Content validity of game-based assessment: case study of a serious game for ICT managers in training

Serious games foster the acquisition of complex problem-solving skills. Assessment of such skills should be in line with instruction, and within a serious game environment its content validity should equal face-to-face assessment. Research on assessment in serious gaming has remained rather scarce. This article shows how assessment can be implemented in serious gaming in a way that assures content validity. The core of the authors’ validation method entails mapping learning activities (as contained in the game scenario) on performance indicators and outputs (as derived from formal attainment levels). They present how they have elaborated and applied the method for an assessment game for ICT managers in secondary vocational education. They describe the procedure and extent to which this assessment is content-valid compared to face-to-face assessment.     

Teacher Evaluation in The Netherlands and its Relationship to Educational Effectiveness Research

In this article, we describe the history, current practice and future of teacher evaluation in The Netherlands. After a short introduction describing the Dutch educational system, we present information about teacher evaluation practices performed by persons outside the school (the Inspectorate) and inside the school (the principal). We then pay attention to the progress of teacher and school effectiveness research in The Netherlands and the relatively weak links between research and evaluation practices in schools. Finally, we outline some potential future developments in the field of teacher evaluation in The Netherlands.     

New Learning Design in Distance Education: The impact on student perception and motivation

Many forms of e‐learning (such as online courses with authentic tasks and computer‐supported collaborative learning) have become important in distance education. Very often, such e‐learning courses or tasks are set up following constructivist design principles. Often, this leads to learning environments with authentic problems in ill‐structured tasks that are supposed to motivate students. However, constructivist design principles are difficult to implement because developers must be able to predict how students perceive the tasks and whether the tasks motivate the students. The research in this article queries some of the assumed effects. It presents a study that provides increased insight into the actual perception of electronic authentic learning tasks. The main questions are how students learn in such e‐learning environments with “virtual” reality and authentic problems and how they perceive them. To answer these questions, in two e‐learning programs developed at the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) designers’ expectations were contrasted with student perceptions. The results show a gap between the two, for students experience much less authenticity than developers assume.     

Human-aligned artificial intelligence is a multiobjective problem

As the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems improve, it becomes important to constrain their actions to ensure their behaviour remains beneficial to humanity. A variety of ethical, legal and safety-based frameworks have been proposed as a basis for designing these constraints. Despite their variations, these frameworks share the common characteristic that decision-making must consider multiple potentially conflicting factors. We demonstrate that these alignment frameworks can be represented as utility functions, but that the widely used Maximum Expected Utility (MEU) paradigm provides insufficient support for such multiobjective decision-making. We show that a Multiobjective Maximum Expected Utility paradigm based on the combination of vector utilities and non-linear action–selection can overcome many of the issues which limit MEU’s effectiveness in implementing aligned AI. We examine existing approaches to multiobjective AI, and identify how these can contribute to the development of human-aligned intelligent agents.     

Becoming a Secondary Teacher in France: A trainee perspective on recent developments in initial teacher training

The paper begins by outlining recent reforms of initial teacher training in France, changes aimed at moving French teacher training away from its traditional focus on subject knowledge and pedagogic theory towards a stronger emphasis on classroom practice issues such as teaching and learning strategies and motivating reluctant learners. It goes on to examine the perceptions of some French trainee teachers; for example, how well prepared they felt for the challenges ahead and their training and support whilst on placement. Their responses reveal concern about the appropriateness and variability of some of their training, particularly school-based elements and mentor support. The responses also raise some interesting comparisons with experience in the UK and other European countries, all of whom are debating matters such as teacher accountability, societal expectations of the education system and how teachers should be trained. These comparative issues will be the focus for further research.     

The Impact of Management Education

This article summarizes research findings of a study that examined the effects of a sales management training program conducted at Digital Equipment Corporation. The authors used a typology of training outcomes developed by Kirkpatrick (1959a, 1959b, 1960a, and 1960b) to assess students' satisfaction, learning, and field implementation of skills taught in the class. In addition, they estimated the costs of the program and the actual increase in sales that can be attributed to the implementation of the skills in the workplace. The results indicate that properly conceived and carefully implemented programs have a positive net effect on the corporation's financial position.     

Spectral city: San Francisco as Pacific Rim city and counter‐cultural contado

Abstract

San Francisco, since its global takeoff in the Gold Rush Days and long‐standing trafficking in Bohemian, socialist, queer, and left‐leaning energies in and beyond the Beat era of the 1960s, has a complicated global/local history of trying to disentangle its city‐space and urban imaginary from the Greco‐Roman will‐to‐supremacy that would turn California into a frontier settlement of Asian/Pacific domination and US‐framed empire. Forces of social becoming like the Beats and post‐Beat hippies as well as more experimental authors like Jack Spicer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, and Bob Kaufman helped to forge a different literary‐social vision of San Francisco and the Pacific Rim city as a porous community of transnational innovation and outer‐national becoming. This paper will invoke some literary and film texts from Howl and Tripmaster Monkey to Vertigo to Margaret Cho stand‐up performances as well as some geopolitical studies, such as Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco and City Light Press’s Reclaiming San Francisco to substantiate this double vision of San Francisco as global/local US site of (a) imperial ratification and (b) counter‐orientalist deformation.