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Purpose – The chapter provides the reader with an overview of the major components of informal reading inventories (IRIs) and how they can be administered to answer specific questions about students’ reading behaviors. The focus then shifts to how IRIs can be used to help teachers target instruction to better meet students’ instructional needs.

Methodology/approach – The authors describe how educators can use the results of IRIs to analyze a student's strengths and areas of need, align those findings with research about six types (clusters) of readers (Valencia & Buly, 2004), and select one or more of the strategies recommended in the chapter to provide instruction related to that student's specific areas of need.

Practical implications – In addition to the numerous instructional recommendations provided for the six clusters of readers, the chapter includes a detailed scenario of how one teacher used the results of an IRI to plan instruction for a struggling reader, a process that could be replicated by educators who read the chapter.

Social implications – The chapter suggests how small groups of educators could work together to determine which of their students to assess with an IRI and, after assessing, to discuss how they will use the results to target instruction for those students.

During the past decade, amid the current context emphasizing educational standards and accountability, the practice of grade retention has increased. The call for an end to social promotion has generated a variety of recommendations and legislation regarding promotion policies. This context has served as a catalyst for numerous debates regarding the use of grade retention and social promotion. In an era emphasizing evidence-based interventions, research indicates that neither grade retention nor social promotion is a successful strategy for improving educational success. Meta-analyses of studies during the past 100 years reveal deleterious outcomes associated with grade retention. Moreover, research also reveals prevention and intervention strategies that are likely to promote the social or academic competence of students at-risk of poor school performance. It is essential that educational professionals are familiar with the research when implementing interventions to promote student success. This chapter provides a brief synthesis of contemporary concerns and empirical studies examining student outcomes associated with grade retention, and also describes alternatives to grade retention. Particular consideration is given to implications for students with learning and behavioral disabilities, and the importance of focusing empirically supported strategies to promote student social and cognitive competence. Overall, educational professionals are encouraged to incorporate evidence-based programs and policies to facilitate the success of all students.

The aim of this paper is to generate a streamlined, transparent and effective instrument to fairly measure the contribution made by each student to a group project within a higher education context. The primary aim is to moderate the grades of underperforming students at the end of the project. There is a secondary benefit in alerting underperforming students to raise their contribution mid-task or face a potentially reduced grade at the final stage.

The development of this multi-dimensional instrument is guided by findings from previous research. The quest is to minimise the instructor's administrative work load in applying a moderation-only instrument that is open-source and available at no cost. Based on the literature, the survey instrument seeks to apply a peer-based, equitable and transparent evaluation of each member's contribution to a group task. The survey is applied at mid-task and again at end-task in order to afford underperformers the opportunity to address contribution deficits during the final phase of the project.

The instrument, called TANDEM©, offers a transparent, streamlined, equitable, confidential and practical measure of each student's contribution to a graded group task. Students whose end-task contribution falls below the group average rating receive a proportional reduction in their personal grade. Additionally, the end-task moderation instrument captures a single-item holistic measure of relative contribution that may, in the future, serve as a surrogate for the multi-dimensional measures currently in place.

TANDEM© was developed with group sizes of four or five members in mind. There is no evidence to support its application to three-person groups. Moreover, the application was applied only amongst under-graduate students. It is yet to be applied across post-graduate groups and within online learning environments. Future research into diverse cultural settings would serve to advance understanding of how moderation is perceived across borders.

Several existing group grade moderation methods propose complex algorithms that are “black box” solutions from a student's perspective. In establishing a fair, streamlined, confidential and transparent process for peer-rated moderation, TANDEM© deploys a concise instrument with a relatively small administrative load. TANDEM © may be applied to all groups or can selectively be applied to groups that report moderate, strong or extreme levels of conflict.

Students will appreciate the opportunity to rate peer contributions to group projects. This will dissipate the negative social sentiment that may arise when fellow students benefit from the work of others. Those students seeking conflict resolution within the group will value the transparent and equitable moderation of grades as well as the positive social implications that follow.

