Expectations eclipsed in foreign language education: learners and educators on an ongoing journey / edited by Hülya Görür-Atabaş, Sharon Turner.

Between June 2-4, 2011 Sabancı University School of Languages welcomed colleagues from 21 different countries to a collaborative exploration of the challenging and inspiring journey of learners and educators in the field of language education.\ud \ud The conference provided an opportunity for all stakeholders to share their views on language education. Colleagues met with world-renowned experts and authors in the fields of education and psychology, faculty and administrators from various universities and institutions, teachers from secondary educational backgrounds and higher education, as well as learners whose voices are often not directly shared but usually reported.\ud \ud The conference name, Eclipsing Expectations, was inspired by two natural phenomena, a solar eclipse directly before the conference, and a lunar eclipse, immediately after. Learners and educators were hereby invited to join a journey to observe, learn and exchange ideas in orde

The Role of the Clinical Educator in Mentoring of Preservice Band Directors\u27 Conducting Technique

Despite the inclusion of undergraduate conducting coursework in music teacher preparation programs in the United States, the performance of novice conductors may require further development during their field experiences. The clinical music educator fills a critical role in facilitating conductor skill development, yet no comprehensive framework supports this coaching. This explanatory sequential mixed methods design study identifies effective strategies in the mentoring of preservice music educators toward refining their instrumental conducting skills by classifying perspectives of clinical and preservice educators and their perceived roles in developing preservice music educators\u27 conducting skills. A broad base of participants (N = 73) was surveyed on their experience in their role as either preservice educator conducting mentors or as novice conductors, and selected mentors (N = 10) were interviewed to identify strategies in developing preservice educators’ conducting skills. The study found that mentoring in the development of independent gestures and aural error detection skills is critical to the success of the preservice educator, thereby contributing to the success of the music students in his or her future classroom. This research could further influence the design of undergraduate conducting curricula and have implications in the broader area of teacher education or fields where mentoring relationships exist

L2 developmental measures from a dynamic perspective

An important objective of research in Second Language Acquisition has been to find a simple and reliable way to quantify second language use. Corpora have provided a crucial source of information for these studies. In spite of many attempts to determine an optimal “yardstick” to measure the quality of second language use, particularly lexical complexity and syntactic complexity, a reliable and widely applicable instrument has not yet been determined. The difficulty in finding a suitable instrument can be accounted for in a complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) approach to second language development. An important starting point of this approach is that every next step in time “is the emergent product of context and history, and no component has causal priority” (Thelen 2005, p. 271). In this paper we illustrate this by using a dense longitudinal corpus of the development of 22 highly similar L2 learners, consisting of 23 weekly measurements. The analysis of these data show convincingly that L2 development is a highly individually owned and nonlinear process. While complexity yardsticks (like MLTU and Guiraud) may seem functional from a group perspective, their application to individual learners is very limited

Precision education: A Bayesian nonparametric approach for handling item and examinee heterogeneity in assessment data

We propose a novel nonparametric Bayesian IRT model in this paper by introducing the clustering effect at question level and further assume heterogeneity at examinee level under each question cluster, characterized by the mixture of Binomial distributions. The main contribution of this work is threefold: (1) We demonstrate that the model is identifiable. (2) The clustering effect can be captured asymptotically and the parameters of interest that measure the proficiency of examinees in solving certain questions can be estimated at a root n rate (up to a log term). (3) We present a tractable sampling algorithm to obtain valid posterior samples from our proposed model. We evaluate our model via a series of simulations as well as apply it to an English assessment data. This data analysis example nicely illustrates how our model can be used by test makers to distinguish different types of students and aid in the design of future tests

Integrating Timing Considerations to Improve Testing Practices

Integrating Timing Considerations to Improve Testing Practices synthesizes a wealth of theory and research on time issues in assessment into actionable advice for test development, administration, and scoring. One of the major advantages of computer-based testing is the capability to passively record test-taking metadata—including how examinees use time and how time affects testing outcomes. This has opened many questions for testing administrators. Is there a trade-off between speed and accuracy in test taking? What considerations should influence equitable decisions about extended-time accommodations? How can test administrators use timing data to balance the costs and resulting validity of tests administered at commercial testing centers? In this comprehensive volume, experts in the field discuss the impact of timing considerations, constraints, and policies on valid score interpretations; administrative accommodations, test construction, and examinees’ experiences and behaviors; and how to implement the findings into practice. These 12 chapters provide invaluable resources for testing professionals to better understand the inextricable links between effective time allocation and the purposes of high-stakes testing

AGENT-BASED MODELING AND SIMULATION APPROACHES IN STEM EDUCATION RESEARCH

The development of best practices that deliver quality STEM education to all students, while minimizing achievement gaps, have been solicited by several national agencies. ABMS is a feasible approach to provide insight into global behavior based upon the interactions amongst agents and environments. In this review, we systematically surveyed several modeling and simulation approaches and discussed their applications to the evaluation of relevant theories in STEM education. It was found that ABMS is optimal to simulate STEM education hypotheses, as ABMS will sensibly present emergent theories and causation in STEM education phenomena if the model is properly validated and calibrated