Examining England's National Curriculum assessments: an analysis of the KS2 reading test questions, 1993–2004

The Year 6 National Curriculum reading test has become a familiar and established annual experience at the end of the primary phase in schools throughout England. From 1993 onwards, each year the national reading test for 11‐year‐olds has consisted of a different set of texts, accompanied by a different set of questions. With over a decade's accumulation of national assessment materials, the National Foundation for Educational Research decided to fund a project to take stock of the reading test, scrutinise what children have been expected to do over the years, and track the evolution of the assessment. A new taxonomy of question focuses, introduced by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in 2003 , provided the opportune moment to conduct a retrospective re‐categorisation of all the questions that had ever appeared in a Key Stage 2 reading test. This paper reports on that exercise and reveals that some forms of questioning remain constant and reappear every year, while others are subject to variation.     

Reflection‐Impulsivity and Wholist‐Analytic: two fledglings? ...or is R‐I a cuckoo?

Riding has proposed two families of cognitive styles: Wholist‐Analytic and Verbaliser‐Imager. Although the supporting empirical evidence has been demonstrated, the issue not fully addressed is whether the families are also theoretical valid. The task here is to evaluate the W‐A family against cognitive style theory, as proposed by Witkin and other style theorists. Several ideas are discussed: (1) Overall, the W‐A family provides a useful catalyst to styles research; (2) Despite the envisioned success of the W‐A family, reflection‐impulsivity may be a much less supportive member, having several differences with W‐A theory; (3) These have important implications for the continuing strength of styles theory and research. It also has strong implications for the application of cognitive styles in educational settings.     

Transition from School to Adult Life: Views of School Leavers with Disabilities

USING a structured interview format this exploratory study sought the views of 73 young people with a range of disabilities regarding means for ensuring an effective transition from school to adult life for people with disabilities. A wide range of views was elicited focussing on the roles that both the school and community can play. Included in their suggestions were the need for a planned transition process, a job‐related school curriculum and structured procedures to facilitate community integration. Most importantly, however, the study has highlighted the valuable contribution made by service consumers in providing useful and meaningful information. Implications of the results of the study for future program development and research efforts are discussed.     

新的技术与新的挑战:教师支持与发展

远程教育教师是远程开放教育的促动者,是远程教育院校与学习者获取联系的纽带和桥梁.远程教育教师在实现远程教育教学目标的过程中发挥着重要的作用.本文着重研究新技术对教师和教学的影响,以及远程教育机构对教师提供的有效支持和帮助.     

Teaching Technical Communication in an Era of Distributed Work: A Case Study of Collaboration Between U.S. and Swedish Students

As distributed work begins to shift the nature of practice for technical communication professionals in the workplace, faculty need new frameworks to help prepare students for roles that involve negotiating, supporting, and facilitating virtual global collaboration. This paper identifies key areas of metaknowledge appropriate to these new frameworks by synthesizing a review of current scholarship on such collaborations and a case study of students participating in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural team project.     

Theoretical and Practical Integration of Literacy and Numeracy in a University Academic Programme

Abstract

This paper reports on research into the enhancement of generic skills in academic numeracy in the context of an Australian university teacher education programme. The project addressed issues of what constitutes academic numeracy, the design and implementation of appropriate numeracy strategies, and how best to integrate tertiary literacy and numeracy in university courses. This paper presents an overview of the key stages of the project, and the development of its outcomes. The major outcome is a framework for academic numeracy, which is a means for identifying and describing the numeracy demands of academic texts and tasks.     

Reverberating chords: implications of storied nostalgia for borderland discourses in pre-service teacher identity

The research that is the subject of this paper set out to interrogate pre-service teachers’ responses to issues of national identity, ideology, and representation in contemporary multicultural Canadian picture books. While the research focused on whether and how the literature could serve to inform and broaden pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of diversity, we retrospectively decided to re-visit the focus group and interview data to know which of the 70 picture books had most engaged the teachers and why. We critically consider the implications of teachers’ attachments for social justice education and teachers’ cultivation of a critical, ‘borderlands’ discourse aware of self and open to others. The research suggests that a significant source of teacher knowledge and thinking is lodged in teachers’ personal memories of childhood texts, called touchstones. Touchstones were a place from which teachers implicitly began; certain stories struck particular chords, chords largely attributable to childhood memories. Most intertextual connections were personal, with some tangential to the text. While touchstones performed different functions depending on the subject position of the pre-service teachers, they pointed to the existence of an underlying position of teacher as nostalgic subject. Given the importance of this subject position for teachers’ responses to picture books, we explore critical reconceptualizations of nostalgia that can support the development of borderland discourses. We suggest that pre-service teachers need to be invited to individually and collectively examine their responses to both old and new touchstone stories. More nuanced research also needs to be conducted on the role of nostalgia in teacher formation, how it influences teacher practice, and how to best design teacher education courses to foster ‘borderland discourses’ related to the storying of teacher identity, especially with respect to popular ‘collectibles’ and core teaching texts like picture books.