On the supranational spell of PISA in policy

Abstract

Background: PISA results appear to have a large impact upon government policy. The phenomenon is growing, with more countries taking part in PISA testing and politicians pointing to PISA results as reasons for their reforms.

Purpose: The aims of this research were to depict the policy reactions to PISA across a number of jurisdictions, to see whether they exhibited similar patterns and whether the same reforms were evident.

Sources of evidence: We investigated policy and media reactions to the 2009 and 2012 PISA results in six cases: Canada, China (Shanghai), England, France, Norway and Switzerland. Cases were selected to contrast high-performing jurisdictions (Canada, China) with average performers (England, France, Norway and Switzerland). Countries that had already been well reported on in the literature were excluded (Finland, Germany).

Design and methods: Policy documents, media reports and academic articles in English, French, Mandarin and Norwegian relating to each of the cases were critically evaluated.

Results: A policy reaction of ‘scandalisation’ was evident in four of the six cases; a technique used to motivate change. Five of the six cases showed ‘standards-based reforms’ and two had reforms in line with the ‘ideal-governance’ model. However, these are categorisations: the actual reforms had significant differences across countries. There are chronological problems with the notion that PISA results were causal with regard to policy in some instances. Countries with similar PISA results responded with different policies, reflecting their differing cultural and historical education system trajectories.

Conclusions: The connection between PISA results and policy is not always obvious. The supranational spell of PISA in policy is in the way that PISA results are used as a magic wand in political rhetoric, as though they conjure particular policy choices. This serves as a distraction from the ideological basis for reforms. The same PISA results could motivate a range of different policy solutions.     

Further abuse of sexually abused children

OBJECTIVE: To determine the incidence of re-abuse in children known to have been sexually abused and to find factors that increase the risk of re-abuse. METHOD: The study group consisted of 183 children with substantiated sexual abuse who presented to two children's hospitals' Child Protection Units in Sydney, Australia during 1988 through 1990. At intake, when the children were aged between 5 years and 15 years, data about the child, the family, and the nature of the index sexual abuse were collected. Six years after presentation for the abuse, records of the Department of Community Services were checked to see if any of the young people had been the subject of substantiated notifications for abuse/neglect before and after intake to the study. Predictors of notifications for abuse/neglect after presentation for the index sexual abuse were identified. RESULTS: Of the sexually abused young people, nearly one in three were the subject of subsequent substantiated notifications to the Department of Community Services for some form of child abuse and neglect or behavior which placed them at risk of harm. Later notifications for abuse/neglect were predicted by notifications for emotional abuse before the index sexual abuse (adjusted RR = 4.88, CI: 1.43 to 16.65), severity of the index sexual abuse (p = .03), and the number of changes in the child's primary caregivers before intake (p = .03). Approximately one in six of the sexually abused young people were notified for sexual abuse after intake to the study. One in 10 also had prior notifications for sexual abuse. Sexual abuse notifications after study intake were predicted by caregiver changes before intake (p = .01) and whether or not there were notifications for emotional abuse before the index sexual abuse (adjusted RR = 3.40, CI: 1.05 to 11.02). CONCLUSIONS: Revictimization of children appears to be a marker of ongoing family dysfunction. Intervention in child sexual abuse needs to consider a range of risk factors associated with re-abuse and, in particular, should focus on family functioning if further abuse is to be prevented.     

Using Qualitative Evaluation Methods to Identify Exemplary Practices in Early Childhood Education

The proliferation of early childhood programs for children with and without disabilities has occurred without clear indicators or standards of program quality. Evaluations of these programs often consist of compliance monitoring or outcome assessment. Little attention is given to program context or the quality of individual components of the program. In this paper, an alternative evaluation model, a connoisseurship or professional review model using on-site observations, interviews, and document review, was used to identify exemplary practices in early childhood education in one large midwestern state. The results indicated that with proper training and support, early childhood professionals without experience in qualitative methods can become proficient in interviewing techniques, observation, and document review. The resulting case study reports were useful for identifying and describing exemplary practices across the state, demonstrating the potential for this alternative approach to evaluation in early childhood education.     

The 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science presented to Aravind Joshi

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science to Aravind Joshi for his fundamental contributions to natural language processing technology and to cognitive science, including particularly the development of the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) family of formalisms and tractable polynomial time algorithms that analyze the complex, varied surface word orders of human languages while simultaneously recovering local elementary syntactic domains corresponding to meaning. In addition, Joshi has been a major collaborator on a new theory of discourse coherence that has influenced all subsequent work on anaphora resolution, and is currently applying TAG to address modeling problems in the life sciences.     

Sustainability and distance learning: a diverse European experience?

Higher Education (HE) is experiencing disruption from technologies, demographics, the globalising world and longer life expectancy. Historically Higher Education has had a legacy of being seen as the requirement for an educated ‘elite’, there has been a policy ambition set in various countries (including the UK) for it to become the expectation for much wider segments of the population as a whole. As students become ‘everyone’ and learning becomes ‘all the time’ Distance Teaching and Research Institutions have a tremendous opportunity but there are also many disruptions and barriers to overcome. Higher Education institutions have an important role within Education for Sustainable Development and sustainable lifestyles; one of the important goals and targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals for 2030. Higher Education can contribute to sustainability in many ways – social, technical and environmental; globally and locally. In particular distance-learning universities due to the flexibility in the learning process, use of technologies, and inter-disciplinary approach to teaching and learning, constitute key factors in education for sustainable development. But what will this contribution look like? In this paper, the responses from senior leaders in four major European distance-learning universities are presented, compared and discussed. The tentative conclusions draw out some strategic imperatives for sustainable higher education in the twenty first century.     

Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project

Native Americans create, preserve, and organize knowledge within the context of community, thereby ensuring the inclusion of Native American philosophies. Historically, mainstream cataloging and classification systems have not adequately represented this knowledge. The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology was designed to incorporate an Indigenous perspective into mainstream controlled vocabularies. Using story as pedagogy, this article examines the conceptual foundations, theoretical framework, and application of the Thesaurus to a museum setting.     

Reading Words In and Out of Connected Text: The Impact of Context on Semantic and Orthographic Processing

The majority of naturalistic reading occurs within passages. Therefore, it is important to understand how reading in context affects the division of labor between semantic and orthographic processing. However, it is difficult to compare the cognitive processes elicited by reading in context and lists because of the perceptual differences that define them. In 2 experiments, undergraduate students read 72 different words divided across three conditions (context, semantic-list, and orthographic-list). Participants then completed a memory task that was used to estimate either the semantic processing (surprise recall; Experiment 1) or orthographic processing (word stem completion; Experiment 2) elicited during reading. In both experiments, memory performance for words read in context more closely resembled words read in the semantic-list condition and differed greatly from those read in the orthographic-list condition. We interpret these results as showing that contextual reading biases the division of labor toward semantic processing and away from orthographic processing.