‘It’s not the test,it’s how it’s used!’ Critical analysis of public response to NAPLAN and MySchool Senate Inquiry

Public education is commonly perceived as a social good endowed with the capacity to equalise western citizens’ chance of ‘success’. In 2008 Australia introduced standardised testing and reporting procedures to improve educational quality and equity through two policy tools (NAPLAN/MySchool). Ensuing public debate culminated in two Senate Inquiries. Qualitative critical analysis of all (N = 268) submissions to Inquiry One evidenced two major themes: marketisation and data (mis)use; and competition, commodification and practice. Marketisation’s hegemony shaped discourse and recommendations, with institutions and individuals promoting/engaging in self-aggrandising performance-driven activities seeking market advantage, often whilst simultaneously objecting. Submissions largely opposed MySchool and supported NAPLAN despite detailing maladaptive impacts and recommending changes. Drawing upon Latour, we suggest actors’ interactions with these tools (re)produced and re-enacted marketisation principles. Where marketisation, commodification or political rhetoric drives educational change, one ought to be cautious authentic approaches are not truncated by stakeholders lacking legitimate means to compete for resources or social status.     

Framing and Labeling Effects in Preferences for Borrowing for College: An Experimental Analysis

Research in Higher Education - Evidence from behavioral economics suggests that the framing and labeling of choices affect financial decisions. Through a randomized control trial of over six...     

Do Testing Conditions Explain Cyber Charter Schools’ Failing Grades?

Recent Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) analyses find that cyber charter schools in seventeen states show consistently low reading and mathematics value-added test scores compared to traditional public schools serving comparable students. This generally accords with prior research. We hypothesize that the relatively poor measured academic value-added of cyber charters reflects artificial testing conditions for students in those schools. Accordingly, we have collected testing information from the seventeen CREDO states. State-level analyses find that cyber student persistence, which likely indicates school quality, correlates moderately and significantly with the cyber student academic value-added as measured by CREDO. Further, we find evidence of lower cyber school value-added in states which permit cybers to use narrow testing windows, perhaps reflecting testing fatigue on the part of test-takers. We discuss implications, and suggest next steps for research exploring whether testing conditions affect measured cyber charter performance.     

Being chimaera: a monstrous identity for SoTL academics

Lurking on the fringes of university culture are academic identities that do not fit into the usual disciplinary communities. Aiming to explore the experience of ‘being academic’ when not linked directly to a discipline, this paper examines the stories of a diverse group of SoTL scholars who work in a centralised multi-campus academic skills support centre in an Australian university. Framed as group auto-ethnography, the paper inquires into the everyday experience of these academics through narrative analysis of multiple first-person accounts and makes apparent the monstrousness of de-affiliated academic identities. Despite diverse disciplinary backgrounds, the author-participants found that they now shared a tripartite academic identity formed through the negotiation of three roles: the teacher, the disciplinarian, and the educational researcher. Using the chimaera, a mythical three-headed monster as an organising metaphor, this paper aims to provide agency and visibility for often under-represented and unacknowledged academic identities.     

Underprivileged urban mothers' perspectives on science

The purpose of this article is to report our findings from a qualitative study intended to develop our understandings of how inner‐city mothers perceive science. Using qualitative methodologies, our analysis reveals that the mothers' perceptions can be grouped into four categories: perceptions of science as (a) schoolwork/knowledge, (b) fun projects, (c) a tool for maintaining the home and family, and (d) an untouchable domain. After we present these categories we compare our findings across categories to argue that those mothers who had spent time doing science with their children were more likely to have a more personal, dynamic, and inquiry‐based view of science. We also argue that mothers' perceptions of science were more dynamic when they spoke about situations and contexts that were familiar to them, such as food, nutrition, and child care. We conclude the article with a discussion of the implications our findings have for science education reform. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 688–711, 2001