What Does the CBM-Maze Test Measure?

In this study, we identified the code-related (decoding, fluency) and language comprehension (vocabulary, listening comprehension) demands of the CBM-Maze test, a formative assessment, and compared them to those of the Gates–MacGinitie test, a standardized summative assessment. The demands of these reading comprehension tests and their developmental patterns were examined with multigroup structural regression models in a sample of 274 children in Grades 4, 7, and 9. The results showed that the CBM-Maze test relied more on code-related than on language comprehension skills when compared to the Gates–MacGinitie test. These demands were relatively stable across grades.     

Teachers’ Special Education Decisions Does Test Information Make a Difference?

ABSTRACT

Forty-five classroom teachers participated in a study designed to investigate the influence of a student’s individual psychological test performance (learning disabled [LD] vs. normal) and the achievement level of the child’s school (below average, average, above average) on their special education classification decisions. The achievement level of the school did not influence the teachers’ decisions to identify a child as handicapped. The student’s psychological test information did. For the LD case study, the teachers were more likely to have lower academic expectations and to diagnose the child as LD. In contrast to the findings of other studies, teachers were not likely to diagnose the normal case study child as handicapped. In short, these teachers did not ignore individual psychological information but rather utilized the information appropriately in their decision making.     

Does Student Language Ability Affect the Assessment of Teacher Language Ability?

This article arises from an investigation into the classroom language assessment (CLA) component of the Hong Kong English language benchmark test for lower secondary (Grades 7–9) teachers of English as a second language (ESL). After some background to the benchmarking initiative in Hong Kong and to the CLA test, the article describes a small-scale study into the effect of student levels of ability on grades awarded to teachers working in schools with differing ability intakes. In the study, a group of ESL teachers were videotaped teaching ESL classes at two different student ability levels, with the two sets of videos assessed by trained CLA assessors. Results indicate that, although there is some variety in the grade awarded to the two different classes taught, variation in grades may well be attributable to individual teacher performance rather than to external factors such as the ability levels of the students being taught. The grades awarded were generally consistent, irrespective of whether classes of high-ability students or low-ability students were being taught.     

Supervisee Empowerment: Does Gender Make a Difference?

This study used a content analysis of audiotapes of clinical supervisory sessions to examine the effect of supervisee gender on the influence strategies used in the counseling clinical supervisory dyad.     

Gender and Performance in Mathematical Tasks: Does the Context Make a Difference?

This study investigates how the context of mathematical tasks affects the performance of young children (ages 5–11). Subjects were 523 children from age 5 to 11. Three contexts of mathematical tasks (stereotypically boys’ contexts, stereotypically girls’ contexts and neutral contexts) are examined in three age groups (young, medium, and old). Boys’ and girls’ mean scores were compared for each age group in each of the three contexts. The data show that girls’ performance is affected by the context of the task while boys’ performance is not. The comparison between boys and girls in the three different contexts showed that in neutral contexts, the scores of boys and girls are similar. In (stereotypically) boys’ contexts, however, boys score significantly higher than girls. In (stereotypically) girls’ contexts, a significant interaction is found between age and gender, showing that the way girls are affected by such contexts depends on their age. The implications of these findings for gender-fair mathematics learning are discussed.     

Teachers' Planning Processes: Does ISD Make a Difference?

Do teachers who have a formal educational background in instructional systems design (ISD) differ from those who do not in how they plan and implement instruction? This question guided this pilot study of ten volunteer teachers, five who had formal education in ISD and five who did not. An open and closed item questionnaire was sent to each subject and follow-up interviews were conducted. Teachers were asked about their general planning practices, written planning procedures, mental planning, and how they implement instruction based on their plans. Results indicated that nine of the ten teachers use general ISD skills and processes in planning. Teachers reported that they (a) analyzed learners' needs and abilities, and (b) used objectives to guide the instructional process, specifically for selecting learning activities and evaluation. While there were no major differences between the two groups in their submitted daily plans, the teachers with instructional design backgrounds were more specific in their open-ended responses about the use of instructional design for some aspects of planning (e.g., using hierarchies and taxonomies to sequence instruction), and the importance of consistency among objectives, learning activities, and evaluation. In addition, four of the five ISD teachers believed that knowledge of ISD has improved both their planning processes and their teaching. Because major differences between the two groups were not observed, much of the article focuses on teacher planning processes in general.     

Effects of Aggression on Achievement: Does Conflict With the Teacher Make It Worse?

