Evaluation of Music Performance: Computerized Assessment Versus Human Judges.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

Machine Scoring of Student Essays: Truth and Consequences

The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active. Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1138/thumbnail.jp

Stepping Back Through the Looking Glass: Real Conversations with Real Disputants About Institutionalized Mediation and Its Value

This Article describes what a group of real disputants perceives as most valuable about agency-connected mediation before, soon after, and eighteen months after they participated in the process. The Article is based primarily upon qualitative data from in-depth interviews with parents and school officials who participated in special education mediation sessions. Though the specific context of these interviews is obviously important, these disputants and their disputes share many commonalities with disputants and disputes in other contexts and, as a result, these disputants\u27 views have relevance for the broader field of mediation.These interviews suggest that both before and after disputants experience mediation, they place great value upon mediation’s ability to improve the “procedural justice” of their discussions and decision-making – i.e., improving their ability to speak, be heard and be treated in an relatively dignified and even-handed manner. Just as importantly, however, the disputants value mediation’s ability to deliver resolution of the disputes that gave rise to the invocation of mediation – or at least meaningful progress toward that resolution. They seek improvement upon their currently conflicted situations.Further, the interviews suggest that if disputants are reassured that the mediation process and the mediators’ behavior are grounded firmly in procedural justice, they also value an eclectic and apparently conflicting variety of mediator interventions designed to move disputes toward some form of clarification or resolution. These reactions suggest that the mediation field’s current debate over the relative superiority of “evaluative,” “facilitative,” or “transformative” approaches misses the point. Depending upon their implementation, all of these types of interventions have the potential to be consistent with and enhance mediation’s dual promise of procedural justice and resolution. All three types of interventions, however, also have the potential to hinder the dual achievement of procedural justice and resolution. Thus, the focus of the field should not be upon ensuring orthodoxy with any particular mediation model, but with crafting processes that use all three types of interventions in a manner that serves both procedural justice and resolution. The post-mediation interviews also reveal the increasingly dominant technique of caucus as a tool that is particularly important to disputants as they reflect on their mediation experience. Further, caucus is revealed as a particularly potent tool. It can be very effective in helping to produce settlements and providing an opportunity for disputants to be heard. But caucus also may reduce disputants’ ability to hear each other and may invite the use of coercive or manipulative bargaining behaviors. These uses of caucus can endanger the goal of offering an experience of justice in mediation. Thus, these interviews suggest that the technique of caucus deserves much more attention from researchers, mediators, trainers, and policy makers

Credit Recovery and Grade Point Average in an Alternative High School System

Abstract The dropout rates of African American and Hispanic students in the United States are significantly higher than that of White students. Failure to obtain a high school diploma has adverse economic and social implications for these students and for society. The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between a credit recovery program with key demographic variables and high school GPA, which is a graduation antecedent, for students in an alternative school. Knowles\u27 framework of adult learning theory was used to examine how participation in the credit recovery process in a system of predominantly African American-serving alternative schools predicted GPA while accounting for the influence of student demographic variables. The ex-post facto causal-comparative design involved the analysis of an archival random sample of 168 former students, 84 of whom had taken credit recovery courses and 84 of whom had not. A multiple linear regression model (R =0.257, F(4, 163) = 2.770, p = 0.029) indicated that only gender (β = 0.188, p = .02) significantly predicted the students\u27 GPA, with female students outperforming males. A conclusion is that the implementation of credit recovery programs in U.S. schools does not have any impact on students\u27 GPA. The results suggest weaknesses in program delivery and training and that the review and revision of professional development opportunities for teachers is merited. Drawing from the extant literature, a professional development recommendation was made to improve program effectiveness based on documented best practice examples. Implications for the promotion of positive social change include the evaluation of more robust credit recovery programs capable of improving the graduation rates of U.S. Hispanic and African American students