Developmental assessment: lifting literacy through professional learning teams

Outcomes and findings from an evidence‐based approach to targeting primary school students’ developmental reading comprehension levels for effective learning are described. Nineteen schools participated in a literacy assessment project designed to monitor and improve the reading comprehension achievement levels of their students. The project integrated a developmental approach to learning and teaching, information derived from standardised reading comprehension assessments, and professional development for teachers. Reading comprehension achievement across the schools increased at a higher rate than typically expected. Teacher discourse about teaching and learning changed from discrete skill and resource focused, to developmentally focused. The centrality of a professional learning team approach to change for the student, teacher and school is discussed.     

Health status and schooling decisions of young men

This paper considers the impact of health status on schooling attainment and earnings of young men. Using the National Longitudinal Surveys of Male Youth (aged 19–29 in 1971), we find a statistically significant negative relationship between years of schooling and health status. Those with the most severe health problems obtain almost 2.4 fewer years of schooling than their healthy counterparts. This loss represents about 20% of mean schooling for the entire sample. Also, hourly earnings are reduced by approximately 17% directly and indirectly (via schooling reductions) by health problems.     

Chinese Business Process Re-engineering

The popularity of business process re-engineering (BPR) and its international diffusion from the United States make it important to understand the influence of cultural factors on this concept. The global economic prominence of the Chinese and their distinctive cultural characteristics prompted our study of Chinese business process re-engineering. This article addresses a large gap in the Chinese management literature and is intended to help those who are managing organizations or marketing information technology (IT) products and related services in Greater China. We systematically compare IT-enabled change in the American and Chinese business cultures. Informal planning and process modelling, highly interdependent social and organizational relationships with ingrained hierarchies, and the prevailing attitudes towards information management and organizational change will shape the preparation for IT-enabled process innovation efforts as well as the design and implementation of IT-enhanced business process models in Chinese organizations.     

荷兰初等教育监测与评估系统

为了帮助学校控制教学质量,荷兰国家教育测量研究院(Cito)为初等教育阶段开发出一套监测与评估系统。该系统包括一系列连续的国家范围内的标准化考试,对学生受教育过程中的成绩进行纵向评估。本文介绍了该系统的主要内容、教育及心理测量依据以及提供的部分成绩报告,并重点讨论了荷兰学校如何利用这些报告改进和提高教学水平。     

Images of Objective Knowledge Construction in Sexual Selection Chapters of Evolution Textbooks

Textbooks provide a rich site within which to investigate how members of a scientific discipline choose to represent their research to general audiences. We used critical contextual empiricism as a framework for interrogating how a scientific community is depicted via images in evolution textbook chapters on sexual selection. Textbooks that exhibit science within the tenets of critical contextual empiricism will depict uptake of disciplinary change and acknowledge the inseparability of the social and rational aspects of scientific knowledge construction. Sexual selection is an exemplary arena for this work because the field has undergone substantial change in the past few decades that has been driven by critique from within and among disciplines. We used quantitative methods and content analysis to examine images from the textbook editions and from a time series of editions to examine the portrayal of updated understandings of sexual selection. We found that most textbook images did not reflect the shift happening in the scientific community. Images highlighted primarily the classic view of sexual selection focused on males. Examples typical of a more realistic, complicated understanding received little attention even though the scientific literature on these topics appeared decades before these textbooks were published. Images of males were more common than images of females, females were depicted for fewer concepts than males, and images of males and females reinforced stereotypical sex roles. This study highlights an opportunity for acknowledging the inseparability of the social and the rational in scientific knowledge construction.