Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.

The ability to effective learn, process, and retain new information is critical to the success of any student. Since mathematics are becoming increasingly more important in our educational systems, it is imperative that we devise an efficient system to measure these types of information recall. Assessing and Measuring Statistics Cognition in Higher Education Online Environments: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical reference source that overviews the current state of higher education learning assessment systems. Featuring extensive coverage on relevant topics such as statistical cognitions, online learning implications, cognitive development, and curricular mismatches, this publication is ideally designed for academics, students, educators, professionals, and researchers seeking innovative perspectives on current assessment and measurement systems within our educational facilities.

This volume presents research findings on the use of technology to support learning and reasoning in collaborative contexts. Featuring a variety of theoretical perspectives, ranging from sociocultural to social psychological to information processing views, Collaborative Learning, Reasoning, and Technology includes an international group of authors

While information and communication technology has a vast influence on our lives, little is understood about its effects on the way we learn. In the Age of Information, students – consciously or not – are learning in diverse formal and informal environments from a broad variety of sources, with scientific knowledge competing against unfounded assertions, and misinformation and biased data spreading through social and mass media. The Positive Learning in the Age of Information (PLATO) program illustrated by the contributions in this book unites outstanding and highly innovative expertise on the fundamentals of information processing and human learning to investigate a new paradigm of positive learning as a vital, morally and ethically oriented approach, which is of existential importance to maintaining the civilization standards of a modern society in the digital age.

A contemporary look at the merger of technology and education! This timely collection of analytical essays provides provocative discourse on the role technology will play in education in the 21st century. In this book, an esteemed panel of educators, information specialists, program designers, and researchers discusses issues, trends, and problems in online technology and its potential to re-energize the educational system. The Web?s promise to provide unique opportunities for improved instruction is a given; how that promise can be fulfilled is the debate that fuels The Web in Higher Education. The Web in Higher Education offers detailed proposals for: designing Web-based programs designing online courses implementing Web-based course-management systems developing a community prototype for educators using the Web to enhance televised education A thoughtful look at the role of online technology in education, this insightful book is essential for educators and administrators. The Web in Higher Education serves as a reference point for the merger of teaching and technology that will likely define the educational process in the 21st century.