Assessment leaders’ perspectives of institutional cultures of assessment: a Delphi study

Institutional cultures of assessment are praised as beneficial to student learning. Yet, extant studies have not explored the theoretical foundations and pragmatic approaches to shaping cultures of assessment. The researchers used the Delphi method to explore 10 higher education assessment leaders’ attitudes and theoretical perspectives regarding cultures of assessment. These expert assessment leaders were iteratively surveyed until a reasonable threshold of consensus was reached. Study participants viewed buy-in as a necessary component of a positive campus culture of assessment, and advice on reshaping negative cultures was offered. Assessment leaders’ guiding theoretical frameworks were implied and loosely defined with metaphors. Finally, advice is offered for improving cultures of assessment by symbolically connecting assessment to student learning through dialogue.     

Managing the paradox of control: the case of ground-up implementation of active learning in Singapore’s primary schools

The Singaporean education system has recently shifted emphasis from being highly centralised and standardised towards one that aims to promote innovation and autonomy at the school level. Yet, the concomitant move towards a more decentralised and flexible curriculum enacted and controlled at the local level has not been straightforward. Consequently, Hargreaves, Shirley, and Ng have described five paradoxes of educational and social change that characterise Singapore’s continued performance in academic achievement. One of these paradoxes is the paradox of control: How could the Ministry of Education (MOE) release classroom decision making and curriculum development to teachers and schools, while maintaining overall control across the system? They respond that the MOE maintains a fine balance characterised as bottom-up innovation with top-down support that requires further investigation. In this paper, we illustrate the implementation of an active learning curriculum in four primary schools to illustrate this approach of ‘top-down support for bottom-up’ curricular innovation in schools. In Singapore, the ‘Teach Less, Learn More’ movement has ignited school-based development of innovative curricula to bring about active learning, with the intention of developing pupil attributes such as creativity, collaboration, and self-confidence. Our case study explores how practitioners implement a curriculum that is meant to nurture a more emancipatory spirit in students that builds up their confidence and collaboration through active learning. A key premise is that such a curriculum requires practitioners’ autonomy to interpret the goals and desired outcomes and to plan their pupils’ learning experiences.     

Explaining Chinese students' academic motivation: filial piety and self‐determination

This study investigated the relevance of filial piety and the three components of self‐determination, namely, competence, autonomy and relatedness, on academic motivation among Hong Kong Chinese secondary school students. A total of 461 students completed the questionnaire which consisted of five scales assessing attitudes towards filial piety, perceived scholastic competence, perceived autonomous support from parents, relatedness with parents and academic motivation. By using structural equation modelling, a predictive model of academic motivation, with filial piety, competence, autonomy, relatedness, age and gender as antecedents, was developed. All variables explained the prediction of academic motivation, with competence acted as the strongest effect, followed by relatedness and filial piety. The findings highlight the important contribution of the three self‐determination theory (SDT) components and the value of filial piety for Chinese adolescents' academic motivation. The implications of the findings for future research and educational practice were discussed.     

Dual Enrollment and Retention in Tennessee Community Colleges: Implications for Practice

ABSTRACT

With the increased numbers of dual enrollment students across the country as well as various state initiatives to increase retention among the student population at large, institutions face great challenges when balancing the many initiatives incumbent upon them. However, Tennessee, a state leader in both the free community college and dual enrollment initiatives, the Tennessee Board of Regents System (TBR), and its community colleges are positioned to improve retention rates by giving greater attention to their dual enrollment students. This brief study of one cohort of students at Walters State Community College (WSCC), located in East Tennessee, noted a major disparity in retention between students with dual enrollment experience and those without, suggesting an extant need to give particular consideration to institutional approaches designed to reinforce the dual enrollment programs and the students’ experience in said programs. Doing so may not only address the initiative of providing high quality dual enrollment classes to high school students but also improve institutional retention rates.     

Dissenting academies and the education of the laity, 1750-1850

In 1898, students at the University of Toronto founded Torontonensis, the university’s first yearbook. Fashioned as a remembrance of university, from its inception the yearbook was fraught with conflict and contestation particularly around how male students were represented and how their college experiences were made, and not made, meaningful. The vociferous debates that ensued in campus newspapers, particularly among the graduating classes, fractured the ostensibly smooth recounting of this ‘souvenir remembrance’, bringing into question who is allowed to ‘speak’ on behalf of whom and what it is acceptable to ‘say’. The authors enquire into the way university yearbooks served to construct normative definitions of what constituted ‘students’, ‘student cultures’ and forms of gendering within the educational landscapes in which they were enmeshed. Through an examination of Torontonensis, they highlight the multiple and often contradictory meanings and constructions of the student yearbook from the perspectives of their producers, subjects and audiences.     

