EVALUATING AND PREDICTING SURVEY EFFICIENCY USING GENERALIZABILITY THEORY

A long-term science performance monitoring program began in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1980 with the first in an initial series of annual national sample surveys of the science performances of II-, 13- and 15-year-old pupils. The assessment framework underlying this program is process-oriented, consisting of a number of subcategories of science activity, some of which are assessed in practical mode. Pupils are randomly selected for testing according to a complex sampling scheme. Questions are also selected randomly to represent the various subcategories.
From the start of this program, it was intended to appeal to generalizability theory for a suitable estimation paradigm, and in this paper some preliminary applications of G-theory are described. The results of these applications would suggest that computerized question-banking, domain-sampling of questions, and G-theory together provide a useful new technology for this kind of performance monitoring exercise. The issue of interpretability might still remain a problem, however, unless the question domains can be clearly defined, and can be reflected in the question pools with consistency over time.     

The State and the South African University System under Apartheid

This paper is offered as a contribution to the larger task of providing a comprehensive study of South Africa's universities during the era of apartheid (1948-1990). Because of the centrality of the state to apartheid, the focus adopted is that of the role of the state in university affairs. The inadequacies of state theory in general are acknowledged, but, it is argued nonetheless, that the state warrants special consideration, provided the limits of this type of approach are firmly grasped. It is also suggested that the state's actual relations with the racially fragmented university system are best conceptualised in terms of Neave's notion of 'boundaries' which implies flux. Indeed, the interactions between the state and universities in South Africa were more volatile than is generally portrayed in the literature and were especially so during the 1980s as the state struggled unsuccessfully to overcome the popular challenge to White domination in general and to apartheid university education in particular.