Alternative assessments have evolved from an epistemological change in education. They see assessment and instruction as two sides on the same coin which go hand in hand. The traditional roles of both teachers and learners are, consequently, modified which is essential for better language development. In this line, the present study aimed at comparing the effects of portfolio and journal writin...

Automated essay scoring is now an established capability used from elementary school through graduate school for purposes of instruction and assessment. Newer applications provide automated diagnostic feedback about student writing. Feedback includes errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics, comments about writing style, and evaluation of discourse structure. This paper reports on a system that ...

background: despite more than a decade experience of annual student congresses in iran, major scientific writing weakness still exists in students’ abstracts submitted to the annual research congress of iran’s medical sciences students (arcimss). assessment of these abstracts can provide information on common scientific writing errors and subsequent development of abstract quality for the futur...

Multiple-choice questions are a common assessment method in nursing examinations. Few nurse educators, however, have formal preparation in constructing multiple-choice questions. Consequently, questions used in baccalaureate nursing assessments often contain item-writing flaws, or violations to accepted item-writing guidelines. In one nursing department, 2770 MCQs were collected from tests and ...

This study aimed to investigate the washback effect of three alternative assessment procedures, namely oral-conferences, portfolios, and corpora-based feedback on the writing achievement and attitudes of Iranian EFL university learners. The participants taking part in the study were 156 native Iranian students in a mixed Reading-Writing course. Through the two three-month semesters, the learner...

Traditional recovery mechanisms are not adequate in protecting databases from malicious attacks. A malicious transaction by virtue of writing on to the database can corrupt one or more data items; benign transactions reading these data items and writing on other data items can help spread the damage. To prevent the damage from spreading, it is important to assess the damage and confine it as qu...

This article discusses an interdisciplinary research project in which faculty from nursing and english collaborated in the assessment of students' critical thinking skills as reflected in writing portfolios. Faculty reviewed students' writing portfolios and then corresponded on email from two different universities about evidence of critical thinking in the portfolios. Findings suggest that wri...

We investigate students’ negative perceptions about an online peer assessment system for undergraduate writing across the disciplines. Specifically, we consider the nature of students’ resistance to peer assessment; what factors influence that resistance; and how students’ perceptions impact their revision work. We do this work by first examining findings from an end-of-course survey administer...

Our aim in this paper is to tell the story of how a discourse-based approach to university outcomes assessment can transform the teaching of writing and critical thinking across the curriculum. The institutional assessment plan developed by our university has been influenced by the work of Barbara Walvoord, a pioneering figure in writing across the curriculum. We will illustrate the surprising ...