Unintended Consequences of External Testing in Elementary Schools

What is the impact of an external testing program on what teachers teach and the way they teach it? How does an external testing program affect a school's organization? Are these effects contrary to the general goal of improving schools?     

A Discussion of Future Time Perspective

A growing area of research in educational psychology is future time perspective and its relationship to desired educational outcomes. This article discusses and critiques five reviews of current research on future time perspective. Key questions addressed are when do individuals begin to articulate a future, how far into the future does this articulation extend, what is the nature of the future that individuals articulate for themselves, what is the relationship between future time perspective and other important psychological processes such as motivation and self-regulation, what is the relationship of future time perspective to gender, culture, and socioeconomic status, and how does future time perspective change over time as individuals grow and develop intellectually and socially? These key questions are fundamental to understanding the relevance and usefulness of future time perspective for interpreting and explaining variations in educational achievement across diverse group of learners internationally.     

Interventions in teaching first-year law: feeding forward to improve learning outcomes

Aligned assessment is a cornerstone of higher education curriculum design. Yet, it does not address the problem of how students learn how they should proceed when faced with a new assessment task. That teaching task is often left to the role of ‘feedback’. This article examines changes to a first year law unit, introduced following negative student feedback about an assessment task. The feedback made apparent a lack of alignment between staff and student expectations as to what was being assessed and how it was being assessed. The article considers formative assessment through a feed-forward model, and relates this to the design and process of the intervention. The teaching method of the feed-forward model is detailed. The analysis of the results shows that a number of key misperceptions were held by students as to the points of difficulty in the assignment. A significant number of students also found it extremely difficult to judge the quality of past assignments against a marking guide. This direct feeding forward allowed some of the students’ tacit and false assumptions to emerge and be addressed, before they began their first major assessment, resulting in improved pass rates for the assessment.     

Understanding Television Audiences

This article explores some of the methods currently used for studying television audiences and suggests some new possibilities for teaching about them. These include analysis of ‘hard’ data about television audiences and more subjective insights gained from the experience of being part of an audience. It will offer a framework of questions which ought constantly to be asked about television audiences. For example: what is a television audience? What pleasures do television audiences derive from programmes? How are television audiences composed? How are they addressed? How is television audience research carried out? How do television audiences respond to programmes? And finally, what are the implications of an increased understanding of television audiences for broadcasters and educational television producers?.     

Design and use of hypermedia systems

Hypermedia makes it possible for learners to explore interactive multimedia-based instructional systems. To realize the potential of hypermedia to increase student involvement and learning, important design and use issues will have to be addressed. For example, how can we ensure that learners will be able to effectively regulate their own learning as they exercise the control inherent in hypermedia-based systems? How can motivation be stimulated and maintained, so that individuals will go beyond superficial browsing to really explore and learn? A theoretical and research-based foundation is summarized here which suggests answers to these questions, answers that revolve around learner control, self-regulated learning, and continuing motivation. Recommendations are offered for the effective design of hypermedia systems and the appropriate preparation of learners who will use them.     

A developmental perspective on day care

Issues surrounding early day care become clarified when brought within a developmental perspective. Day care is examined in the context of normal developmental issues. A series of questions emerges. How does development commonly unfold in the context of nondisrupted parental care? How is development organized; what are major sequences of development and, especially, how does one phase build upon and set the stage for others? What is required of social partners to promote optimal development? How does this change with age? In brief, what do infants need from the social environment, and how do they typically get it in the context of the family? One then asks questions concerning day care. For example, what kinds of arrangements are and are not generally compatible with infant needs and under what circumstances? A developmental perspective also provides a framework for organizing findings from day care research and even suggests strategies for intervention research. While not fully explicit, Belsky's review (in this issue) provides a valuable service by introducing developmental concepts to the day care discussion. In the present paper this viewpoint is elaborated.     

Smarter,Better, Faster,Cheaper

This article examines and critiques the leadership capacity of department leaders in a high school and attempts to gain a deeper understanding of how department leaders perceive their role as teacher leaders, making a distinction between what an individual department leader does in his or her position and teacher leadership as a form of continuous learning and innovation through collaboration. How do department leaders practice leadership to improve student learning? The author provides an investigation and analysis of the current level of leadership capacity exhibited by department leaders in a high school. A close look at the role and function of department leaders in this high school reveals an absence of the teacher leadership necessary to promote the broad-based leadership capacity that results in improved student achievement.     

