Questions of Assessment

Using SATs in their present form meets the requirements neither of individual assessment nor of the monitoring of standards, writes Professor Klaus Wedell, Department of Educational Psychology and Special Educational Needs, Institute of Education, London University.     

Relations Among Oral Reading Fluency,Silent Reading Fluency,and Reading Comprehension: A Latent Variable Study of First-Grade Readers

In the present study, we examined oral and silent reading fluency and their relations with reading comprehension. In a series of structural equation models with latent variables using data from 316 first-grade students, (a) silent and oral reading fluency were found to be related yet distinct forms of reading fluency, (b) silent reading fluency predicted reading comprehension better for skilled readers than for average readers, (c) list reading fluency predicted reading comprehension better for average readers than for skilled readers, and (d) listening comprehension predicted reading comprehension better for skilled readers than for average readers.     

Parallel realization of systems,using factorizations and quotients in categories

A general theorem concerning the parallel representation of systems is proved, using the also general notions of terminal factorization situation and quotient in a category. Applications are given to the decomposition and synthesis of a number of kinds of systems.     

Some remarks and proposals concerning the planning and performance of technology assessment studies

It is the authors' intention to clarify some basic problems of technology assessment studies and some apparent misunderstandings about the role and possibilities of technology assessment. The discussion centers around questions such as the following: Can technology assessment studies be objective in the scientific sense? What are the risks that may result from a lack of active participation of affected groups in the assessment process? Do technology assessment studies really produce evaluations of the future impacts of a technology according to future value systems? Are the frameworks or schemes for the technology assessment process that are proposed by a number of analysts really helpful for the conception of adequate pragmatic strategies in concrete cases? Should the European countries imitate the US example of setting up an Office of Technology Assessment in the legislature?The authors believe that technology assessment analyses should be organized as transparent, participatory, and argumentative processes and that procedures should be developed and applied that are suitable to fulfil this task.     

Interdisciplinarity as diversity in citation patterns among journals: Rao-Stirling diversity,relative variety,and the Gini coefficient

Questions of definition and measurement continue to constrain a consensus on the measurement of interdisciplinarity. Using Rao-Stirling (RS) Diversity sometimes produces anomalous results. We argue that these unexpected outcomes can be related to the use of “dual-concept diversity” which combines “variety” and “balance” in the definitions (ex ante). We propose to modify RS Diversity into a new indicator (DIV) which operationalizes “variety,” “balance,” and “disparity” independently and then combines them ex post. “Balance” can be measured using the Gini coefficient. We apply DIV to the aggregated citation patterns of 11,487 journals covered by the Journal Citation Reports 2016 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index as an empirical domain and, in more detail, to the citation patterns of 85 journals assigned to the Web-of-Science category “information science & library science” in both the cited and citing directions. We compare the results of the indicators and show that DIV provides improved results in terms of distinguishing between interdisciplinary knowledge integration (citing references) versus knowledge diffusion (cited impact). The new diversity indicator and RS diversity measure different features. A routine for the measurement of the various operationalization of diversity (in any data matrix) is made available online.