ITEM BANKS: WHAT, WHY, HOW

In this paper, we discuss curricular implications of item banking and its practical value to teachers and students, and list a variety of working banks with their sources. We also review the psychometric basis of item banking, outline a family of computer programs for accomplishing banking, and give the equations necessary to build a bank. We conclude with a discussion of item quality control and examples of items that misfit because of miskeying, guessing, or carelessness.     

Religious Worldviews and the Common School: The French Dilemma

This article explores, in the French context, an aspect of what Terence McLaughlin (1991) has described in an unpublished paper as the 'dilemma of substantiality' faced by any school system endeavouring to promote neutrality. In France, in order that the public or common school be genuinely open to all students, not only is the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols forbidden but so too is any direct teaching of religion. The cultural consequences resulting from this prohibition have led to the mandating of cross-curricular teaching about religion. This article aims to show that the civic principles (la laïcité) on which this teaching is based pose in an acute and problematic form the 'dilemma of substantiality'.     

How effective is parental prosecution as a method of improving school attendance among primary‐aged children?

Just under half a million children and young people in state schools in England miss school every day. Indeed, improving school attendance has remained a key aim for successive governments. Various strategies have been adopted at both national and local levels in an attempt to tackle the persistent issue of school attendance with varying degrees of success. This study explores the effectiveness of one of those strategies – that of parental prosecutions – as a means of improving children and young people's school attendance. It reports on the effectiveness of parental prosecutions while highlighting some of the emerging patterns among a cohort of those prosecuted within one local authority during one academic year.     

Moral Rules, Utilitarianism and Schizophrenic Moral Education

R. M. Hare has argued for and defended a ‘two-level’, view of moral agency. He argues that moral agents ought to rely on the rules of ‘intuitive moral thinking’ for their ‘everyday’ moral judgments. When these rules conflict or when we do not have a rule at hand, we ought to ascend to the act-utilitarian,‘critical’ level of moral thinking. I argue that since the rules at the intuitive level of moral thinking necessarily conflict much more often than Hare supposes, and since we often do not have ready-made rules for our moral judgments, we must necessarily use critical moral thinking very frequently. However, act-utilitarian judgements at this level will sharply conflict with our strongly held ‘intuitive’ moral convictions. I show that Hare's attempt to balance these two aspects of moral judgment requires us to simultaneously adopt two conflicting sets of moral standards, and thus an attempt to inculcate such standards constitutes a ‘schizophrenic’ moral education. Finally, I briefly outline an alternative conception of moral education, based on Aristotelian phronesis.