The Role and Functions of Public Examinations

For a brief time in the mid‐1970s Desmond Nuttall was Secretary to a Certificate in Secondary Education (CSE) Examining Board. Desmond Nuttall was already well known for his work with the National Foundation for Educational Research and his appointment caused quite a stir both among those who expected him to be a catalyst for change in the public examination system and those who thought his talents would be lost in a sea of bureaucracy. His sojourn at the Middlesex Board was to be brief, too brief to prove right either the expectations or the cynics. Within 2 years of his appointment, the Middlesex Board had been absorbed into the London Regional Examinations Board and Desmond Nuttall entered the world of academia from where he continued to play a very significant role in examination developments.     

Reproduction: the role of cultural factors and educational mediators

To understand the processes of reproduction in education one must not only take account of the resistances of subordinated groups, but also of the counter‐resistance which develops in response to these. Proponents of resistance theory have tended to ignore the responses of powerful groups to emerging resistances. Two major reasons are suggested for this, one being the failure of reproduction theorists to take cognisance of unique cultural and political contexts within which reproduction takes place, and the other being the lack of attention given to educational mediators. Taking the case of Irish second‐level education, it is shown how unique cultural, historical and political forces contribute to the development of counter‐resistance. In particular, it is suggested that the post‐colonial status of the country is central to understanding the reproduction processes within it. The paper also highlights the inadequacy of defining the parameters of the reproduction debate in terms of an interplay of interests between social classes and the State alone. While the State and social classes are key actors in the educational site, so are educational mediators, viz. those who manage and administer educational services on a day‐to‐day basis. It is proposed that educational mediators (whose character varies from one society to another) are often powerful agents of counter‐resistance.     

Extraordinary Animals and Expository Writing: Zoo in the Classroom

A zoo outreach program led to placing animals in classrooms where those animals became foci for numerous learning activities such as writing, observing, and care. Systematic debriefings suggested uniqueness to learning outcomes connected to zoo animals. Subsequent analysis of student writing indicated that students responded to situational interest by recording more observations, made use of more science facts, and used more science vocabulary when writing about unique animals (albino hedgehog, legless lizard) than ‘ordinary’ animals (rabbit, dove). The results are interpreted in terms of motivation, creating situational interest, and the familiarity of the schema available to the students. Policy implications are discussed.     

Education for literacy

This paper begins by tracing the development of critical scholarship in the sociology of education, focusing on its attempts to explain academic failure for low-income youth. Next, it examines contemporary theoretical work in “critical” literacy—work that appears to have benefited from this sociological scholarship. Third, a brief account is offered of three historical instances of when critical literacy was practiced. Finally, the author concludes by arguing that the needs of culturally diverse and low-income students will be met to the extent that educators and students actively challenge the societal power structure within which they live.     

Working toward transformational leadership in higher education

Before colleges and universities can develop leaders, they must develop a coherent vision of what leadership is. A reflection on James MacGregor Burns's concepts of transformational leadership suggests where that discussion might begin.     

A Tree-Based Approach to Proficiency Scaling and Diagnostic Assessment

A new procedure for generating instructionally relevant diagnostic feedback is proposed. The approach involves first constructing a strong model of student proficiency and then testing whether individual students' observed item response vectors are consistent with that model. Diagnoses are specified in terms of the combinations of skills needed to score at increasingly higher levels on a test's reported score scale. The approach is applied to the problem of developing diagnostic feedback for the SAT I Verbal Reasoning test. Using a variation of Wright's (1977) person-fit statistic, it is shown that the estimated proficiency mode accounts for 91% of the "explainable" variation in students' observed item response vectors.