Reconsidering assessment: From checklist to dialectic

When composition teachers evaluate student essays, how well-aligned is their grading practice with what those teachers profess is important about writing? How do instructors discover this alignment? This article describes the consequences of inadvertent misalignment by analyzing a document typically found in many writing programs—an instructor's essay evaluation checklist. A critique of this common assessment instrument reveals that, in trying to promote evaluative consistency, the checklist privileges product over process, the authority of academic discourse over the autonomy of students' own voices, and an analytic predisposition to student writing as opposed to an instructor's reader-response. In so doing, the checklist undercuts the kind of composition pedagogy instructors claim to espouse in their classroom practice. Perhaps these conflicts cannot be overcome, but, in response to this precarious predicament, this essay poses this question: Can assessment find its direction and vitality by acknowledging such conflicts? A dual heuristic, of sorts, is proposed for locating assessment techniques that directly address the conflicts inherent in the checklist. This heuristic seeks out in assessment what the checklist clearly lacks: dialogic and dialectic dimensions. Defining which assessment methods best fulfill this heuristic—and in so doing more honestly align pedagogy with evaluation—is the purpose of the concluding remarks in this essay.     

Technology’s Non-Neutrality: Past Lessons Can Help Guide Today’s Classrooms

The benefits of classroom computers and associated technologies seem to be an accepted truism with those who question the benefits often dismissed as intractable Luddites. Educational technology has become big business both commercially and academically for today’s increasingly high-tech classrooms. Clearly, computers mark changes—permanent changes—in the way everyone lives, learns, works, and interacts globally. Ellul, Norman, and Postman, among others, have focused on the application of a technology and not on the “box” itself. All three have warned that although educators’ focus should be on the application, it is the characteristic of technology itself that shapes the future. History is replete with lessons and voices that support these warnings and provide a foundation for reasoned discussions of any technology’s Faustian bargains and its often unanticipated uses and consequences. The topic and open debate could not be more crucial or timeless, for how young minds, mental habits, and values are shaped in classrooms around the world affects everyone.     

Making Way for Technology Education

This paper discusses two major issues confronting any attempts to make technology education an integral part of the school curriculum. The first issue has to do with the lack of agreement—stemming from its diverse origins—regarding the core concepts, instructional strategies, and student outcomes that should comprise technology education. Characterizations of eight different approaches are provided. The second issue concerns the relationship of technology education to the existing school curricula, specifically, the science curriculum and vocational education. The historical connections between science and technology are discussed, and the argument is made that the traditional second-class position of technology in the school curriculum needs to be remedied in favor of making science and technology equal curricular partners. Vocational education, too, needs to be modernized to move from narrow skills training to education for the technological work place.     

The end of “information”: Computers,democracy, and the university

This paper describes some of the challenges which the growing pervasiveness of computers and electronic communications technology present to liberal democracies. We argue that these technologies, by their influence on the mechanisms of publicity and privacy, make possible the abuse of an under-developed popular epistemology. The confused response of the courts to cases of information crime suggests that the university is a better forum in which to meet and master these challenges.Freedom is not a simple experience. And as technology becomes more sophisticated, living in freedom—which means living with constant, changing choice—will only become more complex.     

The endless spiral

A Danish textbook on the history of technology,Skruen uden ende — Den vestlige teknologis historie (The Endless Spiral: A History of Western Technology), was published in 1990. In the present article, one of the authors presents some of the background to this event and puts the work into historical perspective by describing a number of different traditions for writing textbooks on the history of technology. Next follows a discussion of why history of technology ought to be an important ingredient in upper secondary education and why only the contextualist tradition — inspired by the rapidly developing school of research centered around the journalTechnology & Culture — offers any real hope for providing meaningful teaching materials on history of technology. The paper ends with a brief outline of the textbook's contents, with special emphasis on one of its several case studies describing the development of certain mainstream technologies in the context of the scientific, economic, social and cultural developments existing when the particular technology came into being.     