高校艺术设计专业教学改革探讨

艺术设计教学怎样适应新的经济时代?培养什么样的艺术设计专业人才?这些是目前许多院校正在探讨与研究的课题和加快调整教学大纲的重点工作之一。结合艺术设计教学专业特点、课程设置、艺术与技术等方面进行分析,并结合教学实践,提出关于加强和改善艺术设计基础教育的一些建议。     

Overcoming Terra Nullius: Aboriginal perspectives in schools as a site of philosophical struggle

What an honor to have political and educational theorists of such caliber take up ideas from my work! What a daunting task to try to respond! My remarks will touch on the following questions: What are some key issues of distributive justice in education today? Why does defining justice in terms of oppression and domination imply that issues of justice cannot be reduced to distribution? How does normalization constitute a major process enacting oppression, and what does this imply for education? What does it mean to include marginalized groups in economic opportunity and democratic process, and how can educational institutions foster such inclusion? Why do issues of religion and other forms of cultural expression belong to a distinct category of justice? Are values of freedom of expression and tolerance in tension with the project of democratic inclusion? How shall we consider transnational issues of educational justice?     

Linguistic performance and minority groups

Abstract

Beginning with linguistic performance as currently defined, this article systematically pursues its implications to and through the notion of “successful communication.” The four divisions of the article attempt explorations of the following questions: What does linguistic performance do? What place does it have in a theory of communication? What are the practical implications of such a theory in connection with actual language use? How is all this relevant to problems of what we take to be “linguistically underprivileged” (minority) groups? The article concludes that the concept of linguistic performance, “scientifically” based, is not significant in successful communication, which is an art.     

Education in the Context of Structural Injustice: A symposium response

What an honor to have political and educational theorists of such caliber take up ideas from my work! What a daunting task to try to respond! My remarks will touch on the following questions: What are some key issues of distributive justice in education today? Why does defining justice in terms of oppression and domination imply that issues of justice cannot be reduced to distribution? How does normalization constitute a major process enacting oppression, and what does this imply for education? What does it mean to include marginalized groups in economic opportunity and democratic process, and how can educational institutions foster such inclusion? Why do issues of religion and other forms of cultural expression belong to a distinct category of justice? Are values of freedom of expression and tolerance in tension with the project of democratic inclusion? How shall we consider transnational issues of educational justice?     

On Being (and Not Being) Mrs Curley’s Wife

How do students draw on texts read in class to explore and make sense of the world? How does role-play open up the possibilities of utilising these resources, remaking them for their own purposes? How does play, as Vygotsky suggests, enable students to achieve more? And how does being in role change the character of social relations in the classroom, enabling students to shed new light on their lives, their experiences. This essay focuses close attention on two role-plays, both involving the same pair of 11th-grade students from a school in Ramallah. The role-plays arose out of, and enabled the students to explore, literary texts that they had been studying in class: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The article argues that what the students accomplished in this work is complex and needs to be understood in context. Through this account, the essay seeks to challenge those (currently fashionable) models of pedagogy that are insufficiently attentive to the histories, identities and interests of particular learners.     

Book Reviews

What does it mean for a mentoring program to succeed? Most evaluations focus on participants' perceptions of success. Few studies employ an independent measure of the intended outcomes of the program, and fewer still examine both participant satisfaction and achievement. This article presents an example of how comparing data on perceived and achieved success can foster new insights into the trade‐offs inherent in program design and improvement. Based on an analysis of survey and interview data from an online mentoring program in which 17 history experts supported 108 high school students in historical research, it was found that mentees' satisfaction did not correlate with their achievement of intended program outcomes. Further analysis illuminated design trade‐offs between the aspects of the online mentoring program that supported perceived success and those that supported intended outcomes. The authors argue that examining such trade‐offs in other mentoring programs may facilitate their improvement over time.     

Achieving Equity and Quality in Japanese Elementary Schools: Balancing the Roles of State,Teachers, and Students

The aim of this paper is to explore perspectives on equity, quality, motivation, and resilience by focusing in depth on the perspectives of educators in one small, semi-rural school in Japan. The paper is intended to provide rich, in-depth data and discussion as a way of providing insights from different perspectives into findings from large-scale international assessments. The two key questions addressed in the paper are, (1) How are equity and quality achieved and maintained in Japanese elementary schools? and (2) How are student motivation and resilience perceived and fostered in Japanese elementary schools? These questions are addressed through analysis of key official documents related to the questions, together with analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with education professionals working in an elementary school. The paper will contribute to understanding the perspectives of teachers in a particular school context in Japan on the roles of state, teachers, and children themselves in the task of achieving and maintaining equity and quality in a high performing education system.     

