Minute math: An action research study of student self-assessment

Forty-one students in two third grade classes, including special education students, participated in an action research project conducted jointly by two university supervisors, three teachers, and three student teachers. The “Minute Math” project involved students in predicting and graphing their test scores on a weekly conventional timed test of the 0–9 multiplication facts. Students also reflected each week on their progress and the success of their studying and problem-solving strategies. Student self-assessment was successful at turning the rote memorization task of learning the times tables into a deeper experience for students about monitoring their own mathematics learning. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

What Does it Take to Make Discovery a Success?: A Survey of Discovery Tool Adoption,Instruction, and Evaluation Among Academic Libraries

Discovery tools have been widely adopted by academic libraries, yet little information exists that connects common practices regarding discovery tool implementation, maintenance, assessment, and staffing with conventions for research and instruction. The authors surveyed heads of reference and instruction departments in research and land-grant university libraries. The survey results revealed common practices with discovery tools among academic libraries. This study also draws connections between operational, instructional, and assessment practices and perceptions that participants have of the success of their discovery tool. Participants who indicated successful implementation of their discovery tool hailed from institutions that made significant commitments to the operations, maintenance, and acceptance of their discovery tool. Participants who indicated an unsuccessful implementation, or who were unsure about the success of their implementation, did not make lasting commitments to the technical maintenance, operations, and acceptance of their discovery tool.     

Dispositional Characteristics of Individuals Involved in Back Burner Relationships

To determine whether certain characteristics are shared by young adults who choose to communicatively maintain back burner relationships, this study investigated the associations between dispositional characteristics (i.e., sociosexual orientation, sensation seeking, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and the Big Five personality traits) and the number of back burners maintained by single and romantically involved individuals. Findings revealed that all dimensions of unrestricted sociosexual orientation and high sensation seeking were positively associated with number of back burners when predictors were considered independently. When the relative contribution of predictors was examined, only unrestricted sociosexual behavior significantly predicted the number of back burners. Implications for developing a profile of those who communicate to initiate and sustain back burner relationships are discussed.     

Shifting the Zone of Mediation in a Suburban New Immigrant Destination: Community Boundary Spanners and School District Policymaking

This paper explores the context of reception for immigrant students and English learners in one medium-sized suburban school district in the northeastern United States. Using qualitative methods, the authors describe how, despite a troubling context of reception emerging from a normative and political community context that harbored resentment toward the new immigrant population, a community-based organization whose members served as boundary spanners between the school district and the community helped prompt district leaders toward more equity-minded policies. Given increasing culturally and linguistically diverse student populations in suburban school districts across the United States, findings from this paper have important implications for community engagement and school district policymaking.     

Assessment of balance among adolescent track and field athletes

Track and field events place different demands on athletes and may have an effect on balance. This study investigated the effects of event specialty, gender, and leg dominance on balance among adolescent track and field athletes. Forty healthy adolescent track and field athletes (male = 23, female = 17) categorised into three different groups (sprinter = 20, distance runners = 13, throwers = 7) had their single leg static balance measured with the eyes open and the eyes closed using an AMTI force platform. Dependent variables included average displacement (cm) of the centre of pressure (COP) in the anterior/posterior direction and medial/lateral directions, the average velocity of the COP (cm/s) and the 95% ellipse area (cm²). Variables were analysed using a 3 (event specialty) × 2 (gender) × 2 (leg) ANOVA with repeated measures on the leg variable (p < 0.05). There was a significant difference (p < 0.05) in the average displacement of the COP in the medial/lateral direction for both the eyes open and closed condition, with the non-dominant leg demonstrating greater displacement than the dominant leg. This might increase the risk of injury for the non-dominant leg, but additional data should be collected and analysed on both dynamic balance and performance.     

Narratives of dynamic lands: science education,indigenous knowledge and possible futures

We aim to share some of our work currently focused on understanding and unearthing the multiplicities of ways the denial of culture in relation to science and knowledge construction is embedded in issues of climate change and climate change education. The issues become more troubling when we consider how effects of climate change are manifesting locally in ways that force shifts in Indigenous ways of living while simultaneously nation-states seem to think that continued or increased control of Indigenous practice is warranted. For us, taking the implications of such approaches seriously requires significant consideration of how climate education impacts Indigenous learners and whether learning western climate science is indeed part of making real change important. In our work we have focused on the ways in which settler-colonialism and the resultant racialized hierarchies permeate science education and contribute to an expectation of human entitlement to land and a notion of land permanence.     

CRIS Power! Taming the Reporting Requirements of Open Access

In the United Kingdom, librarians are adapting their roles to support researchers with the Open Access publication of their research in a post-Finch world, including grappling with reporting requirements at the institutional level. Particularly challenging is the need to provide high-level analysis for strategy makers while also extracting low-level detail for service provision and reporting in order to meet the needs of stakeholders across the university and numerous national external bodies. David Walters of Brunel University London describes how the library maximized its reporting capability by using the research management information in the university’s instance of Symplectic Elements, along with other Open Access data sources to establish the effective management of the institution’s Open Access publications data. Monitoring institutional data in real-time is guiding the development of library services and has allowed library staff to tailor appropriate training to researchers in very different disciplines.     

Linking rights,needs, and fairness in high-stakes assessments and examinations

This paper presents a novel explanation for the continued absence of a children’s rights strategy within high-stakes educational assessment with reference to the competing purposes of high-stakes assessments and group-based constructions of fairness in assessment. We provide an original critique of group-based perspectives on the validity of assessment accommodations which supports an individual perspective on fair educational assessment. From this, the (almost forgotten) concept of ‘student assessment needs’ is (re-)introduced as a central axiom, to be constructed through feedback from, and dialogue with, students about their experience of high-stakes assessments, giving primacy to their purpose as an attainment demonstration opportunity for the student. To promote a new movement towards student participation in educational assessment processes and reforms, we propose ‘rights respecting assessment’, complementary to UNICEF’s ‘Rights Respecting Schools’ initiative, in which regular system-wide student representation would contribute to the development of high-stakes examination systems. In recognition of this aspiration, this paper is co-authored with a recent school-leaving age examination candidate.     

Examining the influence of a STEM certification model on female,minority science outcomes

The authors of this exploratory study examine the influence of the Georgia science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) model; gender; race; and other achievement on elementary students’ science outcomes in Title I schools. Results of the study demonstrate that a positive relationship exists between students participating in a STEM-certified school and science achievement at the third-grade level (n = 339), and that race, gender, and mathematics and reading achievement did not significantly explain science achievement. At the Grade 5 level (n = 279), a negative relationship was found between science achievement and type of school, with students participating in STEM schools scoring lower than those students participating in non-STEM schools. Moreover, in Grade 5, the combination of demographic variables, race and gender, did significantly explain science achievement. The practical and empirical implications of the results are discussed.     

The Effects of Special Education Support on Young Australian School Students

Determining the effectiveness of many special education interventions is most difficult because of the practical and ethical limitations associated with assigning participants to a control or non-treated group. Using Longitudinal Study of Australian Children data, this article utilised eight different propensity score analysis methods to determine if a cohort of young primary school children receiving special education services significantly improved their literacy and numeracy skills, social skills and their behaviour, two years after the commencement of the special service, in comparison to a “matched” group of students who did not receive special education support. The children receiving special education support performed statistically significantly less well than the different matched groups across all outcome measures. This result is consistent with the findings from two similar studies in the US and calls into question the effectiveness of special education services for the majority of Australian students with additional needs.