Effectiveness of Equating at the Passing Score for Exams With Small Sample Sizes

This article explores the amount of equating error at a passing score when equating scores from exams with small samples sizes. This article focuses on equating using classical test theory methods of Tucker linear, Levine linear, frequency estimation, and chained equipercentile equating. Both simulation and real data studies were used in the investigation. The results of the study supported past findings that as the sample sizes increase, the amount of bias in the equating at the passing score decreases. The research also highlights the importance for practitioners to understand the data, to have an informed expectation of the results, and to have a documented rationale for an acceptable amount of equating error.     

Testing to Destruction: A problem in a small state

This paper presents a review of assessment procedures in the small state of Macau, a Special Administrative Region of China under the 'one country two systems' policy. The situation of Macau is used as a critical case study of some questionable educational practices that can occur when testing runs without restraint. The paper presents quantitative and qualitative data from two empirical studies to argue that testing--largely, in this case, the testing of students' ability to repeat book knowledge and facts--if left unchecked, becomes part of a dependency culture, a hermetically sealed system in which curricula and testing mutually reinforce each other in producing a low-level, facts-driven curriculum, dangerously didactic pedagogy, rote learning, poor student motivation, and a powerful controlling mechanism on teachers and students. What is disturbing is that this is the very system which many participants in education in Macau seem to want.     

Making Real Analysis Relevant to Secondary Teachers: Building Up from and Stepping Down to Practice

Future teachers often claim that advanced undergraduate courses, even those that attempt to connect to school mathematics, are not useful for their teaching. This paper proposes a new way of designing advanced undergraduate content courses for secondary teachers. The model involves beginning with an analysis of the curriculum and practices of school mathematics and its teaching, and then using those to build up to the advanced mathematics – in this case, real analysis. After developing definitions, examples, theorems, and proofs, the model then reconnects to practice, asking the teachers to translate ideas from real analysis in ways that are appropriate for teaching high school content to students. To illustrate the model, we provide and discuss two example tasks.     

Does repeating a year improve performance? The case of teaching English

This paper examines whether having school students repeat a year improves their performance, focusing on learning English as a foreign language. It takes students’ English examination results from five years from a Chinese‐medium school, together with data on their learning styles and learning strategies. Drawing on local cultural and pedagogic factors, the study finds that repeating a year, far from improving scores, homogenizes the results of males and females, and, while finding a small but statistically insignificant rise in the scores of females, is detrimental to the performance of males. Repeating a year either makes no difference or a negative difference to results. It is suggested that repeating a year reproduces, sharpens and potentiates gender differences in learning and performing in English as a foreign language, and that repeating a year is the medium and outcome of gender inequality. Implications are drawn for practice.     

Temperament and Parenting Antecedents of Individual Differences in Three-Year-Old Boys' Pride and Shame Reactions

To examine individual differences in pride and shame reactions of 3-year-olds and their temperamental and parenting antecedents, 110 boys were studied at ages 36 and 37 months in a "rigged" achievement situation. After being trained to complete explicitly stipulated "easy" and "difficult" tasks before a buzzer sounded, success and failure were manipulated by artificially "rigging" how much time the child had to work on these tasks. Children's facial, verbal, and postural reactions to success and failure were composited to create pride scores following success and shame scores following failure. As expected, pride reactions were greater following success on the difficult than on the easy task, and shame reactions were greater following failure on the easy than on the difficult task. Early temperament (at 12/13 months) proved unrelated to pride and shame. With respect to parenting, measurements composited across 15, 21, 27, and 33 months showed that mothers and fathers who were more positive in their parenting had children who displayed less pride, and that children whose parents (especially mothers) were more negative in their parenting evinced less shame. These counterintuitive findings are discussed in terms of differences between assessments of parenting obtained in this investigation of parenting antecedents and those obtained in other studies of parental responses in the achievement situation itself. Directions for future research are outlined.     

Teaching children to do what they say they will do: A review of research with suggested applications for exceptional children

A major challenge for intervention programs involves ensuring that new response patterns occur in circumstances and at times other than the training setting. Teaching children to use verbal cues to control nonverbal behaviours is suggested as a procedure for establishing adaptive behaviours and as a self‐management strategy for ensuring generalization and maintenance of new responses.     

Cognitive Neuroscience and Educational Psychology: What Season Is It?