Mathematics education in China today: Four problem areas

The realization that an educated citizenry is essential to China's modernization has led to the national goal of nine years of compulsory education for all students by the year 2000. Among the many and varied problems encountered in efforts to educate the masses are those existent in mathematics education. The authors identify and discuss four critical areas — educational theory, technology, instruction, and assessment of teaching — which are of immediate concern in the mathematics education of primary and secondary school students in China.     

Moving on: A cooperative study of student transfer

With no statewide student tracking system in place for California's tripartite postsecondary education system, three of the state's leading institutions joined in a study of the effectiveness of student transfer—the bridge between community college and university-level education. Transfer success was measured by student preparation, persistence, and performance both before and after transfer. The study examined whether the need for remediation before transfer affected students' progress and degree attainment. The findings run counter to the traditional notion that few remedial students persevere and transfer. A comparison of graduation rates with other community college transfers and with native university students indicated these transfers performed better.Presented at the Thirty-first Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, San Francisco, May 26–29, 1991.     

Teaching and Exploring the Social Implications of Twenty-First Century Molecular Biology in a Laboratory-Based General Education Course

At the University of California, Los Angeles The Genome: Blueprint, Controversy, Destiny is an inquiry-based course with a laboratory component, designed for non-science majors. The course explores the many ways in which molecular biology—including the Human Genome Project, genetically modified foods, gene therapy, and forensics—is increasingly permeating society in the 21st century. The laboratory component of the course includes experience in real research—the sequencing of a microbial genome. Students feel, think, and act like scientists while they consider the societal implications of the technology. The course aims to prepare students to be scientifically literate citizens while simultaneously building a major research accomplishment.     

Teacher development in advanced educational technology

Advanced educational technology promises to improve science teaching and learning. To achieve the posited outcomes, however, teachers must have access to, know how to, have the skills to, and want to use the proposed advanced educational technologies in their teaching. In response, for the past eight years with support from the National Science Foundation, BSCS has conductedENLIST Micros — a teacher development to help science teachers improve their use of microcomputers.ENLIST Micros has three phases — Phase one (1984–1986): BSCS designed, tested, and producedENLIST Micros (Ellis and Kuerbis, 1987, 1989) teacher development materials (text, video, and tutorial software) for helping science teachers improve their use of educational technology. Phase two (1986–1989): BSCS designed, developed, tested, and disseminated a staff development model for helping science teachers integrate educational technology into instruction. Phase three (1989–1992): BSCS established Teacher Development Centers to implement theENLIST Micros teacher development materials and staff development model with science teachers throughout the United States.ENLIST Micros has served more than 1500 science teachers in 15 states. Teachers who have participated in the program have improved their knowledge, attitude, and self-efficacy about computer usage and have improved their use of microcomputers in their science courses. Furthermore, as part of the project, BSCS has described the implementation process and has developed recommendations to support improvements in the use of educational technology in science programs.     

Modeling the student in intelligent tutoring sytems: The promise of a new psychometrics

This paper reviews a number of relatively new and promising psychometric approaches to the problem of modeling student achievement (the student model) within intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). A shared characteristic of most ITSs is their need to estimate a model of the student's understanding of the domain, and use this model to modify and adapt subsequent instructional content and sequence. Sound cognitive diagnosis and the need to advance ITS technology require the development of student models that are integrated with cognitive theory and instructional science. A number of cognitively oriented psychometric approaches — including latent-trait models, statistical pattern recognition methods, and causal probabilistic networks — are described and discussed within the current ITS framework. As measurement-based student models are refined, we anticipate their compatibility with future generations of intelligent tutoring systems.     

