Assessment with children who experience difficulty in mathematics

In recent years, there has been growing awareness of the impact that difficulties in mathematics can have on the life chances of children and young people. Consequently, a range of targeted interventions has been developed to support learners. However, when difficulties persist in spite of such intervention, next steps are not always clear. This article describes how assessment can be used in such cases, to build a better understanding of a child's situation and plan appropriate intervention. Two complimentary approaches to assessment are outlined: curriculum‐based assessment, which considers which parts of the maths curriculum a learner finds difficult and diagnostic assessment which asks why this might be so. Assessment tools and links between assessment and intervention are also discussed.     

ICT and pupil assessment

The role of pupil assessment in ICT is often seen by teachers as problematic. This article will explore the relationship of the two and will argue that research in assessment has not kept up with the opportunities offered by ICT. Conversely, some of the new developments in ‘assessment for learning’ have not yet found their way into ICT. The article will explore the various roles and relationships that ICT has in assessment, for example, the assessment of ICT skills, the assessment of curriculum learning when work is done with the aid of ICT, assessment within computer-assisted learning, and ICT as a tool in supporting the assessment process in general. It will also look at ways forward, including ‘assessment for learning’ (with its concern for questioning, feedback, sharing assessment criteria and self-assessment/peer assessment), and new outcomes that could be in­corporated into ICT.     

Alternative perspectives on learning outcomes: challenges for assessment

In discussing the relationship between curriculum and assessment it is commonly argued that assessment should be aligned to curriculum or, alternatively, that they should be congruent with each other. This article explores that relationship in five educational contexts in the UK and in Europe, ranging across school education, workplace learning, vocational education and higher education. Four main themes are highlighted: construct definition, progression, assessment procedures, and system-level accountability. What emerges from the five case studies under review is a multi-layered process of knowledge being constructed in diverse ways at different levels in each context. The article concludes that, rather than thinking in terms of either alignment or congruence, these relationships are better understood in terms of non-linear systems embracing curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.     

跨学科整合视角下国内外STEM课程质量比较与优化

STEM教育的不断发展,催生了对跨学科整合型课程的迫切需求。然而当前我国的STEM课程建设更多注重形式规范,总体质量堪忧,因此从跨学科整合视角来开发优质的STEM课程以指导教学迫在眉睫。比较与借鉴是提质增效解决问题的重要途径。为提升我国STEM课程建设质量,借鉴权威的STEM课程整合评价工具,从课程背景、工程设计挑战、科学内容整合、数学内容整合、教学策略、团队合作、交流、评估、组织等9个维度对58个国内外STEM优秀课程案例进行定性与定量对比分析后发现,我国的STEM课程案例在课程背景、科学内容整合、教学策略和评估四个方面较国外STEM课程存在明显不足。这在一定程度上制约了我国STEM课程建设和教学质量提升。未来我国STEM课程建设应从以下四个方面加强:一是提升对社会问题的响应度,培养学生的社会责任感;二是鼓励有效失败,营造真实的科学体验;三是丰富以学生为中心的策略,放大学生的思维过程;四是注重非正式评价,促进学生综合能力的发展。     

Seeing the ‘new’ in light of the ‘old’: evolving interpretations of a new national English curriculum

This 2‐year longitudinal study explores the process by which three populations of practitioners (mentors, co‐ordinators, and teachers) interpreted a national curriculum involving a change in policies for teaching English as a foreign language. The analysis revealed that the process of managing the changes brought about by the new curriculum yielded ‘dialogues of practice’ between ‘old’ and ‘new’. These dialogues engaged mentors, co‐ordinators, and teachers alike in mediating between new understandings and old ones. It addresses the ways in which they made sense of the terminology of the new curriculum in light of the old curriculum, negotiated between new pedagogical content knowledge and ingrained conceptions of subject‐matter teaching, adapted old understandings of testing to new conceptions of performance‐assessment processes, and mediated between their need to preserve a sense of professional competence while feeling destabilized as ‘novices’ as they confronted innovative curricular practices. Participants' strategic need to ‘survive’ the changes resulted in the development of networks to support professional exchange and assist teachers in managing their way through the uncertainty of curricular change.     

Seeing double: design and enactments of a lesson on perspective-taking

ABSTRACT

This narrative inquiry of a lesson intended to develop perspective-taking links our understanding of teachers as curriculum makers with a sociomaterial attunement to the ways that materials, forms, and time are also actors in producing curriculum. We offer a close reading of three classroom enactments of the same lesson and discuss ways that these instances of curriculum-making expanded or diminished opportunities for elementary pupils to communicate shifts in perspective through personal narrative writing. We find temporal, spatial, and material resources, including schedules, technologies, and forms of assessment, to play key roles in shaping relations in curriculum making.     

