Threats to student evaluative judgement and their management

ABSTRACT

Students’ capacity for making evaluative judgements of their own work is widely acknowledged as central to their learning within programmes as well as being vital to their subsequent professional practice. In higher education literature, the act of evaluative judgement is usually portrayed as a process of deliberative, analytical reasoning requiring student agency and objectivity, typically scaffolded by points of reference such as explicit criteria, rubrics or exemplars. This article challenges this common portrayal of judgement by drawing attention to research from outside higher education on the role of unconscious factors in judgement and decision-making. Drawing from the field of heuristics and bias studies, the article outlines six unconscious factors that have the potential to distort students’ analytical judgement of their work. A recent challenge to the heuristics and bias approach that radically repositions the place of reasoning in judgement is also considered. Since these unconscious factors have received scant attention in higher education literature, the purpose of this article is to draw attention to them, to identify the challenges they pose to current understandings of evaluative judgement, and to outline their implications for enhancing assessment practice.     

Difficulties in defining mobile learning: analysis,design characteristics,and implications

Educational technology research and development - Mobile learning, or m-learning, has become an umbrella term for the integration of mobile computing devices within teaching and learning. In the...     

How can we Teach History through Television?

This article contrasts the often ambivalent attitudes of teachers towards television and generalised research on teachers’ uses of television, with detailed empirical evidence from primary school history co‐ordinators describing their reactions to and expectations of the medium. The data describes a wide variety of reasons why television is educationally useful in the teaching and learning of history. The argument is articulated that teachers and children can be sophisticated viewers of televisual schools history, offering useful guidelines for programme makers; but that teacher conservatism and lack of advisory support for teachers’ deployment of the medium may be hindering its educational effectiveness.     

An extinction trial as a reminder treatment following electroconvulsive shock

Animals given electroconvulsive shock (ECS) following active avoidance training were found to exhibit poor retention of the active avoidance response. However, this deficit was alleviated if the animals received an extinction trial for active avoidance prior to retention testing. That the trial was an extinction trial was demonstrated by the fact that exposure to the trial decremented the performance of animals not given ECS after learning. The implications of these findings for explanations of retrograde amnesia are discussed.     

Learning to teach with the web: Factors influencing teacher education faculty

Professional development at postsecondary institutions has primarily been supported through a central faculty development center. With purposive sampling, this small case study explored the ways in which teacher education faculty members were influenced to participate in decentralized professional development focused on learning to teach with WebCT. Results suggest that university faculty were influenced by both intrinsic factors (including convenience, comfort, common interests, and future purposes) and an extrinsic factor (external pressures). This research suggests that these factors also contributed to the faculty's satisfaction with the professional development. A follow-up interview explored how faculty coped with budgetary limitations and encouragement to pursue other distance education technologies.     

Perceptions of anatomy: critical components in the clinical setting

The evolution in undergraduate medical school curricula has significantly impacted anatomy education. This study investigated the perceived role of clinical anatomy and evaluated perceptions of medical students' ability to apply anatomical knowledge in the clinic. The aim of this study was to develop a framework to enhance anatomical educational initiatives. Unlike previous work, multiple stakeholders (clinicians, medical students, and academic anatomists) in anatomy education were evaluated. Participants completed an eleven-point Likert scale survey written by the investigators. Responses from both clinical educators and medical students at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and College of Medicine suggest that medical students are perceived as ill-prepared to transfer anatomy to the clinic. Although some areas of patient management differ in relevancy to anatomical education, there are areas of clinical care which were uniformly ranked as relying heavily on anatomical knowledge (imaging and diagnostic studies, physical examination, and arrival at correct diagnosis) by a variety of clinical specialists. Our results suggest a need for advanced anatomy courses to be taught coincidental with medical students' clinical education. Development of these courses would optimally rely on input from both clinicians and academic anatomists, as both cohorts rated clinical anatomy similarly (P ≥ 0.05). Additionally, we hypothesize that preclinical students' application of anatomy would be enhanced if clinical context was derived from areas of clinical care which rely heavily on anatomy, whereas courses designed for advanced medical students will benefit from anatomical context focused on specialty specific aspects of clinical care identified in this study.     

Measures of reading comprehension: do they measure different skills for children learning English as a second language?

The validity of two measures of English reading comprehension was examined across three different groups of English language learners (ELLs; 64 Portuguese, 66 Spanish and 65 Cantonese). All three groups were achieving within the average range in second grade. An exploratory principal components analysis of reading skills was carried out to determine which skills were related to two commonly used tests of reading comprehension, the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery??s test of Passage Comprehension (WLPB-PC; Woodcock, 1991) and the Gray Oral Reading Test-4 (GORT-4; Wiederholt & Bryant, 2001). The factor solutions were different for the three language groups but showed many similarities in that the GORT-4 and WLPB-R tests of reading comprehension fell on the same factor within each group. Hierarchical regression analyses examining relationships among vocabulary, decoding and reading comprehension showed that language group membership did not significantly predict performance on either measure of reading comprehension. Differences that arose are likely due to issues with task validity and not ELL status. Limitations and future research are discussed.