ASSESSMENT METHODS AND ECONOMICS DEGREES

Our objective in this paper is to investigate, and comment upon, the assessment methods in use to monitor student progress and success in Economics Degree programmes. Our reasons for undertaking this study were twofold:

(a) while the content and teaching methods of economics courses have been the subject of debate and change, the corresponding methods of assessment have received little consideration, and (b) colleagues from other academic disciplines at our own institution, the Coventry Polytechnic, and elsewhere, comment adversely upon the terminal achievement record of economics students.     

Mentoring for Principals: Pre-Service and In-Service Models

Mentoring is an increasingly important element in the preparation of principals in many countries, including Singapore, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). In Singapore and the US, mentoring forms part of a pre-service programme of training for intending principals. In the UK, it is a voluntary programme which takes place during their first year as principals. The efficacy of mentoring depends on the quality of the mentor/protege relationship at least as much as the organisational and cultural framework within which it operates. Definitions and conceptions of mentoring are remarkably similar in different societies and its advantages appear to outweigh its disadvantages in both Singapore and the UK.     

Assessment matters: Considering the scholarship of teaching and learning in student affairs

Tony Ribera, Sarah Fernandez, and Matt Gray apply a scholarly approach to assessing student learning in the cocurriculum.     

Enhancing student learning of research methods through the use of undergraduate teaching assistants

By using a quasi-experimental design, in this study, we test the effect of undergraduate teaching assistants on student learning. Data were collected from 170 students enrolled in four sections of a quantitative research methods course, two sections without undergraduate teaching assistants and two sections with undergraduate teaching assistants, over two semesters. Results indicate that having undergraduate teaching assistants in the classroom can result in higher student performance. Students in the sections with undergraduate teaching assistants earned higher grades, were more likely to pass the course with a C or higher and performed better on half of the student learning outcomes than students in the sections without an undergraduate teaching assistant. Based on the overwhelmingly positive results on student learning, we would recommend the active use of undergraduate teaching assistants in the classroom, but especially for courses that students find challenging.     

The American Universities Which Published Most Often in Journals for Business & Finance,Law, Education,and Social Sciences Librarians, 2000–2010

The authors adapt the methods and ranking system of the 5-year study by Wiberley, Hurd, and Weller (2006) to report the number and affiliations of papers published by subject-specialist librarians in four journals from 2000 to 2010: the Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship, Law Library Journal, Legal Reference Services Quarterly, and Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian. While both approaches demonstrated high output from many of the same highly ranked universities, our modified approach identified a significant number of unranked schools that may have deep specialty strengths among their subject expert librarian authors.     

What Makes Schools Effective? A Comparison between School Communities in Australia and the USA∗

This paper reports on findings related to the perceptions held by members of school communities with respect to the factors which most help schools to be effective. The data are from a study conducted in Melbourne, Australia and in seven states of the United States of America. Findings from this research indicate that members of school communities: principals, teachers, parents and students believe that the most critical elements that contribute to the development of an effective school are dedicated and qualified staff, clear school purposes, strong academic and administrative leadership, a safe school environment and a positive school climate.

     

Children with dyslexia are slow writers because they pause more often and not because they are slow at handwriting execution

It is commonly assumed that children with dyslexia are slower at handwriting than other children. However, evidence of slow handwriting in children with dyslexia is very mixed. Thirty-one children with dyslexia, aged 9 years, were compared to both age-matched children and younger spelling-ability matched children. Participants completed an alphabet-writing task and a composition task on the surface of a digital writing tablet. Children with dyslexia wrote the same amount of letters per minute in the alphabet task but wrote fewer words per minute when composing their texts than children of the same age. Crucially, no differences were found between children with dyslexia and their same age peers for speed of handwriting execution, measured by the tablet, when writing the alphabet or composing their texts. However, children with dyslexia were found to pause within their compositions as often as the spelling ability matched group. Thus handwriting execution is not impaired in children with dyslexia. The slow writing that is typical of children with dyslexia is due to pausing more often when composing and is related to spelling ability. This may reflect processing problems in response to high cognitive load through having to contend with spelling and composing concurrently.