Maximising the potential of ICT to provide authentic summative assessment opportunities

This paper reports on elements of a study that was conducted in Western Australia to explore the potential of various forms of digitally based external assessments for senior secondary school courses. One problem that needed addressing was how to provide students with authentic assessment opportunities, particularly in subjects in which performance is an integral component. Traditionally, assessment in many of these subjects was by way of a three-hour paper examination. This established a dichotomy for teachers in which the pedagogy of the subject was very different from the method of assessment. In wanting to maximise their student’s potential for success, many teachers taught to the examination, consequently sacrificing a practical performance approach to the subject for a more theoretical form of delivery

State of the art review : language testing and assessment (part two).

In Part 1 of this two-part review article (Alderson & Banerjee, 2001), we first addressed issues of washback, ethics, politics and standards. After a discussion of trends in testing on a national level and in testing for specific purposes, we surveyed developments in computer-based testing and then finally examined self-assessment, alternative assessment and the assessment of young learners. In this second part, we begin by discussing recent theories of construct validity and the theories of language use that help define the constructs that we wish to measure through language tests. The main sections of the second part concentrate on summarising recent research into the constructs themselves, in turn addressing reading, listening, grammatical and lexical abilities, speaking and writing. Finally we discuss a number of outstanding issues in the field

Implicit cognitions in awareness: Three empirical examples and implications for conscious identity.

open accessAcross psychological science the prevailing view of mental events includes unconscious mental representations that result from a separate implicit system outside of awareness. Recently, scientific interest in consciousness of self and the widespread application of mindfulness practice have made necessary innovative methods of assessing awareness during cognitive tasks and validating those assessments wherever they are researched. Studies from three areas of psychology, self-esteem, sustainability thinking, and the learning of control systems questioned the unconscious status of implicit cognitions. The studies replicated published results using methods of investigating (a) unselective learning of a control task (b) implicit attitudes using IAT, and (c) the Name-letter effect. In addition, a common analytic method of awareness assessment and its validation was used. Study 1 demonstrated that learned control of a dynamic system was predicted by the validity of rules of control in awareness. In Study 2, verbal reports of hesitations and trial difficulty predicted IAT scores for 34 participants’ environmental attitudes. In Study 3, the famous Name-letter effect was predicted by the validity of university students’ reported awareness of letter preference reasons. The repeated finding that self knowledge in awareness predicted what should be cognitions outside of awareness, according to the dual processing view, suggests an alternative model of implicit mental events in which associative relations evoke conscious symbolic representations. The analytic method of validating phenomenal reports will be discussed along with its potential contribution to research involving implicit cognitions

Real-time decoding of question-and-answer speech dialogue using human cortical activity.

Natural communication often occurs in dialogue, differentially engaging auditory and sensorimotor brain regions during listening and speaking. However, previous attempts to decode speech directly from the human brain typically consider listening or speaking tasks in isolation. Here, human participants listened to questions and responded aloud with answers while we used high-density electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings to detect when they heard or said an utterance and to then decode the utterance's identity. Because certain answers were only plausible responses to certain questions, we could dynamically update the prior probabilities of each answer using the decoded question likelihoods as context. We decode produced and perceived utterances with accuracy rates as high as 61% and 76%, respectively (chance is 7% and 20%). Contextual integration of decoded question likelihoods significantly improves answer decoding. These results demonstrate real-time decoding of speech in an interactive, conversational setting, which has important implications for patients who are unable to communicate

The comprehension revolution : a twenty-year history of process and practice related to reading comprehension

Includes bibliographie