High-stakes external assessment for practical courses is fraught with problems impacting on the manageability, validity and reliability of scoring. Alternative approaches to assessment using digital technologies have the potential to address these problems. This paper describes a study that investigated the use of these technologies to create and…

This study documents to what extent writing on a blog in a networked learning environment could influence the affective variables of elementary-school students' writing. The framework is grounded more specifically in theory of self-determination (Deci & Ryan, 1985), relationship to writing (Chartrand & Prince, 2009) and the…

The purpose of this research study was to investigate if and how digital technologies could be used to support a triad-approach for student assessment in higher education. This triad-approach consisted of self-reflection, peer feedback, and instructor assessment practices in a pre-service teacher education course at a Canadian university. Through…

The purpose of this study is to test the validity and reliability of three collaboration indices ("quantity", "equality", "and shareness") proposed by Jahng et al. (2010). The present study repeated the quantitative assessment of Jahng et al., and performed a further qualitative analysis to identify possible factors that might be associated with…

Undergraduates use a wide range of information resources for academic and nonacademic purposes, including web sites that range from credible, peer reviewed, online journal sites, to biased and inaccurate promotional web sites. Students are taught basic critical appraisal skills, but do they apply these skills to make decisions about information in…

A growing literature suggests that there is a disjuncture between the instructional practices of the education system and the student body it is expected to serve, particularly with respect to the roles of digital technologies. Based on surveys and focus group interviews of first-year students at a primarily undergraduate Canadian university and…

Planning, conducting, and reporting leading-edge research requires professionals who are capable of highly skilled reading. This study reports the development of an empirically informed computer-based learning environment designed to foster the acquisition of reading comprehension strategies that mediate expertise in the social sciences. Empirical…

This study seeks to design and facilitate active reading among secondary school students with an online annotation tool--Diigo. Two classes of different academic performance levels were recruited to examine their annotation behavior and perceptions of Diigo. We wanted to determine whether the two classes differed in how they used Diigo; how they…

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, is the preferred choice among resources used by college students to meet their research needs. However, Wikipedia has been criticized for its low information quality, lack of accountability, inconsistency, and vulnerability to vandalism. Despite the warnings and concerns voiced by academia, online learning…

Recent inquiry has identified the establishment of positive self-efficacy beliefs as an important component in the overall process of successfully preparing new teachers for the classroom. Similarly, in-service teachers who reported high levels of efficacy for teaching confirmed feeling confident in their ability to design and implement enriching…