A DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH TO MATHEMATICS TESTING FOR UNIVERSITY ADMISSIONS AND COURSE PLACEMENT

Decisions on admissions to university and placement into university courses are usually based on the results of achievement (as in secondary school exams) and/or aptitude (in intelligence-type tests and SAT). This paper argues that in a situation where educational provision at secondary school level is highly unequal, a third approach to testing offers an alternative which is preferable both on grounds of theory of cognitive psychology and because it yields much better discrimination.The Alternative Admissions Research Project at University of Cape Town has developed a mathematics test according to the dynamic testing approach as advocated by Miller (1990) for admission of African students from grossly under-resourced schools, as well as for placing these and other students into a diversifying first year curriculum. This approach aims to assess the ability of a candidate to learn from authentic academic material within the test. This paper focuses on the reasons for the development of the mathematics test and the process by which the test questions were developed and piloted. The reliability of the test and correlations of this test with subsequent mathematical performance data are discussed.Following the encouraging data for the test as an admission mechanism, the value of the dynamic testing approach for furnishing additional information for placement into an increasingly varied curriculum at first year level was investigated. This enabled the piloting of more topics and more comprehensive validation of this type of testing. The paper concerns itself with the reliability and predictive value of each of the topics in this placement test for a range of core courses in various faculties and the extent to which these tests can identify potentially at risk students who should be placed onto an appropriate curriculum.     

Review of measurements used in computing education research and suggestions for increasing standardization

Background and context: The variables that researchers measure and how they measure them are central in any area of research, including computing education. Which research questions can be asked and how they are answered depends on measurement.

Objective: To summarize the commonly used variables and measurements in computing education and to compare them to best practices in measurement for human-subjects research.

Method: Systematic literature review analyzing 197 papers published during 2013–2017 in computing education research venues.

Findings: The review illuminates common practices related to: variables measured (including learner characteristics), measurements used, and type of data analysis. The paper lists standardized measurements that were used and highlights commonly used variables for which no standardized measures exist.

Implications: The paper concludes with information about best practices currently being used in the community that should be continued, as well as pointing out practices that could be improved along with recommendations for how to begin to adopt those best practices.     

Causal Learning Across Culture and Socioeconomic Status

Extensive research has explored the ability of young children to learn about the causal structure of the world from patterns of evidence. These studies, however, have been conducted with middle-class samples from North America and Europe. In the present study, low-income Peruvian 4- and 5-year-olds and adults, low-income U.S. 4- and 5-year-olds in Head Start programs, and middle-class children from the United States participated in a causal learning task (N = 435). Consistent with previous studies, children learned both specific causal relations and more abstract causal principles across culture and socioeconomic status (SES). The Peruvian children and adults generally performed like middle-class U.S. children and adults, but the low-SES U.S. children showed some differences.     

Learn before lecture: A strategy that improves learning outcomes in a large introductory biology class

Actively engaging students in lecture has been shown to increase learning gains. To create time for active learning without displacing content we used two strategies for introducing material before class in a large introductory biology course. Four to five slides from 2007/8 were removed from each of three lectures in 2009 and the information introduced in preclass worksheets or narrated PowerPoint videos. In class, time created by shifting lecture material to learn before lecture (LBL) assignments was used to engage students in application of their new knowledge. Learning was evaluated by comparing student performance in 2009 versus 2007/8 on LBL-related question pairs, matched by level and format. The percentage of students who correctly answered five of six LBL-related exam questions was significantly higher (p < 0.001) in 2009 versus 2007/8. The mean increase in performance was 21% across the six LBL-related questions compared with <3% on all non-LBL exam questions. The worksheet and video LBL formats were equally effective based on a cross-over experimental design. These results demonstrate that LBLs combined with interactive exercises can be implemented incrementally and result in significant increases in learning gains in large introductory biology classes.     

The immunologist and the Internet—a tale of the tortoise and the hare?

Further in our series on the response of learned societies to electronic publishing possibilities, this article describes the present use made of the Internet as a relatively new phenomenon for many of Britain’s immunologists, and considers how its use might develop in the future.     

Critical Depictions of Agency in Pura Belpré Awarded Texts

Given the need for multiple representations of historically underrepresented voices in children’s literature, this research study explored critical depictions of agency of Latinx youth within the Pura Belpré awarded texts from 1996 to 2021. The findings report a critical multicultural analysis of depictions of age, sex, socio-economic status, ethnicities, and geographic regions of these awarded texts. Using a secondary analysis of opportunities for agency, we examine how focal subjects (Vaughn et al., 2021; Crisp, 2015) exert their agency in their respective contexts. Our aim in doing so is to highlight the notion of agency in these texts of Latinx children and youth, specifically understanding who exerts agency, how, and for what purposes. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

     

Becoming Teacher: A/r/tographical Inquiry and Visualising Metaphor

A great deal has been written about the representational use of metaphor to understand teacher candidates’/new teachers’ conceptions of teacher practice. This article will discuss recent research that explored secondary visual art teacher candidates’/new teachers’ visualising of visual metaphors to provoke their a/r/tographical inquiry into their perceptions of practice. This article engages with the Deleuzian conception becoming as well as the ontology of difference to provoke the reimagination of metaphor in research. We offer new understandings about visualising the visual in research and the methodological implications of relational research practices.