EAST: Developing an electronic assessment and storage tool

Assessment is an ongoing process that evaluates samples of completed student assignments to determine whether the underlying curriculum effectively produces the desired learning outcomes. Each year, the current system of tracking and storing artefacts for assessment becomes increasingly difficult. Compiling the results is a time-consuming process. EAST provides a cohesive web-based solution for managing assessment artefacts. EAST aids the assessment effort through the ability to easily store artefacts in electronic form, support and record the assessment of student work, and ease the development of reports. This paper discusses the analysis, development and features of EAST. The first section discusses the analysis phase of the project, highlighting the system objectives and the requirements of the EAST system. The second section details how the EAST system was developed and implemented. In the last section, features of the system are described and its contribution to the school's assessment effort is discussed.     

Is the Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts? Modeling the Contributions of Language Comprehension Skills to Reading Comprehension in the Upper Elementary Grades

Language comprehension is crucial to reading. However, theoretical models and recent research raise questions about what constitutes this multifaceted domain. We present two related studies examining the dimensionality of language comprehension and relations to reading comprehension in the upper elementary grades. Studies 1 (Grade 6; N = 148) and 2 (Grade 3–5; N = 311) contrasted factor models of language comprehension using item level indicators of morphological awareness and vocabulary (Studies 1 and 2) and syntactic awareness (Study 2). In both studies, a bifactor model—including general language comprehension and specific factors for each language component—best fit the data, and general language comprehension was the strongest predictor of reading comprehension. In Study 2, the morphology-specific factor also uniquely predicted reading comprehension above and beyond general language comprehension. Results suggest the value of modeling the common proficiency underlying performance on tasks designed to tap theoretically distinct language comprehension skills.     

Conceptualising transitions from vocational to higher education: bringing together Bourdieu and Bernstein

Abstract

In this paper we provide a framework for conceptualising transitions from Vocational Education and Training (VET) programmes to Higher Education (HE), by bringing together Bourdieu’s and Bernstein’s theoretical approaches with the view to attend to the often side-lined epistemic and pedagogical parameters. We utilise the Bourdieusian tools of field, habitus and capital to capture the relational, material and cultural aspects of HE transitions. In using a Bernsteinian lens we shed further light into how social agents acquire differentially structured and valorised knowledges and develop a sense of themselves as hierarchically positioned knowers. The metaphor of transitional frictions is utilised to capture the ongoing struggles that students with a VET background experience as they make the transition to HE. We argue for the need of widening epistemic access and putting in place enabling pedagogies that can ease these transitional frictions, thereby potentially increasing the chances of successful HE participation and completion.     

Educational Psychology and Curriculum Design: a child‐centred approach

The links between curriculum design and educational psychology are, in principle, strong but are, in practice, becoming increasingly tenuous particularly with the apparent preference of the Department of Education and Science for a curriculum based upon certain ‘core’ subjects. A framework for a curriculum based upon the five communication skills of literacy, oracy, numeracy, graphicacy and physiognomacy is proposed. These are ‘basics’ yet represent the essentials of aesthetic education; their use ‘across the curriculum’ could lead to the establishment of ‘whole school’ curriculum policies. Some consideration is made of the relationship of educational psychology, and of Gardner's ‘multiple intelligences’, to the five forms of communication, with particular emphasis on graphicacy (spatial ability) and on physiognomacy (physical ability) which are skills commonly neglected in curriculum planning.     

Educating ‘others’: Drawing on the collective wisdom of intercultural experts

Forty invited interculturalists (both academics and non-academics) from nine countries engaged in developing a coherent culture of dialogue and collective action to address the challenge of redefining intercultural education provisions with regard to the needs of refugee children. The method of cooperative inquiry to elicit theoretical and professional expertise from the participants was adopted. This inquiry was based on four dimensions of reflective practice, drawing on experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowledge. The intercultural experts (seen as ‘co-researchers’ and/or ‘co-subjects’) who participated engaged in a rigorous intercultural and reflexive dialogue developed in four distinct phases. The first two phases took place in their own local contexts and the final ones in a forum organised in Greece. During the forum, the participants’ diverse knowledge and experience were renegotiated to ascertain the ‘collective wisdom’ of the group and to address issues of otherness and approaches to refugee education, teachers’ training and mediation. The consensus reached by the participants included the following: the need for local communities to be supported so as to avoid and mitigate any hostility towards refugees; the urgency of a common European asylum policy; the realisation of the ‘other’ as a social construct based on hierarchical connotations and defined by diverse (meta)narratives; the urgency for providing formal/mainstream education to secure a pathway to social citizenship for refugees; the adoption of culturally responsive education practices to empower intercultural learning using refugee children’s own cultural knowledge and collaborating with parents; and the need for systemic intercultural and mediation training for teachers.     

A Vendor Perspective: What Do All of These Changes Mean for Vendors?

Vendor keynote speaker Caitlin Trasande addressed the practical and applied implications of how government mandates and regulations drive innovations and research information management technologies, while tying in remarks made by Jane Marks, the publisher keynote speaker, and Scott Plutchak, the librarian keynote speaker. She is uniquely positioned to do this as she has been at Digital Science for 5 years, most recently as Head of Research Policy; holds a PhD in Neurobiology; and was very recently appointed Senior Strategy Editor at Nature. Trasande used products developed by Digital Science as examples to demonstrate how all sectors of the scholarly community are finding solutions to help enable compliance with mandates, such as those on data and Open Access. She also provided a futuristic look at how the UK government has begun to ask funded researchers to document the social impact of their research; how Digital Science worked with the UK government, and how likely this is to also happen in the United States.     

Creating an educational home: mothering for schooling in the Australian Women’s Weekly, 1943–1960

Abstract

This article examines cultural representations of the mid-twentieth century mother of schoolchildren in a mass-circulation Australian women’s magazine, arguing that schools and schooling have been under-acknowledged in the historiography of mothering, despite their importance in shaping modern childhood and family life. Framing the Australian Women’s Weekly as a medium of public instruction, we identify and analyse its advice about schooling, both direct and implied, across a variety of the magazine’s sections: in illustrations, news, feature articles, advertising, letters and advice columns. This advice was informed by the popular dissemination of medical, psychological and educational expertise, by managed exchanges amongst the magazine’s readers and by the availability of a variety of consumer products. Much of the guidance offered to mothers was aspirational, aimed at educating and thereby modernising the readership. The interconnectedness of advertising and editorial produced visual and textual images of an “educational home” in which children had their learning supported or enriched, just as their bodies were capably fed and clothed. By the 1950s there was an increasing emphasis on interpersonal relations and therapeutic psychology and the Weekly had embarked on a project of encouraging mothers to learn more about schooling, to do more to support their children’s learning and to take an interest in education as a social project. Despite her strong and growing connection to the school through her children, however, the school mother was almost always represented as working outside its physical boundaries during this period.