Bones,boys, bombs and booze: an exploratory study of the reliability of marking dissertations across disciplines

The primary aim of this study was to evaluate the reliability of the University’s Masters’ level (M‐level) generic assessment criteria when used by lecturers from different disciplines. A further aim was to evaluate if subject‐specific knowledge was essential to marking these dissertations. Four senior lecturers from diverse disciplines participated in this study. The University of Teesside’s generic M‐level assessment criteria were used and formatted into a grid. The assessment criteria related to the learning outcomes, the depth of understanding, the complexity of analysis and synthesis and the structure and academic presentation of the work. As well as a quantitative mark, a qualitative statement for the reason behind the judgement was required. Each lecturer provided a dissertation that had previously been marked. All participants then marked each of the four projects using the M‐level grid and comments sheet. The study found very good inter‐rater reliability. For any one project, the variation in marks from the original mark was no more than 6% on average. This study also found that subject‐specific knowledge was not essential to marking when using generic assessment criteria in terms of the reliability of marks. The authors acknowledge the exploratory nature of these results and hope other lecturers will join in the exploration to test the robustness of generic assessment criteria across disciplines.     

Individual strategies in a spatial task and how they relate to aptitudes

Thirty-two subjects were first submitted to a series of aptitude tests, then participated in a mental rotation task with advance information (Cooper, 1975), and finally gave retrospective reports about their solution strategy. The verbal reports showed that different subjects used different strategies to perform the rotation task, and also that some subjects shifted strategies, in that they successively adopted several ways of processing the same task. The coding of verbal reports led to distinguish five types of strategies (called rotation, partial rotation, verbal, projection, multiple). Five groups of subjects using preferentially one of these strategies were constituted. For each group hypotheses on performance were tested via analyses on reaction times and errors. These analyses confirmed that the five strategy groups produced different patterns of RT in conformity with verbal reports. Moreover the comparison of the mental aptitude profiles across the different strategy groups suggests that strategy choices are affected by steady and general characteristics of cognitive functioning.     

Poverty,deprivation and the politics of educational inclusion in Thanet and Lille

The paper reports on one outcome of a European Union-funded research project into some transnational aspects of youth marginalization. It discusses different discourses of inclusion and notes that poverty, deprivation and other social factors increase barriers to inclusive practices. The structure, provision and functioning of the education systems in the city of Lille, France, and the District of Thanet, England, are then compared and contrasted, and some barriers that prevent a proportion of the pupil populations from fully accessing school provision are identified. Both countries espouse inclusion but provide very different cultural contexts for its enactment. In Thanet, the market context inhibits equity of access to education and deepens social and educational disadvantages, while in Lille, despite French egalitarian ideals, the benign market between the private, largely denominational, secondary school sector and the public state provision, together with the informal systems of entry into the more prestigious lycées, are biased against the disadvantaged. Poverty and deprivation in both areas add to the difficulties of educational access and contribute to the formation of a group of disaffected young people who are marginalized as a consequence of an inability to participate fully and effectively in the education services provided. Some structural solutions to these problems are suggested and the paper concludes by advocating transnational policy considerations that could help to mitigate these difficulties.     

Difficultés liées à la présentation des questions mathématiques

Sans résumé     

Maternal scaffolding of attention between 5 and 8 months

Infants’ abilities to focus attention on objects and mothers’ behaviors mobilizing the attention of their child were studied in a sample of 30 dyads, at 5 and 8 months of age. It was hypothesized that at the younger age infants need their mothers’ scaffolding to explore their environment, and that the frequency of mothers’ encouragements at that age is related with their attentional capacities at 8 months; at this later age, mother’s and infant’s behaviors should no more be correlated. Data concerning both the total frequency of the target behaviors and the length of individual occurrences strongly confirm the hypotheses. They imply that in the mother attention getting should be distinguished from attention holding, and are discussed in terms of educational consequences.     

Cross-linguistic analysis of vocabulary in young children: spanish, dutch, French, hebrew, italian, korean, and american english

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.     

Une lumière s'est éteinte. H. Freudenthal — Homo Universalis

Résumé Nous voulons rendre ici hommage plus particulièrement à 1'aspect humaniste de la personnalité de Hans Freudenthal. C'était un homme dont 1'immense culture ne reconnaissait pas les frontières. Il s'est opposé (et ce dans plusieurs langues) à tous les obscurantismes. Son ceuvre s'est d éveloppée dans un très grand nombre de directions: mathématiques, histoire des sciences, éducation, philosophie, ... Il a uvré pour l'ouverture de l'enseignement des mathématiques 'pour tous' et pourtant il a toujours suivi les exigences intellectuelles d'un grand homme de sciences. Il fut aussi un homme d'action et a joué un rôle essentiel dans le d éveloppement de la recherche sur l'enseignement des mathématiques non seulement aux Pays-Bas mais dans le monde entier.

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We intend to present here an homage to the humanistic aspect of Hans Freudenthal's personality. His culture was devoid of any frontier and he always struggled (in many languages) against obscurantism. His thoughts and his works went in many complementary directions: mathematics, history of mathematics, mathematics education, philosophy... He worked to open mathematics education to everyone and never lost the intellectual requirements of a great scientific thinker. But he was also a man of action and had a great influence on the development of mathematics education research, not only in The Netherlands but also all around the world.