This longitudinal study examined different explanations for negative associations between aggression and academic achievement using data collected from 403 children from low‐income families followed from kindergarten or first grade (ages 6 and 7 years) through fifth grade (ages 10–11 years). Most results of growth curve analyses examining change over time and path analyses examining associations among the variables within grades were consistent with the hypothesis that the effect of aggression on achievement was partially mediated by the conflictual relationships relatively more aggressive children tended to develop with their teachers and concomitant reductions in engagement in academic tasks. The evidence suggested, however, that the relationship between aggression and achievement is complex and reciprocal. Gender differences were also observed.     

Educational Policy on Emotional Intelligence: Does It Make Sense?

Educational policy on emotional intelligence appears to be based more on mass-media science journalism than on actual educational and psychological research. The first section of this article provides an overview of the research areas of emotional intelligence, social and emotional learning, and character education; it further examines how these areas became linked in the popular press. The second section examines the scientific evidence for whether emotional intelligence underpins social and emotional learning, how emotional intelligence relates to success, and whether it is central to character. We conclude that educational policy in this area has outpaced the science on which it is ostensibly based, and recommendations for the future are made.     

Personal Narratives and Policy: Never the Twain?

In this article the extent to which stories and personal narratives can and should be used to inform education policy is examined. A range of studies describable as story or personal narrative is investigated. They include life‐studies, life‐writing, life history, narrative analysis, and the representation of lives. We use ‘auto/biography’ as a convenient way of grouping this range under one term. It points to the many and varied ways that accounts of self interrelate and intertwine with accounts of others. That is, auto/biography illuminates the social context of individual lives. At the same time it allows room for unique, personal stories to be told. We do not explicitly discuss all the different forms of auto/biography. Rather, we investigate the epistemology underlying the personal story in the context of social action. We discuss the circumstances in which a story may validly be used by educational policy makers and give some examples of how they have done so in the past.     

Student Views of Computer-Based Mathematics in the Middle Years: Does Gender Make a Difference?

How the use of computers in mathematics classrooms was viewed by students in two middle years mathematics classrooms was the focus of the research described in this paper. The primary data sources consisted of questionnaires, classroom observations supported by videotaping of mathematics lessons, and interviews with two girls and two boys from each class. Thus both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Girls viewed the computer-based lessons less favourably than did boys. In general, the boys were likely to believe that computers contributed to their experiencing pleasure in these lessons, and to making mathematics more relevant to them. Girls were typically more concerned about whether computers facilitated learning and enabled success in mathematics. The attitudes of students to computer-based mathematics were related to their views of computers.     

Teaching Religion in Public Schools: Review of Warren A. Nord,Does God Make A Difference?

In this review of Warren Nord's Does God Make a Difference? Taking Religion Seriously in Our Schools and Universities, Walter Feinberg provides a detailed analysis of Nord's argument that the study of religion should be constitutionally mandated as a corrective to the overwhelmingly secular course of study offered in contemporary public schools and universities. Nord bases his claim on both constitutional and educational grounds. His constitutional argument is that, due to their secular bias, schools fail in their requirement to take a neutral stance toward religion; he contends that this creates a school environment hostile to religion that thus requires a legal remedy. Nord's primary educational argument is that religion courses are needed to counterbalance the secular bias dominant in public schools and universities. Feinberg delineates how Nord's constitutional argument fails and how his educational argument has serious flaws and contradictions. According to Feinberg, a stronger argument for mandating courses on religion in schools would be that because public schools exist in a religiously infused environment, it is important for students to be exposed to alternative understandings that promote reflection on and criticism of one's own beliefs, including religious beliefs. Feinberg concludes that if religion is to be taught in the public schools, it needs to be justified on civic rather than religious grounds.     

Testing Rhyme Recognition: How Does Your Test Measure Up?

New rhyme tests are being devised throughout the U.K. by educators in response to the Baseline Assessment procedures. The writers, a speech and language therapist and a teacher-educator, are concerned that rhyme tests should be designed in a way which is sensitive to children’s developmental levels. This report on Rappaport’s (1993) Test of Rhyme Recognition (TORR) is part of a larger multidisciplinary study developing a Teaching Programme.     

Learning Together While Designing: Does Group Size Make a Difference?

As the use of project-based learning becomes more frequent in the K-12 science classroom, and in chemistry classrooms in particular, teachers have begun to identify practical questions about implementation that should be addressed empirically. One such question concerns whether there is an ideal group size that fosters individual student achievement. The current project was designed to assess how group size might impact student chemistry content learning in a project-based learning environment, and how well students are prepared to transfer this new knowledge to other relevant areas. The results indicated that particular conditions (e.g. advanced classrooms) interact with group size (a seemingly superficial feature) to differentially influence the depth and level of student learning related to the unit and student’s ability to transfer his/her knowledge outside of the context of a project-based learning unit.     

