How can video-based assignments integrate practical and conceptual knowledge in summative assessment? Student experiences from a longitudinal experiment

This article focuses on how video assignments presenting clinical situations can be implemented in digital summative assessment to enhance the integration of practical and conceptual knowledge. The underlying perspective is that sustainable assessment should comprise evaluative practices that equip students for the challenges they will face in their future professional lives. Drawing on the literature and on empirical results of a qualitative longitudinal research study at a Norwegian university, the integrative potential and challenges of video assignments are examined. The study confirms that video-based assignments are well suited for assessing integrated competencies. However, the complexities of videos’ visual displays have clear consequences that indicate how these resources should be produced. To optimise the potential of video use in enhancing sustainable summative assessment, we must strike a balance between technical accommodation, task clarity and integrative potential.     

Maternal Perinatal and Concurrent Anxiety and Mental Health Problems in Early Childhood: A Sibling-Comparison Study

Do associations between maternal anxiety symptoms and offspring mental health remain after comparing differentially exposed siblings? Participants were 17,724 offspring siblings and 11,553 mothers from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort study. Mothers reported anxiety and depressive symptoms at 30 weeks’ gestation, and 0.5, 1.5, 3, and 5 years postpartum. Child internalizing and externalizing problems were assessed at ages 1.5, 3, and 5, and modeled using multilevel analyses with repeated measures nested within siblings, nested within mothers. Maternal pre- and postnatal anxiety were no longer associated with child internalizing or externalizing problems after adjusting for maternal depression and familial confounding. Maternal anxiety when the children were in preschool age, however, remained significantly associated with child internalizing but not externalizing problems.     

Action Competence and Environmental Education

A sharper profile of environmental education is needed to improve the quality of future environmental education. This involves an understanding of the conceptions related to ‘environmental issues’. It is argued that environmental issues have to be understood as issues in the community with conflicting interests at several levels. At the same time the authors argue for the development of the ‘action competence’ of the pupils as the main goal of the new generation of environmental education and refer to promising findings from Danish environmental education, mainly from the MUVIN Programme.     

Briging it all back home: some implications of recent science and technology studies for the classroom science teacher

In this paper, we support the validity of drawing from science studies to reshape science education. While true educational reform must involve alternative curricular structures, we stress that we do not propose here either a comprehensive curricular framework or a report on a pilot classroom project, as our research perspective comes from science studies rather than from education. Instead this paper is intended to encourage educators to draw from methodologies used in science studies to further their goals in education research and in classroom teaching. First, we examine theoretical connections and divergences between science studies and theories of education. Secondly, we discuss the benefits of teaching science as a social process and offer some suggestions that can be introduced by classroom teachers into pre-existing science curricula.     

Student response to the TIMSS test

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) involved 47 countries, thousands of students, and their teachers and schools. Included in the battery of tests and other instruments was a Student Questionnaire that was concerned with the personal and school contexts of the students in relation to their mathematics and science learning. Quite late in the planning of this very expensive study, it transpired that no country had considered gathering data on the students’ sense of the relevance of the science topics in the achievement tests, of their science learning, or, their metacognitive awareness of this learning. This paper reports one last minute attempt to collect these data from one group of student in Population 3—the students in the final year of schooling. Like many other aspects of TIMSS, the psychometric dominance in its design meant that this study was logistically very difficult, but some interesting findings are reported.     

Engineering design in the classroom: Is it good science education or is it revolting?

The changing emphasis of science education today includes a shift from a narrowly disciplinary view of science to a more socially and technologically situated perspective. This article reports on the implementation of engineering design projects in about two dozen U. S. secondary science classrooms, following an inservice professional development course conducted at a university engineering college. Using data from an evaluation of the project and three sociological themes—secrecy and ownership, social persuasion and the status of facts, and the relationship between money and science—I argue that technological design projects provide a sociologically fruitful approach for teaching new themes in science education. However, teachers must rethink the nature of their subject matter, something that may be difficult if their training was disciplinary in emphasis.     

Language in the Education of the Working Class

A shortened version of a lecture delivered at the University of Sussex, October 1981. The original list of references stands.
It is a limitation in much of the literature on language and class that the language (or sociolect) of each class is treated as though it exists in isolation from that of other classes and independent of class relationships. In fact it is an important feature of our society that workers encounter the language of other social strata in certain significant contexts, in their place of work, in the media, in their necessary negotiations with bureaucracy. Children encounter a sociolect different from their own in school though that contact is full of social and linguistic ambiguities. But as Edward Thompson (1965) says