Balancing varied assessment functions to attain systemic validity: Three is the magic number

Accountability-oriented reforms demand immediate and continual gains on achievement test, for all students, and without diminishing other outcomes or undermining instruction. This paper describes a framework for aligning classroom assessment and external testing with the aim of negotiating these seemingly contradictory goals. The framework varies the sensitivity to instruction and the representations of knowledge across approaches to assessment. Cycles of design- based studies successively refine relationships between a curriculum and the frame that each assessment provides. Doing so, we argue, leverages the unique formative and summative balance across assessments in order to scaffold learning and demonstrate the “consequential” validity of our strategy without compromising curricula, instruction, or the “evidential” validity that warrants their continued use.     

Early Identification and Intervention: Head Start's Response to Mental Health Challenges

Serving low-income children from birth to age five and their families, Head Start is a primary venue for identification and intervention in the area of child mental health. However, recent research has demonstrated that the knowledge base regarding prevalence, developmental course, and predictive power of child mental health problems is lacking for young children in general and low-income, diverse populations in particular. Head Start's agency-level data is often discrepant from both national estimates and small, intensive studies of similar populations, perhaps for reasons related to availability of community services and professional staff, as well as concerns about stigmatization. Following on recent expert recommendations, new collaborative Federal initiatives are underway to increase our understanding of the types, trajectories, and treatments of mental health problems affecting the vulnerable children served by Head Start. The paper concludes with a call to action for the field in the area of young children's mental health.     

Discovering the Laws of Sampling

That the sample mean and variance are “good” estimates of the corresponding population parameters is easily accepted as “obvious” by students, but the concept of standard error of the mean is often found to be quite a hurdle. That this standard error decreases inversely as the square-root of the sample size, and the mysterious appearance of the Normal distribution, are often taken as magical and incomprehensible effects, and non-mathematical students can often be turned away from further understanding. This article describes a program which provides an experimental framework in which the student can rapidly develop an intuition for the basic properties of sampling.     

Promoting technology integration through collaborative apprenticeship

Teachers often learn technology skills and integration strategies in intensive seminars, ineffective means for professional learning because experiences are seldom transferred to instructional practices. Thus, effective technology integration requires teachers to obtain learning experiences within the context of their teaching so they can practice, reflect, and modify their practices. Learning in a teaching community is a social process that involves ongoing, on-site, and just-in-time support. Teachers need avenues to continually interact to provide such support across all members of the community. Collaborative Apprenticeship, a professional development model featuring reciprocal interactions, is one such approach to promoting technology integration. Teachers experienced in technology use serve as mentors of peer-teachers' technology applications aimed at improving instruction. Technology is progressively infused as peer-teachers learn to design technology-rich lessons from their technology-savvy peers through modeling, collaboration, and coaching.     

The nexus between college choice and persistence

Initial student commitments have long been considered an influence on persistence, but the reasons why students choose to attend a college have seldom been considered as dimensions of initial commitments that could influence persistence processes and outcomes. This study used NPSAS-87 to examine the influence of finance-related reasons for choosing a college on persistence decisions. The findings include (1) finance-related choices have direct and indirect influences on whether students persist in college; and (2) market-based, monetary measures of financial aid, tuition costs, housing costs, and other living costs have a substantial direct effect on persistence.     

New Zealand Maori Stories and Symbols: Family Value Lessons for Western Counsellors

Maori stories and symbols offer Westerns counselors a rich heritageof wisdom. This article provides a summary of key Maori mythologyand worldview highlighting the profound significance of sacredgeography—manifested in the marae (meeting ground) andthe wharenui (meeting house)—and family (whenau) imbedded in genealogy (whakapa). The authors then considerrelated significance for contemporary Maori, offer questions andapplications for western counsellors, and acknowledge essentialconsultation from a Maori staff advisor (te kaiurungi).     

Comparing Union and Nonunion Staff Perceptions of the Higher Education Work Environment

Evidence of substantial growth in unionization among university noninstructional staff over the past 20 years (Hurd and Woodhead, 1987) and the emergence of a quality movement in higher education linking employee attitudes toward the work environment with increased productivity point to the need for additional research into union and nonunion staff perceptions of the work environment. This paper describes a conceptually oriented, exploratory study of the university work environment as perceived and defined by union and nonunion noninstructional staff.     

Digital archives in the cloud: Collective memory,institutional histories and the politics of information

The archive is a cultural institution that creates a framework for the social and collective memory and as such is one of the collection of knowledge institutions that not only preserves and classifies “texts” but uses them to re-create collective memory and sometimes to invent cultural histories. Like all knowledge institutions, the archive is also a construction deeply implicated in knowledge politics or what Foucault calls power/knowledge. In the past the archive has functioned as a central metaphor for the construction of human knowledge in all it is different institutional forms and like the encyclopedia and the camera, the archive produces highly coded representations that make implicit validity claims to the truth and justice of the past. Politically speaking, those who control the archive control the past. In the digital world, the archive is used to describe a machine-readable location as a store for “data” and “information.” Digital technologies radically alter our existing institutions, making access to their embedded knowledge widely available and enable learning and research anytime, anywhere. Data analytics algorithmically can manipulate electorates and entire democracies in new ways, while destabilising the free press. This article asks what digitizing an archive means for collective memory, for the history of institutions and for politics in the Cloud.