Novick Meets Bayes: Improving the Assessment of Individual Students in Educational Practice and Research by Capitalizing on Assessors' Prior Beliefs.

The assessment of individual students is not only crucial in the school setting but also at the core of educational research. Although classical test theory focuses on maximizing insights from student responses, the Bayesian perspective incorporates the assessor's prior belief, thereby enriching assessment with knowledge gained from previous interactions with the student or with similar students. We propose and illustrate a formal Bayesian approach that not only allows to form a stronger belief about a student's competency but also offers a more accurate assessment than classical test theory.

Salient syllabi: Examining design characteristics of science online courses in higher education.

The importance of online learning in higher education settings is growing, not only in wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, metrics to evaluate and increase the quality of online instruction are crucial for improving student learning. Whereas instructional quality is traditionally evaluated with course observations or student evaluations, course syllabi offer a novel approach to predict course quality even prior to the first day of classes.