This research forms part of an ongoing quest to present a moderation instrument that fairly identifies student contribution to a group project. Whilst the solution proposed is one of many existing alternatives, its focus is on a practical moderation-only instrument that can immediately be applied to a course or major. The benefits lie in the ease of application and minimal administrative workload. This constitutes an original contribution to the individual (course or major) coordinator who seeks to apply a moderation-only instrument without having to commit to an extensive, broad-based group optimisation programme.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate course instructor perceptions into personal and classroom use of computer‐generated bibliographic citations. The paper aims to provide guidance as librarians promote and teach automated citation services to the academic communities.

Course instructors at one university completed a quantitative survey about computer‐generated bibliographic citations. Questions focused on instructor use of automated citation services, if they generally reduce grades for bibliographic errors, if they would reduce grades for specific computer‐generated citation (CGC) errors, and would they advise students to use automated citation services at various course levels.

The results show a majority of course instructors do not use CGCs for their own research or promote the citation services in the classroom. A majority of respondents generally reduce student grades for bibliographic errors and would continue to do so for CGC errors. The data show specific types of automatically generated citation errors are more detrimental to student grades than others. Furthermore, results indicate course level impacts instructor promotion of CGCs.

The results provide librarians with helpful data, from the course instructor perspective, as they promote and teach computer‐generated bibliographic citations.

Literature on computer‐generated bibliographic citations tends to focus on technical and comparative aspects of citation services, or users' product opinions. This paper explores course instructor use, course promotion, and bibliographic grading of automatically generated citations to enhance advocacy and instruction of these services.

Much of the recent research on data‐driven decision making in US schools has focused on standardized test scores while other forms of data in schools have gone largely unexamined as useful data, such as teacher‐assigned grades. Based on the literature, the theory outlined in this paper is that grades, as data historically overlooked in schools, are a useful multidimensional assessment for decision making by educational leaders. This paper aims to address these issues.

Using multidimensional scaling, grades, and standardized test scores are compared for 195 students in grades 9‐12 from two US school districts. The relationship between these assessments is visualized between grades in core subjects, such as Mathematics and English, non‐core subjects, such as Art and Physical Education, and standardized test scores, such as the ACT.

Two significant dimensions appear to be embedded within grades; assessment of academic knowledge and an assessment of a student's ability to negotiate the social processes of school. These findings indicate that grades should be reconceptualized as informative for data‐driven decision making in schools as a potential assessment of both academic knowledge and a student's ability to negotiate the social processes of school.

Grades have been overlooked as useful data in the data‐driven decision‐making literature. This paper provides novel evidence for the usefulness of actual teacher‐assigned grades in school and district decision making as well as research and policymaking versus the past use of student self‐reported grades or teacher perceptions of grading practices.

Many universities now offer courses online using learning management systems (LMS). Numerous studies have been conducted to assess the effectiveness of the LMS but few studies have examined how student online behavior within the course, or what they think about the online course, are related to their actual learning outcomes. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this study, student activity in an online business course was captured though learning analytics and assignments to determine if online activity and reflective learning impact final grade. A post-positivist ideology was employed. The dependent variable was the grade resulting from five assignments assessed using rubrics. Correlation, t-tests, multiple regression, surface response regression, General Linear Model (GLM)/F-tests, text analytics, analysis of means (ANOM), and cluster analysis were used to test the hypotheses.

Four statistically significant predictors of online student learning performance were identified: course logins, lesson reading, lesson quiz activity, and lesson quiz scores. This four factor model captured 78 percent of variance on course grade which is a strong effect and larger than comparative studies using learning analytics with online courses. Text analytics and ANOM conducted on student essays identified 17 reflective learning keywords that were grouped into five clusters to explain online student behavior.

First, from a pedagogy standpoint, encouraging students to complete more online lessons including quizzes, generally promotes learning, resulting in higher grades, which is a win:win for students and for the university. Second, from an IT perspective, the student pre and post testing resulted in statistically significant increase of IT-course knowledge, which puts students on a solid foundation to begin an online business course. Additionally, the link between students voicing IT problems but nonetheless scoring very well on the course certainly implies the development of IT self-efficacy, developed partly through the pre and post testing process. A clear link was established between course learning objectives and student learning performance by using a unique text analytics procedure.

