The Use of Assessment Data for School Improvement Purposes

Hampshire LEA has carried out two longitudinal studies: from reception intake to the end of Year 2, and from the end of Year 2 to the end of Year 6. A total, respectively, of 161 and 114 schools and about 6400 and 4700 pupil records have been analysed. Test scores at baseline (entry to reception), Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 have been used, together with pupil and school level variables. Multilevel models have been fitted and show that schools differ along several dimensions, both by curriculum subject and by prior attainment of pupil. The research sought ways of communicating the results to head teachers in ways which were meaningful without destroying the underlying complexity of the relationships uncovered. The paper describes how this can be done, in ways which can assist the process of school improvement.     

Ralph W. Tyler: The man and his work

CONGRESS AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY by George N. Rainsford. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1972. 156 pp. $6.95.

BAYLOR AT INDEPENDENCE: 1845‐1886 by Lois Smith Murray. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 1972. xxiii + 421 pp. $10.00.

DIRECTORY OF FACILITIES FOR THE LEARNING‐DISABLED AND HANDICAPPED by Careth Ellingson and James Cass. New York: Harper &; Row, Publishers, Inc., 1972. xii + 624 pp. $15.00.

THE EMERGING TECHNOLOGY: INSTRUCTIONAL USES OF THE COMPUTER IN HIGHER EDUCATION by Roger E. Levien et al. A Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and RAND Corporation Study. New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1972. 583 pp. $12.50.

GOVERNANCE FOR THE TWO‐YEAR COLLEGE by Richard C. Richardson, Jr., Clyde E. Blocker, and Louis W. Bender. Prentice‐Hall, 1972. ix + 245 pp. $8.95.

TEACHING SINGING by John Carroll Burgin. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1973. 284 pp. $7.50.

THE NIGHTWATCHERS by Angus Cameron. Illustrated with line drawings by Peter Parnall. New York: Four Winds Press, 1971. 112 pp. $8.95.     

International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS): An analysis of international comparisons of adult literacy

The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) raises a number of important issues that are inherent in all attempts to make comparisons of cognitive and behavioural attributes across countries. This article discusses both the statistical and interpretational problems. A detailed analysis of the survey instruments is carried out to demonstrate the cultural specificity involved. The data modelling techniques used in IALS are critiqued and alternative analyses performed. The article argues for extreme caution in interpreting results in the light of the weaknesses of the survey.     

The evolution of school league tables in England 1992–2016: ‘Contextual value‐added’, ‘expected progress’ and ‘progress 8’

Since 1992, the UK Government has published so‐called ‘school league tables’ summarising the average General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) ‘attainment’ and ‘progress’ made by pupils in each state‐funded secondary school in England. While the headline measure of school attainment has remained the percentage of pupils achieving five or more good GCSEs, the headline measure of school progress has changed from ‘value‐added’ (2002–2005) to ‘contextual value‐added’ (2006–2010) to ‘expected progress’ (2011–2015) to ‘progress 8’ (2016–). This paper charts this evolution with a critical eye. First, we describe the headline measures of school progress. Second, we question the Government's justifications for scrapping contextual value‐added. Third, we argue that the current expected progress measure suffers from fundamental design flaws. Fourth, we examine the stability of school rankings across contextual value‐added and expected progress. Fifth, we discuss the extent to which progress 8 will address the weaknesses of expected progress. We conclude that all these progress measures and school league tables more generally should be viewed with far more scepticism and interpreted far more cautiously than they have often been to date.     

Educating World Teachers for Cosmopolitan Classrooms and Schools

This essay responds to the question of what it might mean to educate “world teachers” for cosmopolitan classrooms and schools through an examination of an ethnographic play entitled Satellite Kids. The author begins with the idea that teachers need to develop or build up “intercultural capital”, that is, knowledge and dispositions that will help them in intercultural exchanges of teaching and learning. The author then explores what such knowledge and dispositions might entail through an analysis of Satellite Kids. The play's focus on issues of power, identity, and intercultural conflict within a Canadian cosmopolitan school makes an interesting case study for exploring what intercultural knowledge and dispositions might look and sound like, and how the educational project of building intercultural capital is different from the project of multicultural education that has been dominant in Western teacher education throughout 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.