, 2012) social learning theory (with a focus on three self-efficacy (SE) constructs: academic SE, social SE, and emotional SE), were used as an integrated conceptual framework for predicting expected and actual academic performance. The sample consisted of 289 10th grade high school students (152 girls and 137 boys). The structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis provided support for the hypothesized modified model. The results demonstrated that hopeful thinking had a direct effect on grade expectations, which, in turn, predicted academic achievement. In addition, SOC, social SE, emotional SE, and academic SE were interrelated, but only emotional SE and SOC contributed directly to hope. Academic SE predicted effort, which also contributed to hope. Thus, the relations between students' investment of effort and actual grades were predicted indirectly through hopeful thinking and grade expectations. The implications for future research and the field of educational psychology of using hope, SOC, and SE as an integrated conceptual framework for predicting academic outcomes are discussed.     

Investigating the contributions of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies to L2 reading comprehension: an exploratory study

While a number of studies have investigated the influence of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies on comprehension, no L2 research exists examining and comparing the unique contributions of these two variables examined together. Therefore, the purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the combined and individual contributions of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies to reading comprehension. Data collected from 20 university-level English language learners were analyzed using regression analyses. The results indicated that background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies, operationalized as self-questioning, combined to account for a significant portion of variance in reading comprehension scores, with self-questioning being a stronger predictor of reading comprehension than background knowledge.     

Nonword repetition with spectrally reduced speech: some developmental and clinical findings from pediatric cochlear implantation

Nonword repetition skills were examined in 24 pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users and 18 normal-hearing (NH) adult listeners listening through a CI simulator. Two separate groups of NH adult listeners assigned accuracy ratings to the nonword responses of the pediatric CI users and the NH adult speakers. Overall, the nonword repetitions of children using CIs were rated as more accurate than the nonword repetitions of the adults. The nonword repetition accuracy ratings from both groups of subjects were correlated with open- and closed-set word recognition scores and forward digit spans. Only the perceptual accuracy scores from pediatric CI users were correlated with measures of speech production accuracy. These results suggest that although the pediatric CI users had more experience and success in perceiving speech under degraded auditory conditions, developmental differences in their memory skills prevent them from performing as well on working memory tasks as mature listeners.