Evaluation systems and the pace of change – The example of Swedish higher education1

Abstract

The aim of¹ this article is to illuminate and discuss evaluation and evaluation systems in relation to the pace of change. It is argued that evaluation promotes and accelerates change. The article will thus contribute to a critical scrutiny of evaluation as a societal phenomenon and as a widespread practice in education. To accomplish this aim, the inherent purpose of evaluation and evaluation systems is brought forward. National evaluation systems for Swedish higher education are used as an empirical example. An analysis using Rosa’s three aspects of social acceleration (technical acceleration, acceleration of social change, and acceleration of the pace of life) is offered to demonstrate how the evaluation systems are related to, sustain, and promote an increase of the pace of change (acceleration) in educational practice in higher education.     

Mothers of children with externalizing behavior problems: cognitive risk factors for abuse potential and discipline style and practices

OBJECTIVE: Utilizing the conceptual framework of the Social Information Processing (SIP) model (Milner, 1993, 2000), associations between cognitive risk factors and child physical abuse risk and maladaptive discipline style and practices were examined in an at-risk population. METHODS: Seventy-three mothers of 5-12-year-old children, who were identified by their therapist as having an externalizing behavior problem, responded to self-report measures pertaining to cognitive risk factors (empathic perspective taking, frustration tolerance, developmental expectations, parenting locus of control), abuse risk, and discipline style and practices. The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) provided a confirmation of the child's externalizing behaviors independent of the therapist's assessment. RESULTS: The results of this study suggest several cognitive risk factors significantly predict risk of parental aggression toward children. A parent's ability to empathize and take the perspective of their child, parental locus of control, and parental level of frustration tolerance were significant predictors of abuse potential (accounting for 63% of the variance) and inappropriate discipline practices (accounting for 55% of the variance). CONCLUSIONS: Findings of the present study provide support for processes theorized in the SIP model. Specifically, results underscore the potential role of parents' frustration tolerance, developmental expectations, locus of control, and empathy as predictive of abuse potential and disciplinary style in an at-risk sample.     

A Step-by-Step Design and Development of an Integrated Educational Software to Deal with Students' Empirical Ideas about Mechanical Interaction

We present the educational software Interactions between Objects, which we designed and developed to assist constructive teaching of Newton's 3rd law and Newtonian Dynamics in general. The software was designed on the basis of students' empirical ideas and conceptual difficulties, identified from previous research with Greek students (11–16 years old), the main findings of which are presented. We describe the step-by step design of this software, which aims to help students reconstruct their knowledge in the action–reaction thematic field through a number of experiments, by simulating real everyday life situations of interaction between bodies, modeling those situations by the help of an appropriate didactic method, applying cognitive conflict processes and supporting run my model features to promote students' conceptual change in this physics area.     

Prospective relations among victimization, rejection, friendlessness, and children's self- and peer-perceptions

This study investigated the prospective links between three forms of peer adversities (i.e., victimization, rejection, and lack of reciprocated friendships) and children's perceptions of themselves and of their peers. The sample consisted of 212 children (107 boys and 105 girls, 11-13 years) recruited from four primary schools and followed up for a period of one year. The results showed that a negative self-perception was a risk factor for the development of all forms of peer adversities. Of the three forms of peer adversities assessed, victimization and rejection had an influence on children's peer perceptions. None of the peer adversities predicted changes in self-perceptions. The results partially support a transactional model between children and their environments.     

Nurturing Nature: How Brain Development Is Inherently Social and Emotional,and What This Means for Education

New advances in neurobiology are revealing that brain development and the learning it enables are directly dependent on social-emotional experience. Growing bodies of research reveal the importance of socially triggered epigenetic contributions to brain development and brain network configuration, with implications for social-emotional functioning, cognition, motivation, and learning. Brain development is also impacted by health-related and physical developmental factors, such as sleep, toxin exposure, and puberty, which in turn influence social-emotional functioning and cognition. An appreciation of the dynamic interdependencies of social-emotional experience, health-related factors, brain development and learning underscores the importance of a “whole child” approach to education reform and leads to important insights for research on social-emotional learning. To facilitate these interdisciplinary conversations, here we conceptualize within a developmental framework current evidence on the fundamental and ubiquitous biological constraints and affordances undergirding social-emotional learning–related constructs and learning more broadly. Learning indeed depends on how nature is nurtured.     

