Assessing School Readiness: Validity and Bias in Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers' Ratings

As a part of efforts to evaluate and monitor the increasing public investment in early childhood education, teachers are being asked to assess children's school readiness. In this study, preschool teachers and kindergarten teachers rated children's skills in three areas (kindergarten readiness, academic skills, and communication skills), and these ratings were compared with direct assessments of the children's skills. Ratings by both groups of teachers tended to be more highly related to basic skills, such as counting and number naming, than to abilities such as solving applied problems and using expressive and receptive vocabulary. Preschool teachers' ratings had a lower association with children's observed skills and abilities than kindergarten teachers' ratings. Ratings of children attending Head Start were systematically inflated, but this relationship was mediated to a significant extent by the teachers' levels of education. More educated teachers rated children in a manner consistent with the children's directly assessed skills. Implications of these findings for informing future efforts to assess school readiness by using teacher ratings are discussed.     

Reconceptualising educational assessment in South Africa — testing times for teachers

This paper explores some of the problems arising when Continuous Assessment (CA) is grafted onto established pedagogic practices. It focuses on three issues: teachers' restricted understandings of assessment, teachers' emphasis on criteria that demonstrate concern with social control, and some of the problems connected with peer assessment. Two vignettes derived from fieldwork associated with a project to improve the quality of primary education are used to raise the issues. We argue that the development of desired practices is hampered above all by tacit values in tension with those underpinning the new curriculum. These values, together with the complexity of curriculum design, create serious problems of manageability and interpretation, which can only be addressed through detailed interactive in-service training, aimed at reconceptualising teachers' notions of assessment.     

Copyright complicance in the electronic age: Conceptual issues

This article focuses on several conceptual and structural issues that are central to copyright compliance in the electronic age. It presumes the development of a national electronic network for storing, organizing, accessing, managing, and charging for information. The article first discusses the implications of constructing a comprehensive electronic “highway,” or Digital Library System (DLS), which would link information to the widespread community of users. It then presents the ramifications of a highly decentralized set of subsystems serving rights holders and users, linked by protocols established by the DLS. A discussion of the implications of digital interchangeability for copyright follows. The article ends with an analysis of alternatives to existing intellectual property rights conveyance systems, and concludes that current ownership structures, and systems for conveying rights and royalties, will remain the foundation for copyright in the electronic world. This article appeared in a slightly different form in theProceedings of the Twelfth National Online Meeting—1991, and is published here with the permission of Learned Information, Inc., Medford, N.J.     

Academic libraries and university presses

In recent years university presses have undergone some significant changes, such as expansion of their scope to include materials that may have appeal beyond the scholarly market. This article investigates, through the use of a survey of university libraries, the acquisition of university press products by libraries. In general, recent years have been changes in the relationship between university presses and libraries that have resulted in fewer items being purchased by the libraries.