ABSTRACT at the Least (Reviews of Data-Based Studies of a Whimsical Nature)

One aspect of human resources development in which performance technologists are frequently involved is the establishment of selection procedures and criteria. There is a trend toward increased use of standardized tests in the selection process. A performance technologist might be involved in the selection of, or development of, tests for screening of applicants. Alex L. Chew and John D. Morris in their article “Investigation of the Lollipop Test as a Pre-Kindergarten Screening Instrument” provide a useful review of validation procedures.     

Curriculum and assessment for the knowledge society: interrogating experiences in the Republic of Ireland and Queensland,Australia

The ‘knowledge society’ has become a central discourse within educational reform. This article posits that the impact of the knowledge society discourse on curriculum and assessment has led to the emergence of what the authors term a new-form/re-form curriculum, and it asks whether what is transacting in contemporary movements in curriculum is less the reform of curriculum and more the emergence of a new-form/re-form curriculum. What is emerging is well beyond the discussions of outcomes and curriculum alignment that characterised much curriculum reform effort in the late 1990s. In this new-form/re-form curriculum ‘content’ is displaced by ‘skills’ and ‘knowledge acquisition’ by ‘learning’. Curriculum coverage is replaced by learner engagement. In this context, assessment also begins to take on new-form/re-form. Assessment now engages and promotes learning as process rather than as product. Two cases – the Republic of Ireland and Queensland, Australia – are analysed and compared to illustrate this shift in the conceptualisation of curriculum and assessment. Consideration is given to the possibility that this new-form/re-form curriculum represents a settlement in the contestation associated with learning outcomes and their perceived technical rationality and market focus. The paper concludes that the new-form/re-form curriculum is emerging in locations as diverse as Ireland and Queensland.     

About the Editor and Contributors

In the last decade ‘quality’ has assumed the status of one of the meta-discourses across many domains of public policy, including education. This paper focuses on the specific example of quality policy in Australian higher education of the 1990s, and in particular, on the micro level of quality policy practice as experienced by academic practitioners in 6 universities. As such, it forms a follow-up to an article published earlier in the Journal of Education Policy (Vidovich and Porter 1997) which examined macro (national) and intermediate (the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) levels of a quality policy cycle consisting of contexts of influence, policy text production and practice, as articulated by Ball and colleagues (Bowe, Ball and Gold 1992, Ball 1994). The findings of in-depth interviews with key university personnel provide evidence of the ‘messy’ realities of the policy process and considerable variation in quality policy practices at local sites, particularly in terms of the different historical contexts of universities which were categorized as ‘traditional’, ‘alternative’ and ‘former college’ types. However, despite such variation, the ‘bigger picture’ effect of the quality policy under investigation was to enhance Australian national Government control of higher education, albeit at a ‘distance’, characteristic of the culture of performativity increasingly pervading higher education across many OECD countries. A further effect was to increase inequalities, both between and within universities.