教育评价变革背景下语文学科核心素养测评框架研究

建构语文学科核心素养的测评框架是落实高中语文课程变革理念的内在要求。课程观念变革之际,核心素养评价发展趋势为:评价目的由评价学习结果转向促进学习过程,强调测评框架的可解释性;评价内容由知识本位走向关注对学科本质的深度理解;评价工具的设计强调测试任务的综合性与实践性。据此,本研究建构以情境为依托,以语言实践活动为载体,以实践活动中表征出的关键认知能力为核心的测评框架。通过对测试数据的分析发现,构建的语文学科核心素养测评框架结构合理并具有可操作性,能够为语文学科核心素养的课程评价提供一定参考。     

Tutors’ assessment practices and students’ situated learning in higher education: chalk and cheese

This article uses situated learning theory to consider current tutor assessment and feedback practices in relation to learning practices employed by students outside the overt curriculum. The case is made that an emphasis on constructive alignment and explicitly articulating assessment requirements within curricula may be misplaced. Outside of the overt curriculum students appear to be interdependent learners, participating in communities of practice and learning networks, where sense-making occurs through negotiation and there is identity development. Such negotiation may translate curriculum requirements articulated by tutors into unexpected meanings. Hence, tutors’ efforts might be better placed on developing students’ ability to self-assess and to effectively evaluate and negotiate information, rather than primarily on their own delivery of the curriculum content and feedback. Tutors cannot be fully effective if they fail to consider students’ learning outside the overt curriculum, and ways to facilitate such learning processes are suggested together with future research directions.     

Formative assessment: translating high-level curriculum principles into classroom practice

The curriculum is the totality of experiences which are planned for young learners through their education, wherever they are being educated. It determines the ethos of the school as a learning community, curriculum subjects and areas, interdisciplinary learning, and opportunities to attain personal and learning goals. An effective curriculum, which meets the needs of the twenty-first century learner improves numeracy and literacy, promotes health and well-being, and supports the social and technical skills required for learning, life and work (lifelong learning). Relatively recent developments in the policy frameworks of numerous nations have seen the implementation of an interactive style of teaching and learning called formative assessment. Formative classroom assessment is a potentially powerful instructional process because the practice of sharing assessment information that supports learning is embedded into the instructional process by design. This article uses a range of sources, including policy and framework documentation relating to the development and implementation of a curriculum which drives interactive assessment practices designed to make evidence of learning visible as assessment data with potentially lifelong effects. The purpose of this article is to delineate a ‘formative curriculum’ designed to drive classroom practices that create responsible citizens, confident individuals, effective contributors, and successful learners.     

Curriculum in early childhood education: critical questions about content,coherence, and control

A continuing struggle over curriculum in early childhood education is evident in contemporary research and debate at national and international levels. This reflects the dominant influence of developmental psychology in international discourses, and in policy frameworks that determine approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Focusing on early childhood education, we argue that this struggle generates critical questions about three significant themes within curriculum theory: content, coherence, and control. We outline two positions from which these themes can be understood: Developmental and Educational Psychology and contemporary policy frameworks. We argue that within and between these positions, curriculum content, coherence, and control are viewed in different and sometimes oppositional ways. Following this analysis, we propose that a focus on ‘working theories’ as a third position offers possibilities for addressing some of these continuing struggles, by exploring different implications for how content, coherence, and control might be understood. We conclude that asking critical questions of curriculum in early childhood education is a necessary endeavour to develop alternative theoretical frameworks for understanding the ways in which curriculum can be considered alongside pedagogy, assessment, play, and learning.     

新课程视野下的发展性学生评价观

评价方式的改革是影响新课程发展的关键环节，它直接关系到新课程改革能否顺利实施。然而，传统的学生评价中过于重视甄别与选拔功能、过分强调学科知识、过分注重他人评价等弊端，已成为制约新课程实施的瓶颈，必须加以改革。发展性学生评价观主张评价应面向全体学生，关注学生的全面发展，提倡评价主体的多元性、评价标准的多元化、评价方法的多样性，必将对新课程的实施和发展起着推动作用。     

新课程理念下中学数学学习过程评价的探究

数学学习过程评价，是数学新课程评价的核心内容．它是将评价与教师的教学与学生的学习活动有机地结合起来，把评价纳入学习活动过程之中，并将评价作为学生主动学习的一部分，以评价促进学生的学习和学生的发展．数学学习过程评价的目的是为了及时反馈调节学生数学学习活动，促进学生的发展，而不是为了检查．正确建构数学学习过程评价必须明确过程评价的意义、类型、内容、评价方法和呈现方式．     

Dynamic assessment: supporting educational psychologists’ practice through the use of video during supervision

ABSTRACT

Dynamic assessment (DA) is appealing to educational psychologists (EPs) due to: its flexibility, allowing EPs to adjust materials and processes to fit the assessment context; its usefulness, revealing ideas about how the next steps for learning might be achieved; and its focus on strengths. In Feuerstein’s words, “it is the instances of success of the individual that are the focal point for analysis for the reasons of success and failure”. Given the appeal of DA, it is frustrating that it has not been taken up more by practitioners. This paper will explore what DA is, and what it is not, summarise its advantages, consider why it is not more widely used, and introduce one way in which EPs can receive support for DA; using video of an EP “doing” DA within supervision in order to reflect on “good” DA.     

