Achieving Legal Viability in Personnel Evaluations

Legal viability of an evaluation means that the evaluator can successfully address pertinent legal issues and avoid debilitating legal difficulties in conducting an ethical personnel evaluation and applying its results. While the 1988 Personnel Evaluation Standards contain no specific standard on legal viability, following the documents twenty-one standards substantially aids evaluators to avoid legal difficulties. Nevertheless, meeting legal viability requirements is becoming increasingly complex and difficult in the face of the expanding role of personnel evaluations in high-stake decisions, including initial and advanced certification, sanctions and rewards, and terminations. Evaluators increasingly need sound, definitive guidance to meet procedural and substantive due process requirements and, in general, to keep their evaluations legally defensible. Eight years of experience in applying the 1988 Standards provides a foundation for developing a specific legal viability standard. This article argues for the inclusion of such a standard in the next edition of The Personnel Evaluation Standards. A prototype standard is presented to help the Joint Committee and its constituents deliberate on this matter.     

Jordanian and British Primary Schoolchildren's Attitudes Towards the Environment

The paper explores the important but neglected field of primary schoolchildren's attitudes towards the environment using a specifically designed scale in Arabic and English. It reports attitude differences towards the environment and three domains -- pollution, waste and animals and plants -- according to nationality and gender. Overall the findings show that environmental education programmes produce only slightly positive attitudes. Consideration is given to the further research required to enhance such programmes.     

Electronic portfolios and learner identity: an ePortfolio case study in music and writing

Although the employability of graduates is of concern across further and higher education it is particularly problematic in the arts disciplines, from which few students transition to a traditional, full-time position. Arts graduates shape their work to meet personal and professional needs, and the successful negotiation of this type of career requires a strong sense of identity and an awareness of diverse opportunities. The challenge for educators is how we might develop these capacities whilst being mindful of students’ dreams, which are often focused on artistic excellence and recognition. This paper reports findings from a collaborative study undertaken at four Australian universities. With a focus on developing an electronic portfolio (eP), the study involved students in classical and contemporary music, music education, music technology, creative writing and professional writing. The combination of music and writing provided points of comparison to identify issues specific to music, and those that might apply more generally. This paper reports findings related to learner identity, drawing evidence from survey and interview data. The study, which was driven by the learning process rather than the technological tool, revealed that students’ use of eP transitions from archive to self-portrait. Moreover, the eP emerged as a vehicle through which identity is negotiated and constructed. Indeed, the process of developing of an eP prompted students to adopt future-oriented thinking as they began to redefine their learning in relation to their future lives and careers. These findings were common to all students, regardless of discipline or technological platform.     

S + T + M = E as a Convergent Model for the Nature of STEM

Science & Education - The paper provides a theoretical synthesis that addresses the multiple calls to consider the existence of an integrated nature of STEM (science, technology, engineering,...     

What happens to precocious readers' performance by the age of eleven?

This paper reports on the progress made by a small group of fourteen 11‐year‐old children who had been originally identified as being precocious readers before they started primary school at the age of five. The data enable comparisons to be made with the performance of the children when they were younger so that a six‐year longitudinal analysis can be made. The children who began school as precocious readers continued to make progress in reading accuracy, rate and comprehension, thereby maintaining their superior performance relative to a comparison group. However, their progress appeared to follow the same developmental trajectory as that of the comparison group. Measures of phonological awareness showed that there are long‐term, stable individual differences that correlated with all measures of reading. The children who were reading precociously early showed significantly higher levels of phonological awareness than the comparison children. In addition, they showed the same levels of performance on this task as a further group of high achieving young adults. A positive effect of being able to read at precociously early age was identified in the significantly higher levels of receptive vocabulary found amongst these children. The analyses indicated that rises in receptive vocabulary resulted from reading performance rather than the other way round.     

The development and validation of a framework for teaching competencies in higher education

In higher education, approaches to teaching are becoming more student-centred, which demands different teaching competencies. Therefore, it is necessary to have an adequate framework of teaching competencies that can be used for evaluation purposes. The weaknesses of the existing frameworks are that they do not pay attention to the person as teacher, they are too narrowly defined, they are not validated and they are not adjusted to modern approaches to teaching. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a framework of teaching competencies in higher education. A framework for teaching competencies was therefore constructed containing the following domains: The Person as Teacher, Expert on Content Knowledge, Facilitator of Learning Processes, Organiser and Scholar/Lifelong Learner. The framework was validated using a Delphi method. Educational experts (N = 63) were asked: ``How important are the following teaching competencies in each domain for an experienced teacher in higher education?'' A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the adequacy of the domains. After two rounds, the shift in ratings was minimal, so the results were considered stable. The response rate was 82%. From the original list with 134 items, 30 items were omitted because many experts failed to respond to them. The experts reached consensus on 61 out of the resulting 104 items (59%). A confirmatory factor analysis on the three best scoring items in each domain confirmed the model. A framework of teaching competencies was developed and validated that can be used as a starting point for teacher evaluation in higher education.     

Using a conceptual framework and the opinions of portfolio experts to develop a teaching portfolio prototype

This article reports the design of a prototype for a teaching portfolio for development and assessment purposes. A portfolio prototype was developed according to theoretical choices based on portfolio literature and Zeichner and Wray's (2001) conceptual framework. We conducted an interview study in which portfolio experts were asked to judge to what extent our theoretical choices were reflected in the prototype developed and which modifications were needed. In general, the experts agreed that our choices were reflected in the prototype developed. However, there were some controversial topics, which are discussed, as well as key issues for further research.     

Student Perspectives on Academic Accommodations

The active involvement of secondary school students with high-incidence disabilities (HI) in instructional accommodations is essential to both enacting the accommodations and to the accommodations effectiveness. Very little is known about students with HI’s knowledge about instructional accommodations, experiences with them, or opinions on effective practices. A focus group study was conducted with 10 high school students with HI. A content analysis (Fraenkel & Wallen, 2009) revealed they are unaware of how their accommodations are identified, and that they typically are not directly taught to use them. The students explained how accommodations are usually provided in the classroom, including the ways they signal need, and offered their suggestions for more effective practices, which included responding to fairness and potential embarrassment. Their comments also revealed their beliefs and practices for self-advocating for accommodations.     

Multimedia and the changing experience of the learner

This paper argues for a pedagogical analysis of what the new multimedia systems can offer that will impose on them a more ambitious objective than they currently have. It begins by summarising a framework for analysing educational media, in terms of how well they each support the teaching-learning process. The different types of media are then related to different 'modes' of learning: via the narrative media which support learning through acquisition, the discursive media which support learning through discussion, the interactive media, which support learning by discovery, and adaptive media which can be used to support 'guided discovery'. Multimedia is sometimes seen as a way of re-purposing material originally developed for narrative media. Because it can be (even should be) an adaptive medium, this requires the learning objectives to be re-constructed if the new medium is to achieve its pedagogical potential and offer a new kind of learning experience to students.