Balancing varied assessment functions to attain systemic validity: Three is the magic number

Accountability-oriented reforms demand immediate and continual gains on achievement test, for all students, and without diminishing other outcomes or undermining instruction. This paper describes a framework for aligning classroom assessment and external testing with the aim of negotiating these seemingly contradictory goals. The framework varies the sensitivity to instruction and the representations of knowledge across approaches to assessment. Cycles of design- based studies successively refine relationships between a curriculum and the frame that each assessment provides. Doing so, we argue, leverages the unique formative and summative balance across assessments in order to scaffold learning and demonstrate the “consequential” validity of our strategy without compromising curricula, instruction, or the “evidential” validity that warrants their continued use.     

Reading the mass violence in Indonesia 1965–1966 as a form of primitive accumulation

Abstract

A human rights perspective is compromised in its ability to understand and respond to the mass violence that took place in Indonesia, largely against members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) from 1965–1966. In “Indonesia's Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion, 1965–66,” Hilmar Farid makes the point that a human rights standpoint is limited when capital or its various actors, are involved in propagating and/or perpetrating mass violence. In starting to fashion an alternative reading, Farid proposes Marx's notion of primitive accumulation. While Farid's position is suggestive, I contend that his analysis is marred by a number of theoretical weaknesses, which I attempt to sublate in this article. As such, I will offer an alternative reading of primitive accumulation perceived through a multi-dimensional local/global dialectic.     

Economic returns to education: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and Where We Are Going—Some brief pointers

The estimation of the economic return to education has perhaps been one of the predominant areas of analysis in applied economics for over 50 years. In this short note we consider some of the recent directions taken by the literature, and also some of the blockages faced by both science and policymakers in pushing forward some key issues. This serves by way of introduction to a set of papers for a special issue of the Economics of Education Review.     

Ruby Tuesday

Ruby was 15, and a student at a mixed day special school for students with learning and behavioural difficulties. She was diagnosed with ADHD and had a wide range of additional learning difficulties, including auditory processing problems and literacy difficulties. These combined with classic symptoms of ADHD, including organizational problems, task avoidance and procrastination, made life very difficult for Ruby and her teachers. She would forget to bring in homework assignments and sports kit regularly despite repeated warnings, punishments and various reinforcement mechanisms.     

大学里的德里达

本文解读了德里达对康德和席勒论现代大学起源的著作的阐述,表明那些试图监督和掌控当代大学的理论立场本身也不知不觉地遭到了解构和颠覆.接着,文章考察了当今两个把文科当作现代大学守卫者和监督者的例子.两者都成为德里达辨别出来的解构置换类型的牺牲品.文章还讨论了德里达本人对现代法国大学的制度性干预背后的不同理由.该讨论引向本文的结论,即我们应该像为社会科学和自然科学的纯粹研究辩护一样为人文科学中的纯粹研究辩护,但不应该把经典文科提升到享受特权的优越地位.