The integrity of educational outcome measures in international assessments

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability -     

How do students’ accounts of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees?

In this article we examine how students’ accounts of the discipline of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees. Based on a phenomenographic analysis of 86 interviews with 32 sociology and criminology students over the course of their undergraduate degrees, we constituted five different ways of accounting for sociology. These ranged from describing sociology as a form of personal development focused on developing the students’ opinion to describing sociology as a partial way of studying the relations between people and society. The majority of students expressed more inclusive accounts of sociology over the course of their degrees. However, some students’ accounts suggested they had become disengaged with sociology. We argue that the differences in the ways that students were disengaged were not captured by our phenomenographic categories. In conclusion, we argue that our analysis illustrates the crucial role that students’ relations to knowledge play in understanding the transformative nature of higher education.     

Child sexual and physical abuse among college students in Singapore and the United States

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to explore differences in rates and characteristics of child sexual and physical abuse experiences among women in Singapore and the US. METHOD: Participants (N=153) completed an anonymous questionnaire which assessed experiences of childhood sexual and physical abuse, abuse characteristics (e.g., victimization age, severity), and behavioral and subjective reactions to such experiences (e.g., labeling of experiences as abuse, psychological symptomatology). Exposure to other forms of traumatic life events was also assessed. RESULTS: In comparison to Singaporean women, US women were more likely to report a history of child sexual abuse, and to report experiencing more severe forms of sexual abuse. Women in Singapore were more likely than women in the US to report a history of child physical abuse, to report experiencing injury as a result of the abuse, and to disclose the abuse. Singaporean women with a history of child sexual abuse reported elevated psychological symptom levels relative to their nonabused peers and to US women with a history of child sexual abuse, even after controlling for exposure to other types of traumatic events. No significant differences in symptomatology with regard to child physical abuse were observed. CONCLUSIONS: Although preliminary in nature, the present findings are among the first to demonstrate differences in psychological adjustment between sexually abused and nonabused Asian women living in Asia. This study also provides some of the first support for cross-national differences in the psychological adjustment of child sexual abuse survivors.     

Effective strategies for mental and written arithmetic calculation from the third to the fifth grade

The strategies used to solve mental and written multidigit arithmetical addition, subtraction, multiplication and division were observed in 200 third, fourth and fifth grade children. A strategy was classified as effective if it resulted in the correct solution at least 75% of the time. For mental addition and subtraction, primitive strategies such as counting on fingers and counting on (mental counting from a specific point), and the more sophisticated strategy 1010 (solution of the calculation problem using tens and units separately) were more effective than the strategies learned at school. In written addition, subtraction and multiplication there was a shift from the CAR+to the CAR- strategy (tabulating with, or without, a carried amount) from the third to the later grades. Results show that typical strategies taught at school progressively substitute every other strategy both in mental and written calculation, but without reaching the criterion of effectiveness. The implications for maths curricula are discussed.     

A Classroom Study on the Relationship Between Student Achievement and Retrieval-Enhanced Learning

Retrieval practice has been shown to produce powerful learning gains in laboratory experiments but has seldom been explored in classrooms as a means of enhancing students’ learning of their course-relevant material. Furthermore, research is lacking concerning the role of individual differences in learning from retrieval. The current study explored the effects of retrieval in a large undergraduate introductory biology course as a function of individual differences in student achievement. Students completed in-class exercises that required them to retrieve course information (e.g., recalling definitions for terms and labeling diagrams) followed by feedback or to simply copy the information without retrieving it. A later quiz over the information showed that high-performing students benefited more from retrieving than copying, whereas middle- and low-performing students benefited more from copying than retrieving. When asked to predict their quiz scores following the in-class exercises, high-performers demonstrated better overall metacognitive calibration compared to middle- or low-performers. These results highlight the importance of individual differences in learning from retrieval and encourage future research using course-relevant material to consider the role of student achievement in classroom-based interventions.     

No Quick Fixes: Problems in the Development of A-level Students’ Writing (and Learning)

Over the past 15 years, there has been a range of standards-driven educational interventions in England: focused particularly on students’ writing, they have been targeted at particular students, short-term and based on the assumption that identifiable, quantifiable inputs would produce pre-identified, measurable outputs. This article explores one such intervention, aimed at students in Year 13 who were seen as having difficulty with academic writing. It looks closely at the work of one student, and raises questions about the effects of high-stakes testing upon pedagogy in schools and the damaging impact that this has upon student learning.     

On Codes of Ethics,The Individual and Performance

In this paper I contend that, although codes of ethics are very good things and could potentially improve performance by acting as a normalising agent for a profession, they are not problem‐free. In particular, they lend themselves to reification (making something abstract into something concrete and thus, reduce the potential for their full impact), they are time dependent (that is, they are relevant only to the time in which they were formulated), subject to different lenses (that is, they are relevant only to the culture in which they were formulated), and emotionally challenged (that is, they are rarely formulated in a way that encompasses the emotions around the particular situation). An individual's role in a situation is hard to delineate via codes of ethics and, thus, these codes of ethics should be seen as a proposition, rather than as a solution for performance problems regarding ethical challenges.