Engineering Student Exchange Programmes—France,Germany and Spain with Britain

The paper describes the development and operation of joint study programme schemes, which lead to double awards. The essential prerequisites for an exchange programme are identified together with an evaluation of academic standards and teaching methods in each country. The process of obtaining equivalence and credit recognition between courses is presented, together with specific data relating to requirements for double awards. The experience gained in these exchange programmes is discussed and student performance is evaluated.     

Access management: the overlooked but critical enabler

• Access management (AM) is a critical, but often overlooked, enabler for publishers looking to expand the appeal of their online resources.
• This article examines why publishers underinvest in AM, and provides practical examples of how this impacts productivity and growth across the organization.
• Three AM trends that offer new growth opportunities are also explored: (i) enabling a wider range of customer types and business models, (ii) supporting a more diverse range of access scenarios, and (iii) facilitating greater personalization through identity management.
• Publishers need to review their AM strategy in light of these opportunities. In particular, publishers that currently support AM in‐house should outsource to specialist vendors if they are not fully committed to investing the expertise and time needed to support this increasing sophistication.

     

Rush Rhees on Education

R.S. Peters and Paul Hirst were the most influential figures in philosophy of education in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The claim in this paper is that their rationalist's approach was often misleading and unilluminating. They believed they were preparing children for life beyond school, but to a large extent they failed because they did not take into account the diversity of values and practices of life in general. The paper contains some reflections by Rush Rhees, a student of Wittgenstein, on some of their writings. Rhees had first met Wittgenstein when he attended his classes in 1936. They formed a lifelong friendship, and Rhees subsequently devoted much of his life to the dissemination, interpretation, and criticism of Wittgenstein's work. The reflections discussed here derive primarily from views Rhees expressed in the 1970s.     

POSTDICTION STUDY OF THE GRADUATE RECORD EXAMINATION AND EIGHT SEMESTERS OF COLLEGE GRADES1

Data from a postdictive study of the tests of the Graduate Record Examination and the eight semesters of undergraduate grade averages, each semester's average being computed independently of the rest, are presented. Postdictive validities of the aptitude portions of the GRE are essentially similar to predictive validities obtained earlier by the senior author. Both predictive and postdictive validity gradients over the eight semesters are relatively steep, with freshman grades having the highest correlations with the tests. The validity gradient for all advanced tests combined does not follow the pattern for the aptitude tests, but neither does it show the opposite gradient. Advanced test results are most highly correlated with sophomore grades, but the validity gradient over the eight semesters is relatively flat. A small scale extension of this research into post baccalaureate training indicated that senior grades were most predictive of graduate criteria, but a larger scale study is clearly called for. Possible implications for ability theory and for selection of graduate students are discussed.     

TECHNICAL GUIDELINES FOR ASSESSING COMPUTERIZED ADAPTIVE TESTS

Guidelines are proposed for evaluating a computerized adaptive test. Topics include dimensionality, measurement error, validity, estimation of item parameters, item pool characteristics and human factors. Equating CAT and conventional tests is considered and matters of equity are addressed.     

Insight into Industry: one school's approach

Leadership provided by the headteacher is widely acknowledged to be a crucial variable in determining the effectiveness of schools. However, the majority of leadership studies consist of either surveys or interviews which the researcher has conducted with head teachers or case studies written by the head teachers which draw heavily upon their own experience, and as such are essentially 'autobiographical' in the perspective they provide on leadership in schools (Ribbins &; Sherratt, 1992). The objectives of this article are to: set out a new model of effective school leadership based on recently completed empirical research; demonstrate how the multi-perspective methodology adopted contributed to a critique of existing models of leadership and the development of a new grounded model and discuss the analytical issues raised by the multi-perspective methodology which involved all the stakeholders in a school community.     

Book Review Section 2

A persistent belief in American culture is that males both outperform and have a higher inherent aptitude for mathematics than females. Using data from two school districts in two different states in the United States, this study used longitudinal multilevel modeling to examine whether overall performance on standardized as well as classroom tests reveals a gender difference in mathematics performance. The results suggest that both male and female students demonstrated the same growth trend in mathematics performance (as measured by standardized test scores) over time, but females' mathematics grade-point average is significantly higher than males. These results are discussed in the context of present day standardized assessment in the United States that may motivate teachers to focus on higher expectations for mathematics performance regardless of gender, thus challenging cultural beliefs that stigmatize mathematics as masculine in the United States.