The mixed-methods research design started with hypothesis testing using parametric and nonparametric techniques. Once a statistically significant predictive GLM was developed, qualitative data were collected from what the students thought as expressed in their last essay assignment. Text analytics was used to identify and statistically weight the 17 most frequent reflective learning keywords from student essays. A visual word cloud was presented. Parametric statistics were then used to partition the reflective learning keywords into grade boundaries. Nonparametric cluster analysis was used to group similar reflective keyword-grade associations together to form five clusters. The five clusters helped to explain student online behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether students perceive grade inflation as a problem. It questions whether differences exist in perceptions based upon gender and grade point average (GPA).

Previously validated scales were used to assess perceptions. The sample included 108 full-time traditional-aged undergraduate students from a private university.

Students do not believe A grades are given more than deserved; however, they believe some receive higher grades than deserved. Grades are seen as an accurate reflection of achievement. Neither gender nor GPA differences were found on grade inflation perceptions, although women believe faculty give higher grades to receive better student evaluations.

This paper combines student perceptions about grade inflation and analysis by gender and GPA.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative academic effectiveness of vocational education in three countries with early tracking systems: Austria, Croatia, and Hungary.

The authors use an instrumental variables approach to estimate vocational education’s relative academic effectiveness in terms of achievement on an international test, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program of International Student Assessment (PISA), and two possible indicators of non-cognitive outcomes – self-efficacy in mathematics and intrinsic motivation in mathematics, both also available from the PISA student survey.

The results show few, if any, differences in student gains from attending the vocational track in secondary school as opposed to the academic track. Specifically, the results show that attending the vocational or academic track results in similar achievement gains in the tenth grade and generally similar gains in self-efficacy and motivation in mathematics.

The study is unique because in the three countries, the authors can use a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach based on school systems’ age entrance date rules to estimate the gain in test scores over an academic year and to compare the gain for students in the vocational and academic tracks. The results contradict almost all other studies by showing that in these countries student academic gains in vocational education are about the same as in the academic track.

In this paper a systematic and well-defined student participation assessment scheme for college courses is proposed. The scheme supports the involvement of students in a variety of areas of participation within and outside the classroom with the aim of improving their learning. The scheme addresses mostly the challenges related to the practicality of the structure and design of the assessment. It also addresses the subjectivity of grading student participations. Areas of participation are widened to allow the faculty more accurate information about the conduct of each individual student towards more objective assessment. In addition, it provides the faculty with the flexibility to select areas that best fit the learning outcomes, nature of the course, availability of time and resources, and class atmosphere. The proposed scheme is initiated and developed using feedback from the teaching staff of Nizwa College of Technology, (NCT) through a survey and open discussion. The results indicate that over two thirds of the surveyed staff show agreement with the concept of assessing participation and find the scheme design clear and systematic, while 82% of them perceive the scheme as effective in improving the motivation and learning of students.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how universities play an institutional role in inflating student grade point averages (GPA) by modifying academic polices such as course withdraw, repeats, and satisfactory/unsatisfactory grade options.

Three research strategies are employed: an examination of eight public institutions in a southern state illustrates the variability in academic policies; a transcript analysis demonstrates how students at some universities can capitalize on academic regulations to inflate GPA; and an empirical analysis of 1,798 graduating seniors at one institution explores the parameters of utilizing “do‐over” policies and how the policies correlate with GPA inflation.

Schools are transforming the “rules” of the academic game. Such changes enable students to selectively inflate their GPA, thereby rendering effective comparison of GPA problematic. This is of particular significance to administrators, governing and accrediting bodies, potential employers, graduate or professional school recruiters, and policy makers.

This study is cross‐sectional and the sample is restricted to one state and in some analyses one institution. Longitudinal research exploring a larger number of universities in a variety of states is necessary to uncover the determinants of any changes in academic policies.

The paper reframes grade inflation as GPA inflation, which is partially a function of institutionalized processes, and offers a remedy to the problem of GPA comparison. A new simple metric (EAR) is offered to accompany GPA; only when considering earned hours versus attempted hours (EAR) does grade point regain some utility to educators, recruiters, or policy makers engaged in assessment.