Teachers' work in reading literacy across the curriculum in the senior phase of learning

Teaching students to read is one of the main aims of education systems around the world. For a significant number of adolescents, however, formal schooling has failed to deliver adequate reading proficiency. This article reports on a study of teachers' responses to a reading intervention programme for adolescents implemented in a senior secondary college in Australia in 2006. It engages with the question: in what ways does the reading intervention affect senior secondary teachers' knowledge of reading literacy and their motivation to provide reading literacy support to students in content area subjects? Data were collected from 20 semi-structured interviews with 15 teachers over a six-month period. The findings suggest that, despite the success of the intervention for the students, in this particular senior school context the teachers were largely resistant to expectations that they engage with the process of teaching reading in all senior phases of learning curriculum areas.     

小学科学课程改革中的问题与分析

新一轮的小学科学课程改革从目标、内容、教法、评价等方面进行了全方位的改革,取得了进步。但是,从整个基础教育的现状来看,小学科学作为核心学科的地位至今没有得到真正的确认,而且由于缺乏重要的基础理论研究,出现了过程和内容目标不平衡、课程内容设计不连贯以及课程实施缺乏横向联系的问题,需要在今后的课程改革实验中加以重视和解决。     

‘The Beauty Walk,this ain't my topic’: learning about critical inquiry with adolescent girls

This study analyses and describes the links between the curriculum policies of one urban school district in the US and an intervention by the economics firm Standard &; Poor’s (S&;P). It characterizes the languages and values introduced to the district leadership by S&;P as ideologically neoliberal. This school‐level case study that makes clear the connections between the introduction of neoliberal languages and values, local‐level curriculum policies, and the resulting experiences of teachers and children in the US. In the end, it offers a case study of the ways corporate forces, such as S&;P, are extending their reaches beyond national and state‐level policy bodies to local communities to further legitimize the neoliberal project and to ‘reform’ schools in ways that grow their own profitability.     

Sustainable assessment revisited

Sustainable assessment has been proposed as an idea that focused on the contribution of assessment to learning beyond the timescale of a given course. It was identified as an assessment that meets the needs of the present in terms of the demands of formative and summative assessment, but which also prepares students to meet their own future learning needs. This paper reviews the value of such a notion for assessment; how it has been taken up over the past 15 years in higher education and why it might still be needed. It identifies how it has been a successful intervention in assessment discourse. It explores what more is needed to locate assessment as an intervention to focus on learning for the longer term. It shows how sustainable assessment can help bridge the gap between assessment and learning, and link to ideas such as self-regulation, students’ making judgements about their own work and course-wide assessment.     

Assessment for learning in the accountability era: Queensland, Australia

Developments in school education in Australia over the past decade have witnessed the rise of national efforts to reform curriculum, assessment and reporting. Constitutionally the power to decide on curriculum matters still resides with the States. Higher stakes in assessment, brought about by national testing and international comparative analyses of student achievement data, have challenged State efforts to maintain the emphasis on assessment to promote learning while fulfilling accountability demands. In this article lessons from the Queensland experience indicate that it is important to build teachers’ assessment capacity and their assessment literacy for the promotion of student learning. It is argued that teacher assessment can be a source of dependable results through moderation practice. The Queensland Studies Authority has recognised and supported the development of teacher assessment and moderation practice in the context of standards-driven, national reform. Recent research findings explain how the focus on learning can be maintained by avoiding an over-interpretation of test results in terms of innate ability and limitations and by encouraging teachers to adopt more tailored diagnosis of assessment data to address equity through a focus on achievement for all. Such efforts are challenged as political pressures related to the Australian government's implementation of national testing and national partnership funding arrangements tied to the performance of students at or below minimum standards become increasingly apparent.     

企业微型学习设计与评价研究

新一代网络技术的发展与智能终端的普及改变了知识的分布和存储方式,革新了人的知识分享方式,催生了基于移动技术的微型学习。微型学习能够帮助企业员工开展随时随地的短时学习,促进企业内部更大范围的学习协作与知识分享,是保持和提高企业竞争优势的重要手段。企业微型学习的设计要充分考虑组织特征、学习者、微型内容、技术通道和学习评价等要素,通过前端分析、通道选择、内容设计、活动设计和评价设计几个阶段来完成。微型学习的评价可以借助企业学习平台,结合测试、问卷、历程分析等方法对学习者的反应层、学习层进行效果评估。     

体育课程校本化开发的意义与目标模式

基于分享课程开发权力与职责理念的体育课程校本化开发具有特别重要的意义,它是体育课程改革过程中承上启下的联动环节.体育课程的校本化开发是一个在国家课程愿景、地方课程方案与本校课程情境之间不断调适的动态过程,它是体育课程有效实施的前提条件.从基于"泰勒原理"的经典的目标模式来看,体育课程校本化开发包括分析体育课程情境、确定体育课程目标、选编体育课程内容、预设体育课程实施、开展体育课程评价等基本步骤.