Thinking/acting locally/globally: Western science and environmental education in a global knowledge economy

This paper critically appraises a number of approaches to 'thinking globally' in environmental education, with particular reference to popular assumptions about the universal applicability of Western science. Although the transnational character of many environmental issues demands that we 'think globally', I argue that the contribution of Western science to understanding and resolving environmental problems might be enhanced by seeing it as one among many local knowledge traditions. The production of a 'global knowledge economy' in/for environmental education can then be understood as creating transnational 'spaces' in which local knowledge traditions can be performed together, rather than as creating a 'common market' in which representations of local knowledge must be translated into (or exchanged for) the terms of a universal discourse.     

The Role of Extended Time and Item Content on a High‐Stakes Mathematics Test

The premise of a great deal of current research guiding policy development has been that accommodations are the catalyst for student performance differences. Rather than accepting this premise, two studies were conducted to investigate the influence of extended time and content knowledge on the performance of ninth‐grade students who took a statewide mathematics test with and without accommodations. Each study involved 1,250 accommodated students (extended time only) with learning disabilities and 1,250 nonaccommodated students demonstrating no disabilities. In Study One, a standard differential item functioning (DIF) analysis illustrated that the usual approach to studying the effects of accommodations contributes little to our understanding of the reason for performance differences across students. Next, a mixture item response theory DIF model was used to explore the most likely cause(s) for performance differences across the population. The results from both studies suggest that students for whom items were functioning differently were not accurately characterized by their accommodation status but rather by their content knowledge. That is, knowing students' accommodation status (i.e., accommodated or nonaccommodated) contributed little to understanding why accommodated and nonaccommodated students differed in their test performance. Rather, the data would suggest that a more likely explanation is that mathematics competency differentiated the groups of student learners regardless of their accommodation and/or reading levels.