Making sense of decades of debate on inter-subject comparability in England

This article illustrates how a new framework for conceptualising comparability has the potential to help assessment professionals to understand and to conduct debate on linking theory and practice. The framework was used as a lens through which to study a corpus of research reports, from which a narrative was constructed to characterise the evolution of conceptions of inter-subject comparability in England from the 1960s to the present day. The new framework helped to bring clarity and structure to the trajectory of ideas, from a period before theoretical commitments were clearly articulated to the present day. One dominant underlying conception was identified and characterised as the ‘all causes’ causal definition. Characterising the dominant conception explicitly, in the language of the new framework, revealed clearly its inadequacy in this comparability context, despite its apparent longevity as the de facto paradigm for interpreting inter-subject comparability monitoring research. Although the dominant conception remained largely unchallenged during the twentieth century, the new framework helped to identify how a number of researchers were grappling for alternative conceptions, even from early on. It was not until the turn of the twenty-first century that alternative conceptions began to be articulated explicitly and the focus of the debate changed from methodological adequacy to definitional adequacy.     

Hydraulic variable-speed transmissions as servomotors

The hydraulic transmission is an important form of servomotor about which little has been written from the viewpoint of the servomechanisms specialist. This paper presents an analysis of the hydraulic transmission; and, for three transmissions, a comparison between the predicted behavior based on the analysis and the measured behavior observed by frequency response tests. Discrepancies between predicted and measured performance are discussed and conclusions drawn. Suggestions are made for improvement of transmission performance. Data necessary for calculations on the transmissions tested are given in the appendix.     

The relations between children's linguistic awareness and spelling: The case of the apostrophe

In a longitudinal study, we looked at the link between children'sunderstanding of a morphemically-based orthographic rule and theirawareness of morphemic distinctions. The orthographic rule in question wasthe use of the apostrophe to denote possession in English. Early on in thestudy, we gave the children phonological, semantic/syntactic and morpho-syntactic awareness tasks, and later we gave them a spelling task in whichthey had to write words which were either genitives (e.g., `boy's') ornominative or accusative plurals (e.g., `boys'). Eight- to 10-year-oldchildren found this task difficult, but their performance improved to someextent with age. The morpho-syntactic, but not the phonological orsemantic/syntactic, awareness tasks predicted how well the children placedapostrophes in genitive words and omitted them from plural words. Weconclude that different forms of linguistic awareness affect differentaspects of reading and spelling. Learning about spelling patterns based onmorphemes is heavily influenced by children's morpho-syntactic awarenessbut not, apparently, by other forms of linguistic awareness.     

An Evaluation of the Impact of External Quality Monitoring on a Higher Education College (1993–98)

With the establishment, in August 1997, of a new UK‐wide Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), it is timely to reflect on the impact of the two principal forms of external quality monitoring which the QAA has replaced. First, the quality assessment by the funding councils, whose five‐year cycle of teaching quality assessment in universities and colleges in Scotland and Wales, which commenced in 1993, is now complete. Second, institutional quality audits of universities and colleges, conducted by the Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC) between 1993 and 1997. This paper reports the results of a five‐year action research study conducted at a college of higher education. The particular focus of the study was on issues arising from the development and implementation of a quality assurance system at the study institution, and attempts to reconcile requirements for accountability and efforts to encourage quality improvement. The paper reviews and evaluates the impact of each of the forms of external monitoring, teaching quality assessment and institutional audit, on the study institution. Results are presented using qualitative and quantitative data drawn from external performance measures, such as the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) and HEQC quality assessment and audit reports, and internal measures of staff experience and perceptions. Lessons are drawn in relation to perceived benefits, or otherwise, of external quality assessment and quality audit, and consideration is given to the implications which the findings have beyond the study institution and the Scottish higher education sector, and in particular for the newly established Quality Assurance Agency.     

The signed algorithm and its bugs

Deaf children consistently lag behind their hearing cohorts in mathematics achievement tests. It has been hypothesized that their difficulty is a consequence of their lack of covert counting strategies and reliance on memorized verbal facts. We investigated the acquisition of an alternative method to solve sums, the signed algorithm, by six profoundly deaf primary school children. Similarly to the acquisition of the written algorithm by hearing children, deaf children's calculation errors with the signed algorithm were found to be systematic and related to the structure of the numeration system in British Sign Language. These results can be used to examine better ways of teaching arithmetic to deaf children and illustrate in a novel way the role of systems of signs in mathematical cognition.     

Creativity as a twenty-first-century competence: an exploratory study of provision and reality

Recently, creativity has begun to be talked about as a twenty-first-century competency [UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). 2006. The World Conference on Arts Education: Building Creative Capacities for the 21st Century: Working Document, Lisbon, Portugal, 6–9 March 2006. Lisbon: UNESCO]. Several government-endorsed publications have also stressed the importance of fostering creativity in the classroom [Robinson Report. (1999). Great Britain Department for Education and Employment. Department for Culture, Media and Sport. National Advisory Committee on Creativity and Cultural Education. All Our Futures: Creativity and Culture in Education. London: DfEE; DfES. (2004). Excellence and Enjoyment: A Strategy for Primary School. London: DfES; QCA. (2005). Find It! Promote It! London: QCA]. This study aims to explore opportunities to foster creativity following the new National Curriculum’s introduction (DfE (Department for Education). [2013a. National Curriculum for Art & Design. London: DfE; DfE. 2013b. National Curriculum for History. London: DfE; DfE. 2013c. National Curriculum for Science. London: DfE]). It explores provision and attempts to go beyond this into daily classroom practices by interviewing teachers. Analysis indicates a wide variation in terms of in-school provision. Certain schemes of work may be more successful at fostering creativity and that relying purely on the National Curriculum can hinder opportunities for creativity. Teacher responses indicate that they value creativity but find it hard to accurately describe incidents of creativity being fostered and teaching creatively is often confused for teaching for creativity. Training has been designed to address this, although a pervading emphasis on schools’ performativity will mean creativity is not embedded into daily learning to the extent it can be a twenty-first-century competence unless there is a major policy change.     

Ethnic identity among Japanese-Americans in Hawaii : A critique of Hansen's third-generation return hypothesis

Ethnic identity is a complex phenomenon involving the interaction of cultural elements and contemporary social relationships. Hansen's third-generation hypothesis offers a monocausal explanation that has been tested in several U.S. sites with various ethnic groups. The mixed results from U.S. mainland studies and from the studies conducted in Hawaii with Japanese-Americans show the inadequacy of generational position as an explanation of ethnic identity. In the Hawaii study reported here, 30 Nisei (second generation) and 30 Sansei (third generation) male Japanese-Americans between the ages of 31 and 55 were given Meredith's Ethnic Identity Questionnaire. Results showing the Sansei significantly more assimilated than the Nisei require a rejection of Hansen's hypothesis. These findings are discussed in relation to other studies of Hansen's hypothesis and to theories of ethnicity that view ethnic identity as less a function of time and generationalposition than of social position in complex societies.