Contextualising Authentic Assessment

The term 'authentic assessment' has recently gained widespread use in education. This paper explores various ways in which authentic assessment is being interpreted and the relationship between these different interpretations and the original focus of authenticity in learning. The paper explores briefly the ways in which implicit and explicit beliefs about the nature of learning and knowledge formation direct the ways in which authentic assessment is interpreted and used. Educational issues that arise from some implementations of authentic assessment, identified as camouflage, simulation and abstraction, are discussed. The need for authentic assessment to be contextualised through a coherent teaching, learning and assessment domain is stressed.     

留学小语种国家

能学一门专业还能再掌握一门外语,无疑在职场中独具竞争力,工薪阶层也可以选择去留学,小语种国家的费用优势开始突显出来——有的国家只收注册费,还可以打工等优惠条件更吸引了不少生源前往小语种国家去留学。     

Asperger syndrome and the English curriculum: addressing the challenges

A major criterion for the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome is an impairment of the imagination. This article focuses on the specific difficulties that students with Asperger syndrome have with the imaginative content of the English curriculum. It examines the problems with reading and writing imaginatively of a group of students with AS in a secondary school mainstream setting. Various strategies and interventions are considered and discussed which could aid their understanding and learning in relation to the imaginative element of the English curriculum. While acknowledging that this is an area of real difficulty for these students, recommendations include: treating students with AS as individuals; using a small group setting; providing support through structured frameworks.     

Significant Life Experiences and Formative Influences on the Development of Adults’ Environmental Awareness in the UK,Australia and Canada

Environmental educators in Australia (n = 82), and Canada (n = 48) wrote autobiographical statements describing the formative influences and significant life experiences (SLE) which led to their concern for the environment. Content analysis identified the influences/experiences mentioned most often, both as single factors, e.g. ‘close family’, and as groups of logically related factors, e.g. ‘people’, a group composed of the factors ‘close family’, ‘older friends'’, ‘friends'’, and ‘having children’. The final lists of single factors were similar but not identical in the two countries, and both differed slightly from the list already derived from a sample of environmental educators in the UK (n = 233). Here we present the single and grouped factors named most often in Australia, then do the same for Canada, and then compare the principal factors in all three nations.     

A View from Somewhere: Explaining the Paradigms of Educational Research

In this paper I ask how educational researchers can believe the subjective perceptions of qualitative participant-observers given the concern for objectivity and generalisability of experimental research in the behavioural and social sciences. I critique the most common answer to this question within the educational research community, which posits the existence of two (or more) equally legitimate epistemological paradigms—positivism and constructivism—and offer an alternative that places a priority in educational research on understanding the purposes and meanings humans attribute to educational practices. Only within the context of what I call a transcendent view from somewhere—higher ideals that govern human activities—can we make sense of quantitative as well as qualitative research findings.     

What is Common About Common Schooling? Rational Autonomy and Moral Agency in Liberal Democratic Education

In this essay I critique two influential accounts of rational autonomy in common schooling that conceive liberalism as an ideal form of life, and I offer an alternative approach to democratic education that views liberal theory as concerned with coexistence among rival ways of living. This view places moral agency, not rational autonomy, at the heart of schooling in liberal societies—a moral agency grounded in initiation into dynamic traditions that enable self-definition and are accompanied by exposure to life-paths other than one's own. This alternative challenges the tendency in large diverse democracies (such as those of the US and the UK) to prefer common to particularistic schools, thereby placing many types of faith and secular schools on a more equal footing and providing moral justification for education in the national cultures of small liberal republics (such as Denmark, Israel and Lithuania) that maintain special relationships to particular groups while acknowledging the rights of all citizens. I call this approach the pedagogy of difference.