The Chartered Librarian as Information Officer: experiences in Huntingdon Health Authority*

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Assessment Outcomes of Pre-service Teachers

As a response to the shortage of credentialed teachers in California, a four-year major called Urban Learning (ULRN), combining both the undergraduate and a teaching credential program was developed by professors at the Charter College of Education at California State University, Los Angeles. The assessment results of the program after its first two-year pilot period showed that ULRN students (N=153) exhibited higher motivation to learn and tended to take fuller course loads as compared to other undergraduate students at the university. This was attributed to faculty collaboration and cohort modeling of the program. Compared to students in the regular credential programs, ULRN students were more likely to remain enrolled in their program and more likely to complete the program and graduate sooner. This blended program as a whole including the assessment course appeared to have help pre-service teachers become competent as teachers. This blended program with its structure emphasizing efficiency and effectiveness was comparatively successful.     

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.     

Examples as Method? My Attempts to Understand Assessment and Fairness (in the Spirit of the Later Wittgenstein)

What is 'fairness' in the context of educational assessment? I apply this question to a number of contemporary educational assessment practices and policies. My approach to philosophy of education owes much to Wittgenstein. A commentary set apart from the main body of the paper focuses on my style of philosophising. Wittgenstein teaches us to examine in depth the fine-grained complexities of social phenomena and to refrain from imposing abstract theory on a recalcitrant reality. I write philosophy of education for policy makers and teachers. Scrutiny of examples plays a vital role in communicating with such an audience. Starting points include 'accommodations' for disabled students, allegedly gender-biased tests, and the recruitment procedures of 'elitist' music conservatoires. A key intuition that fairness is associated with test validity turns out to be seriously flawed. Problems centre on the idea of a 'construct', and the supposed divide between an underlying construct and its behavioural manifestations. Equality of opportunity notions underlie some accusations of unfairness but there are alternative approaches to a just society. Both the judgments about fairness, and the proposed remedies are open to serious philosophical criticisms. There are widespread conceptual difficulties, together with inconsistent and contestable value judgments.     

Exploring Sexuality Education and the Burdened Teacher: A Participatory Approach in a Rural Primary School in Kenya

Twenty-five years since the onset of HIV/AIDS, young people aged 15–24 now make up half of new HIV infections. This paper advocates for comprehensive sexuality education as an effective panacea to reverse this, with teachers stepping up and embracing their role as sexuality educators. The exploration of this challenge is informed by a small-scale participatory study of teacher responses in a rural primary school in Nakuru district, Kenya. Dialogue was held with 18 teachers (11 females, seven males) on the challenges they faced in teaching sexuality education and teachers emerged as disorientated and embarrassed in conversations about sexuality issues with the pupils. Because sexuality education lacks a curriculum, teachers have found it challenging to integrate it into regular subjects; they also observed that parents seem resistant to addressing this at home, and thus this task falls to them.
In the study, a process of self-awareness of the need for them to step up and teach sexuality education emerges among the participants. A key finding is that participatory and dialectical interventions that can prepare teachers and develop their confidence in teaching sexuality education are required.