Mixing languages for science learning and participation: an examination of Korean-English bilingual learners in an after-school science-learning programme

Bilingual and multilingual speakers mix two or more languages for communication, gaining information and sense-making in varieties of contexts. How do bilinguals mix languages and what does the mixing afford for their learning and participation? This study examines these questions, focusing on Korean-English bilingual youths in a community-based after-school science programme in the United States. A close analysis of videorecordings of the programme sessions demonstrates the ways in which bilinguals negotiate their participant positions and negotiate meanings in their study of science topics. The findings reveal that bilinguals utilise their Korean proficiency to craft diverse ways of participation and that linguistic and scientific sense-making co-occur and support each other. Based on these findings, I offer implications as to how science teachers should perceive students’ mixing of multiple languages and how they can support bilinguals’ learning of science content and English. Additionally, I suggest a future research direction that can help teachers to prepare for linguistically diverse science-learning and -teaching contexts.     

Religious Identity and Cultural Refashioning: Educational Constraints for Migrant Muslim Hui University Students in China

This study discusses the educational constraints facing Muslim Hui students and the measures that should be pondered by the Chinese government to address these constraints. Three key research questions are addressed: (1) How does the mainstream Han, Confucian, or the state ideology interact with Hui students’ culture? (2) In what ways do ethnic boundaries and educational uniformity affect the engagement of ethnic minorities in education as well as the larger society? (3) What are the major educational constraints faced by Hui migrant students of Muslim background? Through the mixed-methods research design, I find that the yearning of Muslim Hui Chinese students to achieve educational success and social mobility is limited by social, cultural, and educational factors that regard them as the “other”; they still face issues of marginalization—educationally, socially, and culturally—that delay them from achieving higher educational success.     

On Subject Variations in Achievement Motivations: A Study in Business Subjects

Student achievement motivations are crucial in learning in two ways: as a determinant and an aim of learning. In this study, we focus on two related questions with regard to achievement motivations: to what extent are they subject-specific, and to what extent are they malleable? Answers to both questions are especially important when aiming to influence motivations. Malleability of motivation is studied by designing structural equation models that explain achievement motivation out of the most stable student characteristics one can think of: gender, and personality traits. Subject matter variability is studied by estimating these models for five main subject areas in a business program. The motivation construct we use is based on the expectancy-value model and distinguishes four different facets: cognitive competence, difficulty, task-value and affect. We find evidence for strong subject-specificity and considerable non-malleability of achievement motivation; part of that last aspect is a remarkably constant over-confidence gender gap present in the data of the calibration of competency beliefs and performance in all subject areas.     

High School Student Participation in Scientific Research Apprenticeships: Variation in and Relationships Among Student Experiences and Outcomes

Research apprenticeships for secondary students provide authentic contexts for learning science in which students engage in scientific investigations with practicing scientists in working laboratory groups. Student experiences in these research apprenticeships vary depending on the individual nature of the laboratory in which students have been placed. This study explores potential relationships among student experiences in apprenticeship contexts and desired student outcomes (e.g. science content knowledge, understandings of nature of science, and aspirations for science oriented career plans). The following two research questions guided the study: How do participant experiences in and outcomes resulting from an authentic research program for high school students vary? How does variation in participant experiences in an authentic research program relate to participant outcomes? Primary data sources were student and mentor interviews in addition to student generated concept maps. Results indicated that the greatest variance in student experiences existed in the categories of collaboration, epistemic involvement, and understandings of the significance of research results. The greatest variation in desired student outcomes was observed in student understandings of nature of science and in students’ future science plans. Results suggested that collaboration and interest in the project were experience aspects most likely to be related to desired outcomes. Implications for the design of research apprenticeships for secondary students are discussed.     

Helping Children to Develop as Writers: Supporting,Showing, Responding

How can we help children develop as writers once they have begun to master the complexities of the writing system and begun to understand how they can compose their own texts? Colin Peacock proposes some answers to these questions on the basis of a small-scale research project in one school. Key issues which emerged were the need to develop motivation, to give children opportunities to write, to respond to their difficulties and to show them what counted as success.     

Metacognition,comprehension monitoring,and the adult reader

This article provides an overview and synthesis of the current literature on metacognition and comprehension monitoring among adult readers. It is organized around three major research questions: (1) How do adults conceptualize their own comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities? (2) How effectively do adults evaluate and regulate their ongoing efforts to understand? (3) How successfully do adults assess the final products of their comprehension efforts? Cutting across these broad issues are questions concerning metacognitive differences as a function of reading ability, academic success, domain expertise, developmental level, and task variables. The research reveals that adults' conceptions of how they comprehend and how they monitor their comprehension are quite variable. In general, those who have more expertise, who are better readers, and who are more successful students seem to have greater awareness and control of their own cognitive activities while reading. The research also reveals that adults evaluate and regulate their ongoing efforts to understand, although there is considerable room for improvement in these skills. Finally, the research shows that adults are remarkably unsuccessful at assessing how well they have comprehended a text and whether or not they are ready to take a test on the material. The article closes with a discussion of recent intervention efforts aimed at enhancing the metacognitive skills of adult readers.