Sur l'Acquisition des structures numériques en fin de 3ème

Sans résuméRésultats d'une enquête effectuée en mai-juin 1973 par une équipe de l'IREM de Strasbourg dans les classes de 3ème du Bas-Rhin.L'équipe comprenait quatre membres de l'IREM:Mathématiciens:—Mademoiselle Anne Scherpereel—Monsieur François PluvinagePsychologues:—Mademoiselle Catherine Bloch—Monsieur Raymond Duval.     

Facilitating Grounded Online Interactions in Video-Case-Based Teacher Professional Development

The use of interactive video cases for teacher professional development is an emergent medium inspired by case study methods used extensively in law, management, and medicine, and by the advent of multimedia technology available to support online discussions. This paper focuses on Web-based grounded discussions—in which the participants base their contributions on specific events portrayed in the case—and the role facilitators play in these online interactions. This paper analyzes the online exchange of messages in one school district that participated in a video-case-based program of teacher professional development and derives principles that will help facilitators lead grounded online interactions.     

The Role of Play in the Pedagogy of ICT

Today’s children meet a wide range of technology in their everyday lives, and they become competent users of devices such as mobile phones and games machines without any formal instruction. It appears that highly complex ICT processes and techniques can be learned through informal methods which are very much learner directed—unfocussed exploration, creative invention, trial-and-error, cooperation with friends and asking people who are more experienced. Indeed, the children themselves tend to see their activity as play rather than learning.This paper describes a project carried out in a number of informal learning situations. The children involved were relatively disadvantaged economically, and the majority were not very confident in using a PC. Most had access to both a games machine and a mobile phone, however, and rated themselves as very confident with these. The project aimed to find out how they developed competence in using unfamiliar hardware and software, and how much they learned from self-directed study in a loosely structured learning environment. In order to investigate these issues, groups of children were introduced to new software tools and left to ‘play’ with the software in order to explore the possibilities and discover new features. The children were observed and their questions answered, and the researcher also discussed their experiences with them afterwards.Despite their lack of previous experience with PCs and the particular software used for the project, the children were generally successful in gaining specified competencies with the software. Several children reflected that they were learning in the same way as they had learned to use mobile phones, although there was no evidence for transfer of specific techniques. This indicates that the role of higher order learning skills is important, and evidence emerged that the influence of self-efficacy may be more important in gaining success than previous experience with PC technology. This factor is suggested as the focus for further investigation.     

Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K–12 Education in the United States: Findings Related to Research and Evaluation

The Panel on Educational Technology was organized in April 1995 under the auspices of the President's Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) to provide advice to the President on matters related to the application of information technologies to K–12 education in the United States. Its findings and recommendations were set forth in March 1997 in the Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K–12 Education in the United States. This report was based on a review of the research literature and on written submissions and oral briefings from a number of academic and industrial researchers, practicing educators, software developers, governmental agencies, and professional and industry organizations involved in various ways with the application of technology to education. Its most important finding is that a large-scale program of rigorous, systematic research on education in general and educational technology in particular will ultimately prove necessary to ensure both the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of technology use within our nation's K–12 schools. Finding that less than 0.1 percent of our nation's expenditures for elementary and secondary education are currently invested to determine which educational techniques actually work, and to find ways to improve them—an extremely low level relative to comparable ratios within the private sector—the Panel recommended that this figure be increased over a period of several years to at least 0.5 percent, and sustained at that level on an ongoing basis. Further, because no one state, municipality, or private firm could hope to capture more than a small fraction of the benefits associated with a significant advance in our understanding of how best to educate K–12 students, the Panel concluded that such funding will have to be provided largely at the federal level in order to avoid a systematic underinvestment (attributable to a classical form of economic externality) relative to the level that would be optimal for the nation as a whole. This paper originally appeared as Section 8 of the report.     

