Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia – författare

This book examines important advances and offers a realistic image of the state of the art in student learning outcomes assessment in higher education—a field close to the core of nearly every higher education institution. Producing sound information on what students know and can do is critical to higher education practitioners and future social prosperity. Spanning international, national and institutional developments, the book presents methodological and empirical insights, highlights research challenges, and showcases the enormous progress made in recent years.

The book will be of interest to researchers in education assessment and neighbouring fields, and stakeholders like institutional leaders, teachers and graduate employers looking for better insight on returns, governments searching for information to assist with funding and regulation, and members of the public wanting more clarity about outcomes and public investment. This book was originally published as a special issue of Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.

This book examines important advances and offers a realistic image of the state of the art in student learning outcomes assessment in higher education—a field close to the core of nearly every higher education institution. Producing sound information on what students know and can do is critical to higher education practitioners and future social prosperity. Spanning international, national and institutional developments, the book presents methodological and empirical insights, highlights research challenges, and showcases the enormous progress made in recent years.

The book will be of interest to researchers in education assessment and neighbouring fields, and stakeholders like institutional leaders, teachers and graduate employers looking for better insight on returns, governments searching for information to assist with funding and regulation, and members of the public wanting more clarity about outcomes and public investment. This book was originally published as a special issue of Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.

Research on students’ media use outside of education is just slowly taking off. Influences of information and communication technologies (ICT) on human information processing are widely assumed and particularly effects of dis- and misinformation are a current threat to democracies. Today, higher education competes with a very diverse (online) media landscape and domain-specific content from sources of varying quality, ranging from high-quality videographed lectures by top-level university lecturers, popular-scientific video talks, collaborative wikis, anonymous forum comments or blog posts to YouTube remixes of discipline factoids and unverified twitter feeds. Self-organizing learners need more knowledge, skills, and awareness on how to critically evaluate quality and select trustworthy sources, how to process information, and what cognitive, affective, attitudinal, behavioral, and neurological effects it can have on them in the long term. The PLATO program takes on the ambitious goal of uniting strands of research from various disciplines to address these questions through fundamental analyses of human information processing when learning with the Internet. This innovative interdisciplinary approach includes elements of ICT innovations and risks, learning analytics and large-scale computational modelling aimed to provide us with a better understanding of how to effectively and autonomously acquire reliable knowledge in the Information Age, how to design ICTs, and shape social and human-machine interactions for successful learning. This volume will be of interest to researchers in the fields of educational sciences, educational measurement and applied branches of the involved disciplines, including linguistics, mathematics, media studies, sociology of knowledge, philosophy of mind, business, ethics, and educational technology. 

This book addresses the topic of online information for everyday personal and professional use by students, graduates, and young professionals. It focuses on the development of the job-related use of online information by young professionals in their practical phases of education (traineeship/practical year) in the domains of law, teaching, and medicine. The research conducted in this context investigates the general and domain-specific use of online resources in educational contexts and examines the effectiveness of an innovative digital training approach in enhancing skills required for the competent use of online information. For this purpose, the presented research uses a yet unprecedented approach of data triangulation, in which self-rated data, digitally and in vivo assessed response process data and expert ratings are integrated into a theoretically founded assessment framework and are examined from various interdisciplinary perspectives with different analysis methods.Overall, this work addresses key research questions related to the use of online information in practical tasks as well as to the impact of digital training. It provides in-depth multidisciplinary analyses of multimodal processes and performance data, allowing implications equally relevant for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in the field of education. 

This book offers a comprehensive overview of current, innovative approaches to assessing generic and domain-specific learning outcomes in higher education at both national and international levels. It discusses the most significant initiatives over the past decade to develop objective, valid, and reliable assessment tools and presents state-of-the-art procedures to adapt and validate them for use in other countries. The authors highlight key conceptual and methodological challenges connected with intra-national and cross-national assessment of learning outcomes in higher education; introduce novel approaches to improving assessment, evaluation, testing, and measurement practices; and offer exemplary implementation frameworks. Further, they examine the results of and lessons learned from various recent, world-renowned research programs and feasibility studies, and present results from their own studies to provide new insights into how to draw valid conclusions about learning outcomesachieved in various contexts. 

Dieses systematische Review gibt einen Überblick über nationale und internationale Assessmentpraxis und bietet eine umfassende und exklusive Informationsgrundlage. Im Auftrag des BMBF haben die AutorInnen eine Synopse zum aktuellen Stand der nationalen und internationalen Forschung zur Erfassung von Kompetenzen bzw. Lernergebnissen (learning outcomes) von Studierenden und Hochschulabsolventen in Zusammenarbeit mit internationalen KooperationspartnerInnen erstellt. Der Band gibt einen umfassenden Überblick über weltweit einschlägige Arbeiten aus der letzten Dekade sowie über aktuelle Entwicklungen in diesem Forschungsfeld. Zugleich enthält die Überblicksarbeit eine Forschungsbefundintegration mit Blick auf die Validität der referierten Studien und sowie auf die aktuellen Forschungspraktiken und die daraus resultierenden Forschungsdesiderate.

This publication focuses on competency orientation in higher education, illustrating international assessment practices for measuring student learning outcomes. For Germany, the Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education (KoKoHs) research program contributes exemplary approaches, and solutions to current challenges in higher education. KoKoHs models and tests can be used for entrance examination, formative and summative assessment of domain-specific and generic competencies and as a basis for developing new teaching-and-learning tools and formats promoting these competencies.

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.