Back to Africa: Tracing Dyslexia Genes in East Africa

A sample of Swahili-speaking probands with reading difficulties was identified from a large representative sample of 1,500 school children in the rural areas of Tanzania. Families of these probands (n = 88) were invited to participate in the study. The proband and his/her siblings received a battery of reading-related tasks and performance on these tasks was recorded and treated as phenotypic data. Molecular-genetic analyses were carried out with 47 highly polymorphic markers spanning three previously identified regions of interest harboring susceptibility loci for reading difficulties: 2p, 6p, and 15q (DYX1–DYX3). The analyses revealed the involvement of these regions in the development of reading difficulties in Swahili. The linkage signals are especially pronounced for time (compared with error) indicators of reading difficulties. These findings are easily interpretable because in transparent languages such as Swahili deficits in reading are more related to the rate/speed of reading and reading-related processes than to the number of errors made. In short, the study incrementally advances the field by adding an understudied language and an understudied population to the variety of languages and populations in the field of molecular-genetic studies of reading difficulties.     

Rats acquire a low-response-cost daily time-place task with differential amounts of food

Gallistel (1990) theorized that when animals encounter a biologically significant event, they automatically form a tripartite code consisting of the time, place, and nature of the event. Recent research examining such time-place learning (TPL) has shown that rats are reluctant to perform TPL tasks and appear to do so only under high-response-cost situations (Thorpe, Bates, & Wilkie, 2003; Widman, Gordon, & Timberlake, 2000). In the present study, we trained rats on a low-response-cost daily TPL task, in which the amount of food varied with the spatiotemporal contingencies. It was found that rats readily learned this task. We hypothesize that, rather than automatically encoding a tripartite code when faced with a biologically important event, rats instead automatically encode bipartite codes consisting of time-event and event-place information.     

Adolescent Journeys: Finding Female Authority in <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Rain Catchers and The House on Mango Street</Emphasis>

This article compares the first-person narratives of two adolescent girls in the novels The Rain Catchers and The House on Mango Street. I propose that adolescent girls can use literacy to read the world around them as a text and therefore help them to form their own identities enough to ultimately find authority in telling their own stories. I use Judith Langer’s theory of envisionment-building as a primary lens through which to interpret the girls’ narrative work and further elucidate the feminist aspects involved through Belenky et al.’s famous work, Women’s Ways of Knowing.

Assessing abuse risk beyond self-report: analog task of acceptability of parent-child aggression

Objectives

The present investigation reports on the development and initial validation of a new analog task, the Parent-Child Aggression Acceptability Movie Task (P-CAAM), intended to assess respondents’ acceptance of parent-child aggression, including both physical discipline and physical abuse.

Methods

Two independent samples were utilized to develop and evaluate the P-CAAM: an undergraduate sample to initially pilot the task and a separate sample of normative parents for additional assessment of validity. Scores from the P-CAAM were compared to related measures, including measures of self-reported disciplinary attitudes, child abuse potential, harsh parenting style, and use and escalation of physical discipline practices on another analog parenting task.

Results

Across the studies, the P-CAAM demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and construct validity, evidencing mild to moderate associations with both self-report and analog measures. Participants demonstrating increased acceptance of physical discipline and physical abuse on the P-CAAM analog task also reported greater approval of physical discipline, greater use of and escalation of physical discipline, harsher parenting styles, and higher child abuse potential on two separate measures.

Conclusions

The P-CAAM analog appears to offer a promising alternative and/or supplement to conventional self-report measures, assessing attitudes regarding the acceptability of parent-child aggression in a way that is less likely to be influenced by social desirability. Suggestions for future evaluations with alternative samples, as well as possible implications of the data for disciplinary reactions are discussed.

Practice implications

The development of alternatives to self-report measurement may lead to clarification of theoretical models of abuse in ways that lead to improvements in intervention programming; analogs may also provide a useful means to assess intervention programming outcomes.     

The role of the principal's leadership style in the implementation of ICT policy

This paper presents findings of a study in information communication technology (ICT) implementation, on the principal's leadership style in relation to other factors that influence implementation. The principal's leadership style is perceived—on the basis of the characteristics of the context where the study was conducted—as a personal quality, rather than a change/transformational leadership behaviour or related to the principals' positional authority. The study employed firstly a large‐scale survey based on which case studies of four schools were selected for further research. The findings have implications for practice, more specifically, for principals' training and for the support provided to schools for embedding ICT. The paper draws on an institutionalist implementation approach to describe the principals' role in theorising the concept of ICT in education.