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Community colleges have embraced distance education as a means to provide increased flexibility and access to their large numbers of non-traditional students. Retention rates and student achievement measures alone may not reflect all of the benefits and opportunities that online learning, blended or hybrid learning, and technology enhanced learning may afford these students. Online learning resources should be viewed as a tremendous value added benefit for community college students, not only for the content conveyed, but also for fostering the digital readiness, cultivating the professional personas, and encouraging the self-directed learning needed to succeed in the digitally-driven workplace.

Recent developments in technology allow instructors to design meaningful customized homework assignments that enhance student performance, while reducing the time and resources required for grading and feedback. In particular, online assignments allow the instructor to utilize various setting options including auto-grading, number of attempts, and timing of access to answer keys that result in assignments that uniquely fit student needs. This study investigates the impact of using such options by comparing single submitted and multiple submitted online assignments in an introductory economics course at a community college. Using the grades on multiple-choice homework assignments, quizzes, and a final exam as the performance measures, the authors tested hypotheses concerning the performance improvement of students at Kingsborough Community College who were allowed to revise and resubmit homework. Results indicate that (a) additional submissions yielded better results, even when students were not told which questions were incorrect on prior attempts; (b) single submitted attempts were not worse off than multiple submitted attempts; and (c) student perception of multiple submission opportunities was extremely positive. The data suggest that resubmitting assignments may serve both as a powerful learning tool to replace or supplement traditional study tools and as a catalyst for student growth mindset cultivation.

As part of standards-based reforms, there is increasing emphasis on ensuring that students with moderate intellectual disabilities (ID), including students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), learn to read. There is also converging evidence that explicit teaching of letter sounds, phonics, and sight words is effective for this population, but that students' responsiveness varies. A critical part of individualizing reading instruction for students with disabilities is the reliable assessment of progress and mastery of reading skills. However, assessment of many students with ID and students with ASD is challenging because of attention, behavioral, and communication issues related to testing situation; therefore, obtaining consistent results often proves to be a difficult task. We hypothesized that alternate assessment presentation formats, as a testing accommodation, would improve the reliability, validity, and consistency of assessment performance. In this study, three different presentation formats--word lists, flash cards, and PowerPoint presentation--were used when administering proximal, curriculum-based reading assessments to determine whether a particular format increased student engagement, reduced the need for prompts, and increased accuracy of identifying known items on the test. While statistical analyses did not support the hypothesis of a format by student effect, visual analysis of the data did suggest that the number of prompts required varied by student as a function of assessment format. Most noteworthy, assessment reliability, estimated with generalizability theory, indicated that reliability increased as a function of format by student. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED586421.]

It's a Wednesday night at the beginning of the fall term at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a lecture hall in the biology building is crowded with 113 [...]

Everybody gets a little something from the new 400-page transportation act. The best part is that states decide what needs to be done. States are winners,' says Colorado Senator Richard [...]

Geographers from 82 countries convened on 9 to 14 August in Washington, D.C. for the 27th International Geographical Congress. The 2700 participants - double the attendance of the previous congress, [...]

Background information for this article was provided by Vis Viswanathan (rviswana@epri.com), Energy Conversion Division, and David Gandy (davgandy@ epri.com) and Shane Findlan (sfindlan@epri.com), Repair and Replacement Applications Center. Welding Research [...]