Creeping privatization and its implications for schooling in the inner city

During the 1980s, the Conservative government introduced a number of measures to enhance choice and diversity in education. It claimed that these would be particularly beneficial in Labour-controlled inner-city areas, where too many children were currently receiving an inadequate education in poor neighborhood comprehensive schools. Three of the government's initiatives—the assisted places scheme, city technology colleges, and grant-maintained schools—are reviewed in this paper in the light of the evidence so far available and the claims of critics that they are a subtle form of privatization. Despite any benefits they may offer to individual children or schools, they are not seen to constitute an adequate response to the problems facing education in the inner city.Parts of this paper draw upon work carried out with Tony Edwards, John Fitz, and Sharon Gewirtz under ESRC Research Grants C00230036 and C00232462 and with members of the Bristol Polytechnic Education Study Group.     

Education in the Light of Liberspace Evolution and Transition to Cyberspace

The article considers main education trends while society is moving towards totally new information environment—cyberspace. Aims and tasks of education are justified and specified. As a solution a new pedagogical technology (projective pedagogy) is suggested. It is based on system methodology of design and the so called productive knowledge, which generates new knowledge, indicating the most probable ways of quality improvement of the objects under study.     

A Hundred Years of Peter Pan

The centenary of the first performance of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan was celebrated in December 2004. Taking account of the various events in Britain to mark the occasion—newspaper articles, radio and television programmes, retrospects in the original theatre—this article examines the status and popularity of Peter Pan after a hundred years. The article traces the double story of Peter Pan—the play itself, and the biographical narrative of those events in Barrie’s life that led to and succeeded its creation—and examines the two recent films, Peter Pan (2003) and Finding Neverland (2004) as examples of fresh approaches to both life and work in the centenary year.Peter Hollindale retired in 1999 as Reader in English at the University of York. He edited ‘Peter Pan and Other Plays’, and an edition of ‘Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’ and ‘Peter and Wendy’, both for the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series He is author of the critical study ’Signs of Childness in Children’s Books’.     

A psychological model of student persistence

The present study examines the validity of the Eccles model of achievement behaviors (model of academic choice) for its predictive validity when the outcome (behavior) is student persistence in the postsecondary educational system to completion of at least the baccalaureate degree. Patterns of effects hypothesized by the theoretical model were only partially supported by the results forthcoming from the estimation of the model. Of the two constructs hypothesized to directly influence persistence—the value placed on college attendance and expectations for success in college—only value had significant influence. Two measures of goal orientations—business/financial and humanitarian/social—exerted indirect influence as hypothesized, but level of degree aspirations had as strong a direct influence on persistence as did value. Prior achievement had the strongest total effects of any of the variables in the model.     

Community Education and child-care programs

The Community Education Services (CES) division of the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) is CTW's community-outreach arm. This article describes how CES works with parents, children, experts, and local groups to develop special multimedia products, four of which are discussed. Two of the products—a fire-safety kit and a natural-hazards packet—were designed to teach young children how to protect themselves in life-threatening emergencies. Two other products—CES'sSesame Street preschool education materials and its3-2-1 Contact andSquare One TV after-school materials—are attempts by CTW to respond to societal changes that have increasingly shifted the burden of child care onto preschool and after-school programs.     

School Security Solutions: Bringing Corporate Safety to Schools and Colleges with EasyLobbyTM Software

This paper describes software for Electronic Visitor Management (EVM), EasyLobby^TM, currently in use in thousands of federal and corporate installations throughout the world and its application for school and campus environments. Protecting the physical safety as well as providing security safeguards regarding internet access of students, faculty, and teachers—K–12 or at the college level—has, unfortunately, become a necessity, especially in the United States at day care centers, schools, hospitals, and campus facilities. This paper describes the technology and its features which allow schools and campuses to use EasyLobby^TM software to (1) replace the visitor log; (2) capture and store visitor data electronically, including the purpose of their visit; and (3) provide badges that quickly allow anyone in the school to recognize authorized strangers. EasyLobby^TM, defined Electronic Visitor Management, has won major awards for innovation and achievement from the security industry and is quite inexpensive. Its web address is www.EasyLobby.com. Documented benefits to the corporate and government world can provide security for educational institutions as well.