Strategies that challenge: exploring the use of differentiated assessment to challenge high-achieving students in large enrolment undergraduate cohorts

Academics teaching large and highly diverse classes are familiar with the inevitable effect this has on promulgating teaching and assessment practices to ‘middle of the distribution’, thus ignoring the distribution extremes. Although the literature documents a wide range of strategies for supporting poor-performing students in large class settings, very little work has been reported on catering for more capable students who may feel frustrated and poorly challenged in such settings. This paper reports on the introduction of alternative assessment tasks into two first-year science units of study, with the aim of providing more challenging learning opportunities for high-performing students. It analyses student engagement with and perception of alternative assessment, and concludes that such opportunities are well received by students, even when no additional marks are available nor special credit recognition given for completing an advanced task.     

Managing Change in Higher Education: Assessing Staff Perceptions of the Impact of Semesterization

The background to the radical reform of higher education in the United Kingdom since the mid-1980s is given with stress on the idea that a motivating factor has been a misunderstanding of classical economics on the part of neo-liberal higher education administrators. Among the reforms that have been imposed, for the most part, from above have been modularization of the course structure and the semesterization of the academic year. Using a Likert-scale format, the authors have polled a sampling of faculty members at a given UK university. Their preliminary set of results, based on what they admit is a small sampling, indicates widespread faculty disapproval at the way modularization and semesterization were imposed at this university.     

Where words collide: social class,schools and linguistic discontinuity

The prestige accorded to standard language varieties, particularly within the field of education, together with language management role of schools with respect to the variety and the extent to which linguistic differences construct discontinuous relationships between the school and specific social groups provide the rationale for this paper. This qualitative study, based on a friendship focus group design, was conducted with two groups of 12-year-old children from contrasting ‘ideal type’, socio-economic groups over the period of one school year. Findings outline specific practices where the linguistic expectations and demands within school-space create different implications and outcomes for middle-class and working-class children as a result of their linguistic experiences in non-school space. The implications of these linguistic interactions on patterns of engagement with the school among the children in the sample are also considered.     

Quantifying Stakeholder Values of VET Provision in the Netherlands

It is well-known that the quality of vocational education and training (VET) depends on how well a given programme aligns with the values and interests of its stakeholders, but it is less well-known what these values and interests are and to what extent they are shared across different groups of stakeholders. We use vignettes to quantify the values that four groups of stakeholders assign to nine attributes relating to VET quality. The four stakeholders are students, teachers, workplace training supervisors, and policymakers. The nine attributes are employers’ appreciation of students, graduation rate, obtained language skills of students, mentoring hours in workplace learning, challenge, structure, students’ appreciation of teachers, schooling hours, and attention to civic education. Five hundred thirty-one Dutch respondents were repeatedly asked to rank a set of four hypothetical programmes, each with a specific value on the nine quality indicators. Through conjoint analysis we obtain the values that the stakeholders assigned to the nine attributes when evaluating the quality of VET programmes. The values assigned to the attributes ‘a challenging curriculum’ and ‘employers’ satisfaction’ were similar across the four groups of stakeholders, yet the values assigned to the remaining attributes differed substantially across stakeholders. This illustrates the diversity in values and interests of different stakeholders, and points to a need to quantify these values, for use by both the Dutch government and VET colleges, to improve the overall quality of education and the match between vocational programmes and their stakeholders.