Language factor: Does it affect children's performance on word problems?

48 children from primary 4 in private and public schools (24 from each) were asked to solve 10 arithmetic word problems (involving more or less as the cue word) presented in English and in their native language. Retrospective clinical interviews were also conducted to find out how each child analyzed the meaning of each problem, before deciding which operation to use to solve it. The results revealed that both public and private school children performed better both in skills and in strategies when problems were presented in their native language than when presented in English, but only public school had the result to be significant (P<.025). Also data obtained from the interviews are in accord with psycholinguistic theories concerning the polarized comparative pair of less and more.     

Validation of the Preschool Child Observation Record: Does It Pass the Test for Use in Head Start?

Research Findings: This study provides the first independent investigation of the second most widely used multidimensional assessment in Head Start—the Preschool Child Observation Record, Second Edition (COR-2). We conducted a comprehensive investigation into the validity of the COR-2 using data from all children in an urban school district's Head Start program (N = 4,071). Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a misfit between the 6 developer-defined categories and the data. Although exploratory analyses revealed a possible 4-factor solution, subsequent analyses indicated problems with this structure as well. Item response theory methods were used to determine whether there was support for the 5-point response scale of each item representing an appropriately sequenced set of skill points. Results indicated that nearly half of the COR-2 items had reversed or poorly spaced thresholds, suggesting potential problems with these items' functioning. Practice or Policy: Specific implications of the findings for the further development of the COR-2 in terms of its constructs and items as well as general implications for early childhood assessment are discussed.     

Tongue-Tied in Singapore: A Language Policy for Tamil?

The Tamil situation in Singapore is one that lends itself ideally to the study of minority-language maintenance. The Tamil community is small. Tamils constitute only 4% of the population, whereas Indians constitute around 7%. The history and demographics of the Tamil community are well known. The Singapore educational system supports a well-developed and comprehensive bilingual education program for its three major linguistic communities on an egalitarian basis, so Tamil is a sort of \"test case\" for how well a small language community can survive in a multilingual society where larger groups are doing well. But Tamil is acknowledged by many to be facing a number of crises. Tamil as a home language is not being maintained by the better educated, and Indian education in Singapore is also not living up to the expectations many people have for it. Educated people who love Tamil are upset that Tamil is becoming thought of as a \"coolie language\" and regret this very much. Because Tamil is a language characterized by extreme diglossia, there is the additional pedagogical problem of trying to maintain a language with 2 variants but with a strong cultural bias on the part of the educational establishment for maintaining the literary dialect to the detriment of the spoken one. This article examines these attempts to maintain a highly diglossic language in emigration and concludes that the well-meaning bilingual education system actually produces a situation of subtractive bilingualism.     

The Perfect Marriage? – Language and Art Criticism in the Hong Kong Public Examination Context

Art education in Hong Kong has undergone various changes in response to educational reform. In art assessment, a major change in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary (NSS) Curriculum is the inclusion of art criticism as a compulsory component of the new public examination. Assessing students’ abilities to interpret art in an art criticism public examination context is a critical issue in Hong Kong because the new senior secondary curriculum and assessment has brought attention to the role of written language in the art examination paper. This means the examination assesses not only students’ abilities to interpret art, but also their language abilities required to respond to art in written form. Since this new mode of assessment of art criticism has been published a number of issues have appeared. Recent studies show that teachers and students perceive this development negatively and they believe that the written format will assess students’ written language abilities rather than their critical abilities. These findings challenge the justification of the new art assessment policy and raise questions about the role of written language in responding to art. This article aims to raise the issue of the marriage between language and art criticism in the Hong Kong public examination context. It argues and examines the relationship of language to art interpretation, reasoning in the assessment, and issues in the public art criticism examination context. The issues addressed in this article provide opportunities for researchers and policy makers to reconsider and refine the new form of examination.     

Attitudes toward Older Workers among Undergraduates: Does Status Make a Difference?

Most research on attitudes toward older adults does not address subgroups of older adults. This study evaluated whether attitudes among undergraduates towards older professionals were more positive than those toward older adults in general. A 2 × 2 factorial design with the covariate of knowledge of aging was used with measures from two attitude scales. Independent variables were the priming target of older adults in general or older professionals and the order of administration of the two attitude scales with a sample of 107 undergraduates. The covariate was significant for three of the four dependent measures. The scale specifically developed for attitudes toward older workers showed a significant difference between the priming instruction groups, with more positive attitudes toward older professionals. Significant interactions in the same direction were noted for two of the other scales: Avoidance and Discrimination. The results suggest that professional status does provide one case in which negative attitudes among undergraduates toward older workers and adults in general may not hold.