Natural hazard preparedness in an Auckland community: child and community perceptions

Community engagement in natural hazard preparedness is crucial to ensure sustainable initiatives. Children are important members of communities, and can actively contribute to community preparedness. This article presents research undertaken with 11- to 12-year-old students from a school in Auckland, New Zealand, and leaders associated with the school community regarding their perceptions of the role of schools, communities and children in natural hazard preparedness. The findings show that the students believe they can be effective in promoting preparedness in their school, homes and community, and act as leaders in this capacity. Community leaders stated that preparedness actions should be culturally relevant, community initiated and owned and inclusive of child perspectives. From the combined perspectives of students and community leaders, this work concludes that emergency management must engage in culturally responsive ways with Māori and Pacific communities to enable community preparedness initiatives that are tailored to the cultural values and practices of communities most at risk from natural hazards. Further, it concludes that children have an important voice in community preparedness, which could be encouraged through school and community initiatives.     

Documenting support needs and adjustment gaps for students with disabilities: teacher practices in Australian classrooms and on national tests

Accommodations or adjustments for students with disabilities (SWDs) who need them are required in Australian education law and policy for classroom instruction and assessment, and external educational accountability tests. Drawing upon the structure of the Assessment Accommodations Checklist and more than a decade of accessibility research, the Checklist of Learning and Assessment Adjustments for Students (CLAAS) was developed to help teachers select and document adjustments that support SWDs and students with additional needs in classroom instruction and assessment, and external tests. The CLAAS was trialled with 21 primary school teachers documenting adjustments for 89 students with diverse needs. Teachers indicated that the CLAAS provided a comprehensive list of adjustments, was useful for recording adjustments across classroom instruction and assessment, and external tests, and provided guidance about potential adjustments for SWDs or with additional learning needs. The documented adjustments also indicated some considerable gaps between supports provided in classrooms compared with the Australian educational accountability tests. Findings also provided initial evidence for the reliability and validity of use of the CLAAS for its intended purposes. The CLAAS is a promising tool for helping both researchers and teachers systematically document and provide equitable and inclusive adjustments for SWDs and additional learning needs given their needs for classroom learning, assessment and external testing and examination requirements.     

Engaging Undergraduate Students in Research Activities: Are Research Universities Doing a Better Job?

Engaging undergraduate students in research activities has been advocated as an innovative strategy to improve American higher education (Boyer Commission, Reinventing undergraduate education: A blueprint for America’s research universities. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Stony Brook, NY, 1998). This study compared the frequency of undergraduate student research experiences at different types of colleges and universities from the early 1990s through 2004. The results indicate that the frequency of student research experiences increased since 1998 at all types of institutions and that students at research universities were not more likely than their counterparts elsewhere to have such experiences. The findings were consistent across major fields. To live up to their claims, research universities must find additional ways to involve undergraduates in research with faculty members. Shouping Hu is Associate Professor of Higher Education at Florida State University. He received his M.S. degree in Economics and Ph.D. in Higher Education from Indiana University. His research and scholarship focuses on postsecondary access and persistence, college student experience, and higher education finance. George D. Kuh is Chancellor’s Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the quality of undergraduate education. Joy Gaston Gayles is Associate Professor in Adult and Higher Education at North Carolina State University. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Shaw University, Master’s degree from Auburn University, and Ph.D. in Higher Education from The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on college student learning and development.     

Persistence versus withdrawal from the college classroom: A test of four theoretically derived propositions

The purpose of this study was to test the generalizability of results obtained in laboratory research in the area of persistence behavior of students who drop college courses. Four hypotheses that included predictions concerning which students were most likely to drop courses, which courses were most likely to be dropped, and at what point in the semester students were most likely to drop courses were formulated from the results of laboratory research. None of the hypotheses were adequately supported by the data, suggesting that the results of laboratory research in this area are not readily transferable to college course-dropping behavior, at least without taking into account more relevant situational and personal variables.     

Enhanced use of educational accountability data to monitor educational progress of Australian students with focus on Indigenous students

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability - In Australia, under the National Assessment Plan, educational accountability testing in literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) is undertaken with all...     

Attitudes towards Innovations in Primary Schools: A Study of In-Service Teachers

This is a study of how a group of primary school teachers in Singapore dealt with the possibility of introducing informal educational innovations in their school settings. “Informal innovations” here refers to the voluntary adoption of new teaching methods, techniques and ideas acquired during an in-service teacher education programme, namely, the Further Professional Certificate in Education (FPCE) programme conducted by the Institute of Education, Singapore. Did these teachers attempt, when back in their schools, to experiment with the new ideas and methods of teaching they had been exposed to during the one year of the FPCE programme? What factors worked for, and against, attempts at innovations in their primary schools? Were there structural constraints and socio-psychological obstacles that they had to negotiate in order to adopt innovations in classroom and educational practices? If innovative ideas had remained dormant, was this because the teachers were unconvinced about the practicality and relevance of these ideas for the classroom and the school? These questions serve as the focal points of a small study involving 66 primary school teachers. Of the 66 teachers, sixteen had resumed work at school for nine months after they completed their in-service attachment at the Institute of Education (IE). The remaining 50 were in the midst of their in-service training when they participated in the study.     

The Stability of Rater Severity in Large-Scale Assessment Programs

The purpose of this study was to investigate the stability of rater severity over an extended rating period. Multifaceted Rasch analysis was applied to ratings of 16 raters on writing performances of 8, 285 elementary school students. Each performance was rated by two trained raters over a period of seven rating days. Performances rated on the first day were re-rated at the end of the rating period. Statistically significant differences between raters were found within each day and in all days combined. Daily estimates of the relative severity of individual raters were found to differ significantly from single, on-average estimates for the whole rating period. For 10 raters, severity estimates on the last day were significantly different from estimates on the first day. These fndings cast doubt on the practice of using a single calibration of rater severity as the basis for adjustment of person measures.