Standardized testing and the construction of governable persons

While debates over standardized testing are ubiquitous, there has been relatively little consideration of how today's standardized testing practices have arisen. The current study provides a chronology of standardized testing within Alberta, Canada. Starting from prior work by Foucault and others on ‘governmentality’, we propose that the movement to standardized testing be viewed as part of a larger societal movement toward techniques of government that operate indirectly and at a distance. These techniques of government seek to ‘manage’ populations through the use of measurement tools and numerical calculations. We suggest that, although these techniques are directed toward populations, they also have specific effects on individual students, parents, teachers, and other participants in the education system. In particular, we contend that standardized testing programmes, by rendering the participants visible and subjecting them to public scrutiny, contribute to the construction of governable persons.     

In Memory of Michael Pressley: A Role Model for 21st-Century Educational Psychologists

This article honors the contributions of Michael Pressley and examines 5 roles that were critical to his work as an educational psychologist: teacher, scholar, critic, builder, and mentor. We draw on Michael's life to illustrate how he carried out each of these roles and propose that educational psychologists in higher education in the new millennium should assume all 5 of these roles throughout the majority of their careers.     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CEQ RATINGS AND INSTRUCTOR'S RANK, CLASS SIZE, AND COURSE LEVEL

A study was conducted to determine if the tendency for faculty members of higher rank to receive the highest ratings on the Illinois Course Evaluation Questionnaire (CEQ) remained when variables such as class size and course level were taken into account. The relationship between CEQ ratings and instructor's rank, class size, and level of course was examined by means of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Dependent variables were the six subscales of the CEQ. As hypothesized there were no significant differences in ratings assigned by students in small (1-20 students), medium (21-40 students), and large (over 40 students) classes, or received by teaching assistants, instructors, and assistant, associate, and full professors. Highly significant differences, however, were found in ratings assigned by students in freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, and graduate level courses. In addition, significant size by level and size by rank interaction effects were found. Discriminant functions computed for effects found to be significant yielded information concerning the extent and direction of these significant differences.     

Implications of the UNNDERPIN Study* at St George's Hospital,Morpeth, Northumberland

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Library audit: report of the process of undertaking the audit of library services of selected educational providers within the former Northern Region: July 1994

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Reducing Aggressive Behavior and Increasing Motivation in School: The Evolution of an Intervention to Strengthen School Adjustment

The pervasive links between problem behaviors and school adjustment suggest that effective intervention programs to enhance school adjustment must focus both on decreasing the motivation to aggress and increasing the motivation to achieve. We describe a program of intervention research to improve social behavior and academic motivation in elementary school students organized around principles of attribution theory. Our intervention curriculum initially focused on reducing children's aggression and was then expanded to include enhancing personal responsibility. A series of efficacy and effectiveness studies have demonstrated that children's attributions in both the social and academic domains can be changed with cost-effective, educational strategies. These changes in children's cognitions have reliably produced positive changes in behavior. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our work for the design of effective interventions.