Byrnes and Fox get much right in their review of the relevance of cognitive neuroscience for educational psychology. They are correct that theoretical reduction is to be welcomed. They are also right that neurophysiological findings can constrain psychological theory and that this too is to be welcomed. Their review is on the mark in recommending that educational psychologists must become bilingual in their understanding of neurological terms and their analogous psychological constructs. The one difference in our positions that I do highlight is one of calibration rather than strong disagreement—my level of enthusiasm for scientific reduction in domains related to education is somewhat more muted than that of Byrnes and Fox because of wariness bom of the premature reductive attempts that litter our field.     

Primary science and technology: How confident are teachers?

Science and Technology is a new Key Learning Area in NSW Primary Schools. Survey results are used to compare preservice teachers (on entry and in the third year of their degree) with practising teachers, on their confidence in their knowledge about the topics in the syllabus, as well as their confidence to teach these topics. Reasons for stated confidence (or lack of it) are reported together with preservice and practising teachers' views about what needs to be done to improve their confidence. Preservice and practising teachers' opinions of the major sources of their knowledge about the topics in the new syllabus are contrasted. Results are discussed in the light of severalDiscipline Review recommendations. Specializations: primary science teacher education; environmental education; curriculum development.     

Exclusion and Inclusion in New Zealand Early Childhood Education: Disability,discourses and contexts Exclusion et Inclusion dans l'E´ducation des Jeunes Enfants en Nouvelle Ze´lande: Handicap,discours et contextes Exclusio´n e Inclusio´n en la Discapacidad Educativa de los Menores de Nueva Zelanda,discursos y contextos

This paper addresses some issues relating to the inclusion and exclusion of young children with disabilities in regular early childhood settings. Statements from parents, early childhood educators and support staff are analysed and presented as representing a number of discourses that are the context within which disability and provisions for children with disabilities are created. Exclusionary discourses include a theme of disability as difference, whereby disabled children are considered not to be the responsibility of ordinary early childhood educators or services. Inclusionary discourses, on the other hand, have as a central theme the 'humanness' of disabled children, supporting a rights discourse and a view of disabled children as belonging in ordinary early childhood settings. Cet article s'adresse àdes sujets concernant l'inclusion et l'exclusion des jeunes enfants incapacités dans les milieux ordinaires de la première enfance. Les discours des parents, des éducateurs de la première enfance et du personnel de soutien sont analysés et présentés comme représentant de nombreux discours qui sont le contexte dans lequel l'incapacitéet les services spécialisés pour les enfants incapacités sont créés. Les discours de l'exclusion incluent un thème de l'incapacité comme la différence par laquelle les enfants incapacités ne sont pas considérés comme la responsabilitédes éducateurs ou des services ordinaires de la première enfance. En revanche les discours de l'inclusion ont l'humanitédes enfants incapacités comme un thème principal, soutenant un discours de droits et une opinion des enfants incapacités comme faisant partie des milieux ordinaires de la première enfance. Este art ¤ Iculo discute cuestiones relacionados con inclusión y exclusión de nin~os incapacitados en escenarios preescolar regular. Declaraciones de padres, educadores preescolares y personal soporte estn analizados y presentados como representando un nmero de discursos que estn en el contexto donde incapacidades, y provisiones para nin~os incapacitados, estn creados. Discursos de exclusio´n incluyen un tema de incapacidades como diferencia, donde los nin ¨ os incapacitados no estn considerados como la responsibildad de los educadores o los servicios regulares. Discursos de inclusio´n tienen como tema central 'lo humano' de los nin ¨ os incapacitados, apoyando un discurso de derechos y una vista de nin ¨ os incapacitados como s ¤ I, pertenecen a escenarios preescolar regular.     

Simplicity and Complexity in Contemporary School Leadership: A Response to Grace

Gerald Grace's (2000) paper Research and the Challenges of School Leadership: the Contribution of Critical Scholarship is applauded for making a powerful case for critical leadership studies to be taken seriously and for providing an exhortation for many educationists to think again about headship. However, this paper suggests that Grace's paper is weakened by: (a) traditionalism (e.g. a false equation of leadership with headship and neglect of more recent discourses of leadership, distributed leadership and complexity theory); (b) reductionism, oversimplification, selectivity and misrepresentation in his consideration of educational management studies; (c) neglect of the considerable overlap between critical leadership studies and educational management studies; (d) an untenably negative view of educational management studies (neglecting their potential for realising the same agenda as critical leadership studies); (e) eurocentrism; and (f) his neglect of foundational issues in, and authors on, critical theory.