Using Adjustments to Support the Learning and Assessment Needs of Students with Disabilities: Macau and Mainland China Teachers’ Report

Adjustments are considered necessary for students with disabilities to be fully included in classroom instruction, classroom assessment and external accountability tests. The 67 item Checklist of Learning and Assessment Adjustments for Students (CLAAS), translated for the Chinese community, was used by 74 teachers from Macau and Mainland China to document their application of adjustments for 319 students with special educational needs across these three settings. Results indicated consistently large gaps between adjustment use in classrooms compared with national tests, with the allowable adjustments for public testing reportedly used very little. Findings also provided evidence for the content validity of the checklist for teachers of students with disabilities in China and its utility in documenting applied adjustments. This study also indicates the potential for CLAAS to provide teachers across China with a comprehensive list of adjustments, to reflect on and review adjustment decision-making and assessment protocols for all students.     

Teachers as Disempowered and Demoralised Moral Agents: School Board Management and Teachers in Hong Kong

This study argues that teachers are disempowered and demoralised moral agents. Specifically, it uses a qualitative study of Hong Kong teachers to show that teachers’ agency in the pursuit of the moral goal of education is socially disempowered. The study shows that although teachers are committed to the moral goal of education, the obstacles to attaining this goal result in demoralisation. The difficulties consist of technical disempowerment (deprivation of power over one’s labour) and cognitive disempowerment (deprivation of power to identify the instructional value of teachers’ work), which are induced by managerialist educational reforms and school administration.     

College students’ perception of e-feedback: a grounded theory perspective

The increasing prominence of technology has given rise to new ways for writing teachers to give feedback electronically. Specifically, this article focuses on electronic written feedback (e-feedback) given to a group of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) community college students. Although previous studies have investigated the effectiveness of different computer-mediated feedback practices (e.g. video feedback, audio feedback, multimodal feedback), there is a dearth of research which examines the effectiveness of e-feedback and lower-ability students’ perception of e-feedback in ESL post-compulsory writing classrooms which adopt a process writing approach. The present study, which aims to shed light on this research gap and inform ESL writing teachers’ feedback practices, investigates how feedback is given and attended to online by 93 students of an international community college in Hong Kong. Adopting grounded theory as the methodology and a tripartite definition of written feedback as the conceptual framework, the present study reports students’ perception of e-feedback on Google Docs from two sources: students’ written reflections and semi-structured, focus group interviews. Implications related to e-feedback practices are discussed.     

Assessment of early handwriting skill in kindergarten children using a Chinese name writing test

Reading and Writing - This study developed and validated a Chinese name writing scale (CNWS) for evaluating early handwriting skills of kindergarten children. We then used the validated CNWS to...     

More students and more diverse: new trends in international mobility to Portugal

Tertiary Education and Management - Growing numbers of students from non-Portuguese speaking countries, designated as ‘non-Lusophone students’, signal the diversification of the...     

Academics’ perceptions of the impact of internal quality assurance on teaching and learning

Internal quality assurance systems are expected to improve the institutions’ core mission of teaching and learning. Using data gathered through an online survey, distributed in 2014/2015, to the teaching staff of all Portuguese private and public higher education institutions, this paper examines the impact of internal quality assurance systems on teaching and learning from the perspective of academics. Findings suggest that Portuguese academics feel that, despite the positive contribution of internal quality assurance towards an increased awareness of teaching quality issues at their institutions, the practical effects of these systems have been more related to increasing bureaucracy than to substantive improvements in teaching and learning. The use of information with a view to improvement and teaching staff involvement in the development of quality assurance were found to induce positive changes in teaching and learning, in academics’ perceptions. Based on the findings, the paper makes recommendations for institutional practice.     

Internal quality assurance systems in Portugal: what their strengths and weaknesses reveal

In Portugal, the agency for assessment and accreditation of higher education has recently included in its remit, beyond programme accreditation, the certification of internal quality assurance systems. This implies lighter touch accreditation and aims to direct institutions towards improvement, in addition to accountability. Twelve institutions have already undertaken the certification, and both self-assessment and external assessment reports are available. Based on the qualitative analysis of the nature of institutional strengths and weaknesses highlighted in these evaluation reports, the paper aims to understand whether the identified strengths and weaknesses are related to procedural and organisational matters or to cultural change (values and beliefs), in turn offering an insight into the quality culture(s) which characterise higher education institutions in Portugal. Findings suggest that the quality culture of the analysed institutions is somewhere between responsive and reactive. Overall, all reports dwell more on the prioritisation of formal and structural procedures, both regarding strengths and weaknesses. External reports point towards more weaknesses related to stakeholders’ participation. Both aspects are more frequent in polytechnics than in universities. These findings suggest that polytechnics are more reactive, whereas universities are more responsive. Therefore, accountability apparently continues to be, for the time being, a more pressing concern than improvement.     

Towards a taxonomy of novices' misconceptions of the Prolog interpreter

A series of novice programmers' misconceptions of Prolog flow-of-control and variable unification are identified on the basis of existing empirical evidence, and informal observation. This classification is intended to serve as a first pass attempt towards an understanding of these errors and as a basis for future empirical work.     

Academics’ and employers’ perceptions about responsibilities for employability and their initiatives towards its development

This paper reports the results of preliminary research into how Portuguese academics and employers perceive the responsibility of different higher education stakeholders—students, teaching staff, higher education institutions, employers, and policy-makers—for developing graduate employability. The study was conducted 8 years after the implementation of the Bologna Process, the reform that placed employability firmly on the agenda of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Portugal. This paper aims to assess the extent to which higher education is held responsible for developing employability, and to characterize the activities undertaken by the two actors to achieve that end. In particular, with respect to academics, we characterize curricular and other changes to study programmes, and, with respect to employers, their participation in activities undertaken by HEIs meant to ease the transition of students to the labour market. The data comes from a survey responded to by 684 Portuguese academics and 64 employers. Academics and employers alike were found to attribute high responsibility for developing employability to higher education, suggesting that the political message of the Bologna Process regarding the relation between higher education and the labour market has been assimilated. However, the activities reported by both types of respondents indicate only an average commitment to developing employability. Here, the low participation of employers in internal institutional activities is noteworthy, suggesting that the recognition of employers as stakeholders in higher education, as advocated by policy-makers, has yet to happen in Portugal.