description- – Over the past decade, standardized test results have become the primary tool used to judge the effectiveness of schools and educational programs, and today, standardized testing serves as the keystone for educational policy at the state and federal levels. This paper examines the relationship between fourth grade mathematics achievement and technology use at home and at school. Using item level achievement data, individual student's state test scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), and student and teacher responses to detailed technology-use surveys, this study examines the relationship between technology-use and mathematics performance among 986 regular students, from 55 intact fourth grade classrooms in 25 schools across 9 school districts in Massachusetts. The findings from this study suggest that various uses of technology are differentially related to student outcomes and that in general, student and teacher technology uses are weakly related to mathematics achievement on the MCAS. Implications for improving methods for examining the relationship between technology use and standardized test scores are presented.
subjectcollectiondatepublishercreatorformat description- – The current research was conducted to investigate the validity of automated essay scoring (AES) by comparing group mean scores assigned by AES and human raters. Data collection included two standardized writing tests - WritePlacer Plus and the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) writing test. The research sample of 107 participants was drawn from a Hispanic serving institution in South Texas. The One-Way Repeated-Measures ANOVA and the follow-up Paired Samples t test were conducted to examine the group mean differences. Results of the tests indicated that the mean score assigned by IntelliMetric was significantly higher than faculty human raters' mean score on WriterPlacer Plus test, and IntelliMetric mean score was also significantly higher than THEA mean score assigned by human raters from National Evaluation Systems. A statistically significant difference also existed between the human raters' mean score on WritePlacer Plus and human raters' mean score on THEA. These findings did not corroborate previous studies that reported non-significant mean score differences between AES and human scoring.
subjectcollectiondatepublishercreatorformat description- – This paper reviews a series of formative assessment studies that were conducted to inform and evaluate a large-scale instructional software development project at the University of Missouri - Rolla (UMR). The three-year project, entitled "Taking the Next Step in Engineering Education: Integrating Educational Software and Active Learning," was funded by the U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE). The assessment was carried out under the auspices of UMR's Laboratory for Information Technology Evaluation (LITE) and guided by the LITE model for evaluation of learning technologies. The fundamental premise of the model is that evaluation should consist of the triangulation of multiple research methodologies and measurement tools. Five representative evaluation studies, consisting of eight experiments, are presented here. The studies range from basic experimentation and usability testing to applied research conducted within the classroom as well as a multi-national cross-cultural applied dissemination survey conducted during the last semester of the project. This paper demonstrates that the LITE model can be an effective tool for guiding a comprehensive evaluation program. In addition, the research findings provide evidence that the instructional multimedia developed in this project can have a substantial positive impact in enhancing fundamental engineering classes.
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