Assessment and student participation: ‘choice and voice’ in school principal accounts of schooling territories

Schooling territories are bounded spaces where policies, bodies, practices, and discourses meet and collide. It is well documented in assessment literature that students who are active decision-makers understand their learning processes and have the necessary wherewithal to access support across schooling spaces. These spaces are co-produced through interrelationships, where youth participation is associated with power, voice, democratic citizenship, legal entitlement, empowerment, motivation and self-confidence. Recognising the growing pedagogical emphasis on locating students as responsible for their own learning, we consider how assessment practices constitute enabling and constraining schooling territories. Assessment for learning (AfL) can be linked with emancipatory practices in schooling territories where learner agency is co-produced through socio-material classroom relations. We use principal comments to map a range of interrelated schooling territories as a relational cartography of spatialised practices and student participation in AfL. Mostly, these territories are teacher imagined and defined, constructed through schooling and policy frameworks, and determined through the use of student achievement and student voice data. These conceptualised schooling spaces are interrogated to consider the positionality of students within AfL-related territories. While choice and participation may seem emancipatory, we reveal that AfL practices can serve a rarely acknowledged process of affirming territorial power.     

An exploration of teacher's use of iPads for students with learning support needs

This project explored how iPads were being used in a range of K‐12 schools to support the learning of students with a range of learning support needs. Groups of teachers (and other professionals) from the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK were invited to complete an online survey focused on the use of iPads in their classrooms, perspectives of their skill level, and how their school and school districts support the use of iPads. The survey focused on iPad use in classrooms (curriculum and skills); teachers’ skill levels; whether iPads are addressed in the Individualised Education Program (IEP); the systemic support for the iPads; and the perceived benefits and barriers. The results reveal that respondents are using iPads across many areas of the curriculum, which affirms the research in the emerging literature base. However, there are teacher reported differences in the manner and scope of iPad use in the classrooms and also the integration of the iPad in the IEP. The research also highlights variability in reported skill level for the iPad and an increased need for enhanced systemic support, such as training, funding, technical support and administrative support for the use of the iPad as a pedagogical tool.     

Vocabulary Use by Low, Moderate, and High ASL-Proficient Writers Compared to Hearing ESL and Monolingual Speakers

The written English vocabulary of 72 deaf elementary school students of various proficiency levels in American Sign Language (ASL) was compared with the performance of 60 hearing English-as-a-second-language (ESL) speakers and 61 hearing monolingual speakers of English, all of similar age. Students were asked to retell "The Tortoise and the Hare" story (previously viewed on video) in a writing activity. Writing samples were later scored for total number of words, use of words known to be highly frequent in children's writing, redundancy in writing, and use of English function words. All deaf writers showed significantly lower use of function words as compared to their hearing peers. Low-ASL-proficient students demonstrated a highly formulaic writing style, drawing mostly on high-frequency words and repetitive use of a limited range of function words. The moderate- and high-ASL-proficient deaf students' writing was not formulaic and incorporated novel, low-frequency vocabulary to communicate their thoughts. The moderate- and high-ASL students' performance revealed a departure from findings one might expect based on previous studies with deaf writers and their vocabulary use. The writing of the deaf writers also differed from the writing of hearing ESL speakers. Implications for deaf education and literacy instruction are discussed, with special attention to the fact that ASL-proficient, deaf second-language learners of English may be approaching English vocabulary acquisition in ways that are different from hearing ESL learners.     

A process model of writing development across the life span

In this article, we provide an overview of writing development from a product perspective and from a process perspective. Then we discuss modifications of the most influential process model of skilled adult writing to explain beginning and developing writing, including a proposed developmental sequence of the emergence of cognitive processes in writing. Next we report the results of two recent dissertations by the second and third authors supervised by the first author aimed toward contrasting developmental issues: (a) specifying the algorithms or rules of thumb beginning and developing writers may use during on-line planning; and (b) investigating the further development of writing processes among skilled adult writers. In the first study, development was conceptualized as a linear process across age groups. In the second study, development was conceptualized as a horizontal process within skilled adult writers who expanded their expertise. Finally, we consider the developmental constraints and the instructional constraints on writing development and argue for a model of writing development in which endogenous and exogenous process variables interact to determine the outcome of the writing development process.     

Interdisciplinary teaching

This exploratory study compared cognitive style and teaching technique when 25 doctoral students taught a class session within their field of study and a class session outside their field of study. Methodologies used were a narrative and an analysis comparing in-field teaching with out-of-field teaching. Results revealed that out-of-field teaching produces anxiety which respondents attempted to overcome by changing from less structured to more structured fields and from less formal to more formal teaching techniques. Inferences are that out-of-field teaching may be more appropriately described as traditional than nontraditional, and that out-of-field teaching may be inappropriate for nontraditional, student-oriented institutions.     

Innovative Practice: Systemic Problem Solving: Retention and the Role of a Student Counseling Center

This article describes a counseling center's experience using a “systems” approach to address student retention by initiating campuswide collaboration.     

Variation in Raven's Progressive Matrices scores across time and place

The paper describes a cross-cultural and historical meta-analysis of Raven's Progressive Matrices. Data were analyzed of 798 samples from 45 countries (N = 244,316), which were published between 1944 and 2003. Country-level indicators of educational permeation (which involves a broad set of interrelated educational input and output factors that are strongly related to economic development), the samples' educational age, and publication year were all independently related to performance on Raven's matrices. Our data suggest that the Flynn effect can be found in high as well as low GNP countries, although its size is moderated by education-related sample and country characteristics and seems to be smaller in developed than in emerging countries.