The Benefits of Fixed Item Parameter Calibration for Parameter Accuracy in Small Sample Situations in Large‐Scale Assessments

Large‐scale assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have field trials where new survey features are tested for utility in the main survey. Because of resource constraints, there is a trade‐off between how much of the sample can be used to test new survey features and how much can be used for the initial item response theory (IRT) scaling. Utilizing real assessment data of the PISA 2015 Science assessment, this article demonstrates that using fixed item parameter calibration (FIPC) in the field trial yields stable item parameter estimates in the initial IRT scaling for samples as small as n = 250 per country. Moreover, the results indicate that for the recovery of the county‐specific latent trait distributions, the estimates of the trend items (i.e., the information introduced into the calibration) are crucial. Thus, concerning the country‐level sample size of n = 1,950 currently used in the PISA field trial, FIPC is useful for increasing the number of survey features that can be examined during the field trial without the need to increase the total sample size. This enables international large‐scale assessments such as PISA to keep up with state‐of‐the‐art developments regarding assessment frameworks, psychometric models, and delivery platform capabilities.     

Beyond the modern/postmodern debate,or how to live for the other?

For whatever reason, we tend to believe that men or women can only be goaded or cajoled, by superior force or superior rhetoric, into peaceful coexistence. (Bauman, 1992, p. xvii)     

The limits of socialisation

The article deals with the question of living with others, one of the most significant relationships of human life, and challenge the common understanding of the origins of living with others, where a human being is not just becoming a social but also a moral being through social institutions of societies. This common understanding of a social relationship, fostered and nurtured by a given society, places the responsibility for the possibility of living with others on the other. Drawing on the work from the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and George Simmel and the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Knud Løgstrup we argue that the possibility of living with others is based on the rights of the other rather than of the rights to determine whom the other is.By focusing on the relation between the individual and the society on the one hand, and the connections between being moral and being social on the other hand, we suggest that the process of socialisation is devastating not only for human beings individuality and his or her moral capacity but also for a responsive educational praxis. We explore the ways in which an understanding of socialisation as the making of the social being is intimately linked to how institutional education ‘thinks itself.’ This exploration is followed by a critical discussion of the limits of socialisation, and therefore also the limits of education. By considering some of the problems about the making of the social being we arrive at the conclusion that there is the possibility for education to be somewhere else rather than within socialisation. This conclusion leads us to explore the possibilities for an educational praxis that embraces the other without holding the individuals otherness against them.     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Integration im Ritual

Der Beitrag behandelt die Frage, wie es Gemeinschaften gelingt, kulturelle Differenzen in Ritualen zu bearbeiten. Rituale werden hier verstanden als performative Inszenierungen, die nicht nur einen Rahmen für interne Integrationsprozesse bilden, in denen sich Gemeinschaften konstituieren, stabilisieren oder konfirmieren, sondern die auch einen sozialen Zusammenhang für die Integration externer Herausforderungen darstellen. An einem Beispiel aus der ethnographischen Forschung werden kulturelle Selbstbildungsprozesse als performative analysiert. Dabei erscheint aus dieser Sicht interessant, wie sich eine Familie in einem Frühstücksritual über Schule, Leistungen, Lehren und Lernen selbst wechselseitig belehrt. Eine performative Betrachtungsweise betont die Konstitution gemeinsamer Wirklichkeiten in szenischen und k?rperlichen Aufführungen, die (sprachliche) Artikulation von Rahmungen und die mimetischen, kommunikativen Wirkungsprozesse. Darüber hinaus verweist sie auf die Bedeutung von (institutionellen) Machtbeziehungen und auf die mit ihnen verbundenen habituellen Praktiken sowie auf die Bedeutung der gemeinschaftlichen Differenzerzeugung-und-bearbeitung, die auch im Ritual durchaus mit ludischen Elementen verknüpft ist.