Applying Assessment Principles during Emergency Remote Teaching: Challenges and Considerations

One of the main challenges higher educational institutions encounter amid the recent COVID-19 crisis is transferring assessment approaches from the traditional face-to-face form to the online Emergency Remote Teaching approach. A set of language assessment principles, practicality, reliability, validity, authenticity, and washback, which can be applied to any academic subject, are critical within the design of any task that aims to assess learning. This review paper discusses how assessment approaches need to be modified in a time of crisis. It determines the position assessment should adopt within emergency remote teaching methods and analyzes the fundamental characteristics of five principles of assessment and how they can be accomplished with emergency remote teaching approaches. Furthermore, this paper evaluates the vulnerability and viability of the five assessment principles, examines the application of online assessment on a holistic level, and puts forward a set of recommendations to ensure the assessment principles are achieved within emergency remote learning contexts. The paper concludes with the notion that the construct of time, which is inherent within the principle of practicality, is the most significant when developing online assessments as it is this characteristic that is the most at risk. In addition, we suggest that the assessments that are implemented during emergency remote learning involve open-ended, as opposed to close-ended, questions and highlight the importance of educators demonstrating flexibility and understanding toward their students.

Pseudo-compliance or convergence?

This paper reports on a professional learning (PL) project conducted over one year at a senior secondary school in New Zealand. Subject teachers volunteered to work with one another and a facilitator to identify the linguistic demands of their subjects, adapt teaching materials, and try out teaching approaches congruent with research evidence about teaching emergent bilingual (EB) learners. This paper explores cases of subject-specific partnerships and how participants’ responses to the PL appeared to impact their existing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The PL sessions were facilitated through audio-recorded Zoom meetings. A thematic analysis was conducted, and the findings were analysed using an adaptation of Davison’s (2006) framework to map how participants engaged with the PL and collaborated with one another on new pedagogies. The study suggests that these teachers accommodated linguistic teaching approaches, but their adaptation to language PCK may have remained at a compliant level.

Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn

Preservice teachers are developing their professional identity while honing their teaching skills. Without transformative learning experience, preservice teachers will teach students the ways they were taught. They can have exclusive and deficit mindsets about students with disabilities (SWDs), many of whom are also English learners. Exclusive and deficit mindsets can lead to two teaching approaches: One is to treat SWDs as inferior to their typical peers. The other is to insist on standardized instruction for the sake of equality. In this chapter, the authors, as the teacher preparation faculty, confronted this challenge by engineering a transformative learning experience to liberate preservice teachers from the deficit mindsets about teaching students with disabilities.

A Practical Exploration of Cybersecurity Faculty Development With Microteaching

The growth and development of cybersecurity jobs and careers have created a need for new skilled faculty that can effectively teach the appropriate content to students at all levels. Often instructors are hired based on their academic credentials and professional experience without the use of assessment and faculty development methods to discover if these instructors can teach effectively or even improve the way they teach. Effective instructors have the ability constructively adjust teaching approaches when students are excelling or struggling based on skillful observation and constant assessment. If a student learns something with great ease, perhaps that approach would be of benefit to others. Part of what helps novices develop expertise here is their explicit attempt to understand how and why something works for students. The implementation and use of microteaching can provide a quality improvement approach to help cybersecurity instructors on all levels improve their ability to teach effectively.

The Integration of Popular Culture in K-12 and Higher Education English Language Curricula

In this chapter, the authors present the approaches and benefits of integrating popular culture into the English language learning classroom. They provide background information on classroom use of technology and popular culture as well as student demographics. This chapter addresses counterarguments against the inclusion of popular culture for literacy development and explains why the advantages outweigh the concerns. Also discussing the teaching approaches that are supported by the incorporation of popular culture, the authors provide reasons and examples of effective curricula, including lessons, materials, and topics. The authors base their argument on research as well as personal experience to claim that the incorporation of popular culture will support linguistically and culturally responsive teaching approaches and will promote student engagement, connections, and motivation in ways that support learning for English language learners in both K-12 and higher education settings.

Inclusive Host Language Teaching

This chapter presents research on the teaching-learning of Portuguese as a host language, based on the exploration of authentic informational and institutional texts targeting migrant and refugee people, and considering that successful host language teaching must correspond to the needs of its target audience. The chapter discusses methods of defining and identifying criteria and features to monitor official texts with regard to inclusiveness and bias. It provides insights on how to select real texts to be used in task-based language teaching approaches for inclusive host language teaching. Departing from a real corpus analysis, the potential and the limitations of existing guidelines to inclusiveness for the assessment of real texts are shown, as well as other still neglected issues. Furthermore, this chapter provides future research directions to an effective and reliable assessment of inclusive texts that can serve as inclusive host language teaching materials through NLP and machine learning approaches.

The effectiveness of mDPBL as a multimedia-based learning approach.

This study is aimed to investigate students’ perceptions towards the mDPBL approach as a multimedia-based learning approach. mDPBL approach is a combination of two different teaching approaches (i.e. DIA and PBL) with multimedia. Two departments were selected in this study (i.e. Informatics Engineering and Information System). The survey was divided into two phases, pre-survey and post-survey. 276 students participated in this study. The quasi-experiment method was used with two different ways teaching strategies (i.e. traditional and mDPBL approach). The study revealed that the majority of students have a positive impact on positive learning outcomes in the mDPBL approach. A significant increase in students' perceptions of the effectiveness of the mDPBL approach is proven by an increase in the average score of students' perceptions and perceived effectiveness of 2.67 points or 8.71%, respectively. Keyword- Multimedia, Traditional approach, mDPBL approach

Seeking the right balance between three teaching approaches: a quasi-experimental study in the context of learning about thermal phenomena

In this study, we investigated which teaching approach may be optimal to facilitate learning about thermal phenomena in primary school. Concretely, we conducted a pretest-posttest quasi-experiment that included 45 eighth-grade students divided into three groups. In the first group (a non-interactive teacher-centered approach), the teacher gave an experiment-based lecture on converting thermal energy into mechanical work. In the second group (a teacher-centered interactive approach), the teacher gave the same experiments-based lecture, but interacted much more with the students and encouraged them to think about the demonstrations. Finally, in the third group, the student-centered interactive approach was applied. The results of the ANCOVA showed that the three teaching approaches were equally effective in developing students’ understanding of thermal phenomena. However, closer analyses showed that students who learned from the teacher-centered interactive approach significantly outperformed their peers when it came to understanding basic thermal concepts approach, students worked in small groups to conduct the same experiments and “discover” the same relationships that the teacher had introduced in the previous one.

Representations and Realization of Written Planning of PSE Teachers in Tunisia

Planning is an act of anticipation carried out by the teacher during the pre-active phase to prioritize the pedagogical and didactic teaching approaches. On the other hand, in the teaching field, the teaching-learning situation is also complex to be identified by simple planning. In this study, we seek to explain the influence of gender and the seniority of physical education and sports (PSE) teachers on representations of written lesson planning and its management in the field. We collaborated with 20 PSE teachers and 10 trainee students in initial training in secondary schools. We filmed practical sessions and we carried out two types of interviews with the participants and we analyzed the content of the written plans of the participants in our experiment. Our results show that the professional seniority and the gender of the PSE teacher do not modulate the representations that are made of the written planning of the lesson. However, in practice, the teacher's representations of written planning are not always consistent with their realization on the ground. The difference between teachers' representations of the PSE teacher's written planning and their teaching practices is dependent on the professional seniority and gender of the acting person. The actions of the actor are shaped by the aspects inherent in the learning situation, the actions of the teacher are therefore contextualized.