Assessment might dictate the curriculum, but what dictates assessment?

Almost all tertiary educators make assessment choices, for example, when they create an assessment task, design a rubric, or write multiple-choice items. Educators potentially have access to a variety of evidence and materials regarding good assessment practice but may not choose to consult them or be successful in translating these into practice. In this article, we propose a new challenge for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: the need to study the disjunction between proposals for assessment “best practice” and assessment in practice by examining the assessment decision-making of teachers. We suggest that assessment decision-making involves almost all university teachers, occurs at multiple levels, and is influenced by expertise, trust, culture, and policy. Assessment may dictate the curriculum from the student’s perspective, and we argue that assessment decision-making dictates assessment

An organization overview of pedagogical practice in work-integrated education

Tertiary curriculum design has increasingly emphasized work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities. This qualitative study provides an overview of a variety of WIL activities at Massey University, New Zealand. Descriptive comments, provided through interviews with fifteen academic supervisors from disciplines ranging from the applied sciences through social sciences to business, education and creative arts, highlight the following six factors to be considered in the resourcing of WIL programs. Themes related to set-up include placement requirements, support, selection, location, and risk management issues. Student preparation involves pre-requisite theoretical knowledge, general career preparation (CV & interview skills) and readiness for practice. With respect to supervision, an on-campus academic mentor and a work-place supervisor are both important to the student. Competencies linked to team work and professional standards include self-confidence, communication and people skills. The teaching pedagogies used include lectures and labs, oral presentations, scenario-based-learning and project work. Assessment involved a learning contract, reflective journal, oral presentation, and final report

The Common Core Debate

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have ignited a passionate national debate about the standards that guide the education of our nation’s and state’s students. The purpose of this Arkansas Education Report is to add some clarity to the Common Core debate as well as offer a perspective that is specific to the Natural State

Translating evidence-based guidelines to improve feedback practices:the interACT case study

Background: There has been a substantial body of research examining feedback practices, yet the assessment and feedback landscape in higher education is described as ‘stubbornly resistant to change’. The aim of this paper is to present a case study demonstrating how an entire programme’s assessment and feedback practices were re-engineered and evaluated in line with evidence from the literature in the interACT (Interaction and Collaboration via Technology) project.Methods: Informed by action research the project conducted two cycles of planning, action, evaluation and reflection. Four key pedagogical principles informed the re-design of the assessment and feedback practices. Evaluation activities included document analysis, interviews with staff (n = 10) and students (n = 7), and student questionnaires (n = 54). Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the questionnaire data. Framework thematic analysis was used to develop themes across the interview data.Results: InterACT was reported by students and staff to promote self-evaluation, engagement with feedback and feedback dialogue. Streamlining the process after the first cycle of action research was crucial for improving engagement of students and staff. The interACT process of promoting self-evaluation, reflection on feedback, feedback dialogue and longitudinal perspectives of feedback has clear benefits and should be transferable to other contexts.Conclusions: InterACT has involved comprehensive re-engineering of the assessment and feedback processes using educational principles to guide the design taking into account stakeholder perspectives. These principles and the strategies to enact them should be transferable to other contexts

Pay for percentile

We propose an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions our scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students. Because this scheme employs only ordinal information, our scheme allows education authorities to employ completely new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessment forms. This approach removes incentives for teachers to teach to a particular assessment form and eliminates opportunities to influence reward pay by corrupting the equating process or the scales used to report assessment results. Our system links compensation to the outcomes of properly seeded contests rather than cardinal measures of achievement growth. Thus, education authorities can employ our incentive scheme for educators while employing a separate system for measuring growth in student achievement that involves no stakes for educators. This approach does not create direct incentives for educators to take actions that contaminate the measurement of student progress.Income ; Wages

Who Owns the Soul of the Child?: An Essay on Religious Parenting Rights and the Enfranchisement of the Child