An initial study of the diagnostic utility of the emotional and behavioural screener in Lithuania

In schools, screening is an effective method to identify students at-risk for emotional and behavioural disorders. Several intervention programmes such as Positive Behaviour Interventions and Supports, Response to Intervention, and Multi-tiered Systems of Supports call for the use of psychometrically sound screening instruments. This study investigated diagnostic utility of a brief (10-item) screener, the Emotional and Behavioural Screener (EBS) with a sample 312 Lithuanian students. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire was used as a reference point for the investigation. Diagnostic utility statistics (i.e. overall agreement, misleading negatives, sensitivity, specificity and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) were used to evaluate the usefulness and validity of the EBS. The results indicate, that majority of the diagnostic utility statistics thresholds were met; however, some gender differences were found. In sum, the EBS appears to be an accurate screener discriminating students not at-risk and at-risk for emotional and behavioural problems. Study limitations, future research directions and implications are discussed.     

Professional Development?+?Coaching?=?Enhanced Teaching: Increasing Usage of Math Mediated Language in Preschool Classrooms

In an effort to determine the most efficacious manner to deliver professional development training to early childhood educators, this study investigated the effect of a 2-h workshop followed by side-by-side classroom coaching. Twelve early childhood educators with 4-year degrees teaching in a university child development center participated in the study. The twice weekly classroom observations were analyzed for the use of math mediated language. Results indicate a 56% increase of math mediated language following the professional development; however, the greatest increase (39% increase over professional development condition) occurred during the side-by-side coaching phase of the treatment. These results corroborate previous findings that implementation of teaching strategies presented in professional development trainings can be enhanced by coaching teachers on the use of the strategies.     

Production and consumption of university Linked Data

Linked Data increases the value of an organisation's data over the web by introducing explicit and machine processable links at the data level. We have adopted this new stream of data representation to produce and expose existing data within The Open University (OU) as Linked Data. We present in this paper our approach for producing the data, based on well-defined workflows at the organisation as well as the technical levels. We also discuss the data already available to consume, and show the potential improvements that Linked Data brings by presenting three applications: (1) the OU Expert Search system for finding experts at the OU based on a specified topic of interest, (2) the Social Study application to identify potential courses for students based on their Facebook profile information, and (3) the Linked OpenLearn application that helps students identify related media and courses to OpenLearn units at the OU. Before concluding the paper, we show the potential benefits and an approach towards interlinking data beyond The Open University with other universities, using a common categorisation scheme.     

Assessment of learning gains associated with independent exam analysis in introductory biology

This study evaluates the impact of an independent postmidterm question analysis exercise on the ability of students to answer subsequent exam questions on the same topics. It was conducted in three sections (～400 students/section) of introductory biology. Graded midterms were returned electronically, and each student was assigned a subset of questions answered incorrectly by more than 40% of the class to analyze as homework. The majority of questions were at Bloom's application/analysis level; this exercise therefore emphasized learning at these higher levels of cognition. Students in each section answered final exam questions matched by topic to all homework questions, providing a within-class control group for each question. The percentage of students who correctly answered the matched final exam question was significantly higher (p < 0.05) in the Topic Analysis versus Control Analysis group for seven of 19 questions. We identified two factors that influenced activity effectiveness: 1) similarity in topic emphasis of the midterm-final exam question pair and 2) quality of the completed analysis homework. Our data suggest that this easy-to-implement exercise will be useful in large-enrollment classes to help students develop self-regulated learning skills. Additional strategies to help introductory students gain a broader understanding of topic areas are discussed.     

Exploring the impact of bullying on young bystanders

This study aimed to explore peer bullying events in schools by using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to consider the experiences of young bystanders: the perceptions and understandings of students who had witnessed bullying. Participants were aged 12–13 and attended two neighbouring secondary schools in the UK. Four themes were generated: the power and limits of language in bullying incidents; the power of moral frameworks; the presence of dynamic social systems, both inside and outside peer groups; and the psychological consequences of being a bystander. Implications of the research are discussed, for the practice of school staff and for educational psychologists.