Assessment matters: Making assessment easier with the Organizational Effectiveness Model

Savannah C. Heilman and Lance Kennedy‐Phillips describe a comprehensive, step‐by‐step, mixed‐methods assessment model.     

Making arrival time easier

Summary Arrival time in a child care center is a significant transitional period. The environment that greets children as they enter the center may influence how they respond to separating from a parent and spending many hours in the center. Teachers can make the transition easier for children by providing an environment that supports the individual needs of children.Margaret King is an Associate Professor in the School of Home Economics at Ohio University in Athens.     

Making better decisions by better managing information

This article examines how to improve decision making. We tend to prefer simplified thinking and revise our bias only when we are under overwhelming pressure. The article suggests some ways to better use information technology and offers a prioritizing approach to using information to produce better decisions.     

Precision Teaching and Fluency Training: Making maths easier for pupils and teachers

A 12-week programme was designed for five children in a primary class (9-10 years of age) who were failing to keep pace with their peers in the maths curriculum. The programme drew on principles of precision teaching and emphasised fluency training in the component skills required for the performance of a composite maths skill. The class teacher identified a target composite skill, and the five children's scores were compared before and after the programme, and compared with the rest of the class. On post-programme measures, the precision teaching children out-performed all but one of their peers on the target skill. This paper adds to a growing database demonstrating the importance of fluency training and frequent monitoring of children's progress (fundamentals of precision teaching). It also shows that expensive and time-consuming additional resources are not required to successfully implement such programmes.     

The discussion examination: Making assessment match instructional strategy

This article focuses on a personal classroom experience that led to the development of a discussion examination as a strategy for making assessment match classroom practice in a class for secondary verbally gifted students. The literature read in the courses and the levels of thought emphasized in class discussion inspired the author to use an assessment format that more closely mirrored what went on in the classroom experience. An example of the grid used to assess the process as well as a point system for evaluation are provided. Encouragement for the process and cautions for precision in using it are included.     

Dancing with the devil: formative peer assessment and academic performance

Peer assessment can be important in developing active and independent learners, as well as providing more and faster feedback in large classes, compared to marking done by tutors. In addition, the evaluative, critical stance required by students in order to assess their peers' work encourages the development of higher-order cognitive skills. Changing roles from being assessed to being an assessor can also improve students' ability to judge and improve on their own work. However, peer assessment does have potential problems and there is some debate as to the appropriate academic level at which to implement it, the kinds of feedback that are given and the ways in which students respond. In addition, there is little evidence that peer assessment has an impact on academic performance. This research reports the results of an online peer assessment exercise for a macroeconomics essay conducted in a large Economics 1 class at Rhodes University. Of the 800 students, about half participated in the peer assessment exercise. Data were collected from students via a formal course evaluation. In addition, a sample of 50 essays was evaluated in terms of the relationship between peer marks and final (tutor) marks received and the impact that peer assessment had on the quality of the final essay submitted. An Ordinary Least Squares regression was used to investigate the impact of peer assessment participation on marks. Results showed that peer marks tended to ‘bunch’ in the 60–68% range, indicating the reluctance of peers to give very high or low marks. In general, peers gave more useful feedback on technical aspects, such as presentation and referencing (which were also the categories in which students most often made improvements), than on content. Regression analysis showed that peer assessment participation was not a significant determinant of final essay mark, but that economics ability and English language proficiency were.     

基于PCA-CMAC的设备性能退化评估

提出了一种用于设备性能退化评估的PCA-CMAC(主成分分析-小脑模型节点控制器)模型.该模型利用PCA进行特征提取,去除多个传感器信号特征的冗余信息,并且减少CMAC的输入维数;利用CMAC的局部泛化能力定量地评估设备的性能退化.给出了模型的实现过程,并将模型应用于钻削过程刀具状态的评估,试验结果证明该模型能基于刀具的正常状态,对刀具的磨损状态进行定量的评估.分析了CMAC中泛化参数g和量化参数r对评估结果的影响,g越大,CMAC的泛化能力越好,但各退化状态之间的区别越不明显;r越小,各退化状态之间越容易区分,但所需的权存储空间越大.2个参数的基本选择原则是CMAC的权存储空间应尽量小,与此同时,各退化状态之间应容易区分.     

产教一结合 职教就红火

职业教育有着实践性、就业性显著的特征,从她一创办起,其教学过程就与产教结合结下了不解之缘.长期以来,伴随着职业教育的蓬勃发展,产教结合的模式也不断涌现.产教结合已成为拓宽职校生存空间,增强职校办学活力的必由之路.职业院校或厂办职校,所培养的学生要具有全面素质和综合职业能力,其教学过程就必须是产教结合的过程.     

Making instruction and assessment responsive to diverse students' progress: group-administered dynamic assessment in teaching mathematics

This study entailed a 3 (instructional intervention) × 2 (assessment-type) between-subjects experimental design employing a pretest-intervention-posttest methodology. The instructional interventions were administered between subjects in three conditions: (a) dynamic instruction, (b) triarchic or theory of successful intelligence-control instruction, and (c) standard-control instruction. The assessment-type consisted between subjects of either (a) a group-administered dynamic posttest or (b) the same group-administered posttest interspersed with a control filler activity. Performance in different mathematics content areas taught in fourth grade was investigated. In total, 1,332 students and 63 classroom teachers in 24 schools across six school districts participated in the study. The results indicate the advantages of using dynamic instruction and assessment in regular classrooms while teaching mathematics, especially when the student body is highly ethnically diverse.     

Toward better research on child abuse and neglect: Making definitional issues an explicit methodological concern

In the United States, research on child abuse and neglect is frequently criticized for being poorly performed and largely irrelevant to the important policy questions facing the field. Many of the problems plaguing research on child abuse and neglect are endemic to social science research generally, and this paper does not trod over such issues, which are well known and well described elsewhere. Instead, this paper describes how the inadequacy of definitions of “child abuse” and “child neglect” used by research studies places an additional—and largely unnoticed—burden on research, which aggravates the impact of these more general problems. Existing definitions of “child abuse” and “child neglect” fail to meet research needs because they lack: (1) comparability, (2) reliability, and (3) taxonomic delineation. As a result, they compromise the findings of incidence studies, sequelae studies, etiological studies, and program effectiveness studies. Therefore, if real progress is to be made in understanding child abuse and neglect, definitional issues must become an explicit methodological concern. Specifically, future research should include: (I) a careful determination of definitional needs, (2) the development of operational definitions to meet those needs, and (3) the circumspect statement of findings based on the limitations imposed by such definitions.