How Well Am I Doing? Using a Corpus-based Analysis to Investigate Tutor and Institutional Messages in Comment Sheets

Current Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education guidelines highlight the necessity for institutional assessment to be clear and transparent. Whilst institutions spend much energy on making sure that criteria on which they assess work are published and clear, much of the feedback to students on different courses is discursive in nature and consists of both formative and summative assessment. Students also receive information about grades and criteria from a variety of institutional documents. This paper uses a concordance of feedback sheets to investigate the way that tutors use institutional discourse in written feedback sheets on a part-time MA(Ed) and the functions performed by the written feedback. The paper finds a high degree of congruence between the institutional and tutor corpora. Both corpora place considerable emphasis on academic conventions, yet this is not reflected in the criteria used for assessment.     

Education as a Social Right in a Diverse Society

The aim of this article is to outline the basis for a comprehensive account of educational rights. It begins by acknowledging the difficulties posed by diversity, and defends a conception of universal human rights that limits parental educational discretion. Against the backdrop of the literature of public reason and fair equality of opportunity, it sketches arguments for the existence of rights to education of some specific kinds. Those rights, and associated educational purposes, are systematised on the basis of a conception of education as initiation into practices that express human flourishing.     

Connected Learning and the Foundations of Psychometrics: A Rejoinder

This paper continues an exchange between its author and Andrew Davis. Part I addresses the attribution and ontological status of mental constructs and argues that philosophical work on these topics does not undermine high stakes testing. Part II examines the significance for testing of the connectedness of meaningful learning. Part III addresses the high stakes in high stakes testing in connection with the risk entailed by limited scoring reliability. It concludes that there is no straightforward relationship between the magnitude of what is at stake for students and teachers and the threshold of acceptable reliability in scoring.     

Peters Redux: The Motivational Power of Inherently Valuable Learning

The dominant focus of national education systems today is on children's future employment prospects and economic productivity, yet the collapsing market value of educational credentials compels students to devote ever longer and more intense expanses of their lives to formal education in order to reap such instrumental rewards. In these circumstances, it is more important than ever to be clear about why we are educating children and what could possibly sustain their engagement in a process that too often treats their present wellbeing as an expendable frill. Fifty years ago, R.S. Peters defended the inherent and direct formative value of education, and his ideas are no less relevant today. This essay will revisit and substantially vindicate these ideas, focusing on the importance for student wellbeing and motivation of schools being communities devoted to things of value beyond self-serving attainment.     

Educational Goods and the Ethical Dimensions of Educational Policy and Practice

This essay is a commentary on Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb and Swift's Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making. It discusses the book's conceptualisation of childhood goods, and it comments at length on its place within the larger philosophical enterprise of promoting normatively and evidentially sound decision-making in education. A thesis of the commentary is that the book provides an important form of orientation to educational policy decision-making, but that the goods and distributive values it identifies would need to be supplemented in order to adequately address aspects of educational practice beyond the kinds of policy matters it discusses. These would include the content of education, the scope and division of educational authority, and the manner in which such authority should be exercised, for example pedagogically, in shaping student conduct, and in communicating and implementing educational policies.     

An Introduction to Servo Pneumatic Positioning: An Interactive Multimedia Program Development Supporting Outcome-driven Engineering Assessment

Servo pneumatics retains the advantages of standard pneumatics and adds the opportunity for closed-loop controlled, programmable positioning to within fractions of a millimeter in systems in which positions can be approached rapidly and without overshoot, stability under variable loads and conditions, and adaptive control for optimized positioning. Our challenge was to create an interactive multimedia program that could communicate exciting technical material to interested parties, including students and academia, professional design, industrial and manufacturing systems engineers, marketing and sales engineers and managers in a non-linear, enjoyable fashion. Our approach was that of interactive multimedia on CD-ROM, allowing the integration of text, color images, videos and animation for the purpose of following an engineering problem-solving approach, both when modeling, as well as when illustrating real-world solutions with interactive digital videos. Furthermore, this article introduces outcome-driven assessment principles ( as defined by the American Accreditation Board of Engineering Education) as the key to our educational multimedia design objectives. It illustrates open-loop controlled pneumatic and closed-loop controlled servo pneumatic positioning systems, their components, their programming and some of their applications.