At common law, and (for most of the nation\u27s history) under state statutory regimes, the authority of the parent to direct the child\u27s upbringing was a matter of duty, not right, and chief among parental obligations was the duty to provide the child with a suitable education. It has long been a legal commonplace that at common law the parent had a sacred right to the custody of his or her child, that the parent\u27s right to control the upbringing of the child was almost absolute. But this reading of the law is sorely anachronistic, less history than advocacy on behalf of parental rights. What is deeply rooted in our nation\u27s history—and the custody case law of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century makes this abundantly clear—is the notion that the state only entrusts the parent with educational custody of the child, and does so only as long as the parent meets his or her duty to serve the best interests of the child. Indeed, it was the child who had an absolute right: the right to proper parental care, including the right to an education that would prepare the child for eventual enfranchisement from what Blackstone called the empire of the father. If by fundamental we designate rights with a deep historical pedigree, the right to parent free of state interference cannot be numbered among them. The Supreme Court\u27s seminal cases establishing a parent\u27s right to educate. Meyer and Pierce have been made to state broad claims about the fundamental nature of parental rights, but, in fact, they stand for a much more modest proposition: that the state does not have exclusive authority over the child\u27s education; and, more particularly, that the state cannot prohibit parents from teaching their children subject matter outside the scope of the state-mandated curriculum. Rhetoric aside, Meyer and Pierce are hardly a charter of fundamental parental rights. But that is what the Supreme Court made of these cases in Wisconsin v. Yoder. The idiosyncratic facts of Yoder encouraged the Supreme Court to abandon well established law governing the right of religious parenting and to formulate a harm standard ill-adapted to the existential intricacies of family disputes. Courts should look with skepticism at any authority that, by restricting the spectrum of available knowledge, fails to prepare the child for obligations beyond those of familial obedience. While a full treatment of these cases lies outside the scope of the article, this part suggests that courts should look with skepticism at any educational program—whether the program is imposed by the parent or by the state—that, by restricting the spectrum of available knowledge, fails to prepare the child for obligations beyond those of familial obedience. If the courts were to apply the principle that children may not be denied exposure to the full measure of intellectual incitement that should be the heart (and soul) of every young person\u27s education, they would more consistently, and correctly, sort out the competing claims of parents and public school officials to make educational choices on behalf of the child. The work of preparing the child to make free and independent choices is entrusted to the parent, and it is a challenging and somber task, for it means allowing children (in fact, it means helping children) to leave their homes and leave behind the ways of their parents. Or, at least, it means giving children the choice to do so. It is little wonder, then, that we would want to transform this sacred trust into a sacred right, a right that effectively allows parents to shield their children from choice and its attendant responsibilities. But the law of parent-child relations protects children from this sort of protection, ensuring that children receive a truly public education. Physically and intellectually transporting the child across the boundaries of home and community, a public education can bring its students a much needed respite from the ideological solipsism of the enclosed family. Of course, public education comes at a cost. It disrupts the intramural transmission of values from parent to child. It threatens to dismantle a familiar world by introducing the child to multiple sources of authority—and to the possibility that a choice must be made among them. Indeed, the open world of the public school should challenge the transmission of any closed set of values. Unless children are to live under a perpetual childhood of prescription, they must be exposed to the dust and heat of the race—intellectually, morally, spiritually. A public education is the engine by which children are exposed to the great sphere that is their world and legacy. It is their means of escape from, or free commitment to, the social group in which they were born. It is their best guarantee of an open future. The Yoder standard fails to protect the child from harms routinely addressed in cases involving only secular matters. Judicial non-intervention amounts to little more than a way of not dealing with such cases—or, at least, of not dealing with such cases until it is too late for the child. To honor its fiduciary obligation to the child, the court must be able to consider any practice that could affect the general welfare of the child and to insist upon an appropriate form of civil discourse when religious views diverge. Where exposure to intolerance is not in the best interests of the child, the welfare of the child requires that those responsible for their upbringing observe, or be made to observe, the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior. The duty to respect those with whom one disagrees is a civic obligation for which parents must prepare their children. It is the necessary concomitant of the parenting right. Religious belief should not absolve parents of this obligation, and disparagement born of religious conviction should not get a constitutional pass from judicial scrutiny

Performance Pressure and Resource Allocation in Washington

Based on interviews with state, district, and school officials, explores how performance pressures have changed resource allocation decisions. Examines reform goals and how Washington's finance system impedes efforts to link resources to student learning