Those who ignore the past … : 12 'easy' lessons for the next millennium

Efforts to improve US schools through curriculum reform, attention to teaching and, the specifications of objectives and standards for education, have been recurrent themes during the past half-century. I offer a distillation of 12 'easy' lessons that can be learned from the careful examination of ideas and practices concerning the improvement of schools. I discuss each of these lessons with respect to their potentialities and their complexities, and try to provide a summary of what can be learned from US history which can guide efforts to make schools genuinely educative institutions. Whether those lessons will be learned and applied are consequences that I do not, and cannot, confidently address. However, my arguments may promote debate that might decrease the likelihood that the past will be repeated.     

Validity and Automad Scoring: It's Not Only the Scoring

What are the validity issues involved in automated scoring of tests? What is the nature of the interplay among construct definition, task design, examinee interface, tutorial, test development tools, and automated scoring and reporting?     

Adoption and adaptation in the use of transaction processing systems: The case of OCLC software

Library networks have developed transaction processing software as automation tools for technical and public services, based on generic library models. Transaction processing systems are shown to be a flexible type of design, allowing users to introduce modifications which aid their individual objectives: 92% of user institutions reported they made local modifications to standard OCLC practices and procedures. These findings are discussed in terms of network models for decision making in software use; methodology of software user studies; and diffusion of innovation processes in post-implementation stages of transaction processing software.     

Early identification of special educational needs and the definition of 'at risk': The Early Years Transition and Special Educational Needs (EYTSEN) Project

Education in the early years is a key element in the Government's current strategy. Recently, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) funded a major study of Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE). The Early Years Transition and Special Educational Needs (EYTSEN) Project developed from the EPPE research and was also funded by the DfES. The authors of this article, Brenda Taggart, Pam Sammons, Rebecca Smees, Kathy Sylva, Edward Melhuish, Iram Siraj-Blatchford, Karen Elliott and Ingrid Lunt, all worked on the EYTSEN Project, based at the Institute of Education, University of London. In this article, they provide a summary of the findings from the EYTSEN Project, reviewing the impact of pre-school provision on children said to be 'at risk' of developing special educational needs. They suggest that pre-school experience has a positive impact on cognitive attainment and social or behavioural development and that integrated centres (where education and care are fully combined) and nursery schools have the most positive influence among the different f o rms of pre-school provision. This paper also discusses the identification of special educational needs; quality in pre-school centres; parents' perspectives; and future developments. The article closes with a call for improved training for practitioners working in early years settings.     

Capturing the Complexity of Moral Development and Education

This article discusses challenges educators face when attempting to sequence moral education. Two factors are identified as primary sources hindering efforts to engage in effective moral education: (a) the premature application of research findings from developmental psychology to classroom practices and (b) the underestimation of the complexity of interactions between development in students' social and moral understandings and their applications in social contexts. Research is reviewed demonstrating that morality develops alongside concepts about societal conventions and zones of personal discretion and privacy. Results of an ongoing study are presented pointing toward a U-shaped pattern in moral development in which frequency of moral choices is higher among younger children and older adolescents than among early adolescents. Research examining contextual moral decision making is discussed in relation to efforts to sequence moral education.     

Untangling citation networks

The pattern of citation links between articles permits a placement in a space of points representing these articles. Using the rule that articles are placed at the centroid of the articles to which they are linked, pictures can be drawn revealing key papers and their descendants. This simple rule for placing papers by their citation pattern may also be used to scale other citation-based data. The example used in this paper is the placement of overlapping groups of articles linked by shared articles.     

A Computer-Based Task for Measuring the Representational Component of Quantitative Proficiency

In this study, we created a computer-delivered problem-solving task based on the cognitive research literature and investigated its validity for graduate admissions assessment. The task asked examinees to sort mathematical word problem stems according to prototypes. Data analyses focused on the meaning of sorting scores and examinee perceptions of the task. Results showed that those who sorted well tended to have higher GRE General Test scores and college grades than did examinees who sorted less proficiently. Examinees generally preferred this task to multiple-choice items like those found on the General Test's Quantitative section and felt the task was a fairer measure of their ability to succeed in graduate school. Adaptations of the task might be used in admissions tests, as well as for instructional assessments to help lower- scoring examinees localize and remediate problem-solving difficulties.