Formative e-assessment: Practitioner cases

This paper reports on one aspect of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded project 'Scoping a vision of formative e-assessment', namely on cases of formative e-assessment developed iteratively with the UK education practitioner community. The project, which took place from June 2008 – January 2009, aimed to identify current theories and practices relating to formative assessment of learning where technologies play a key role. The project aimed to scope the 'domain' of formative e-assessment, by developing cases of practice and identifying key formative processes within them, which are affected by the use of technologies. From this analysis, patterns were extracted to inform future software design. A discussion of the key issues emerging from the review of the literature on formative e-assessment, a full account of the project methodology – the design pattern methodology – as well as a critical discussion of the findings – namely the patterns and the role of technology – are the focus of a separate paper (see Daly et al (forthcoming). This paper documents how cases of formative e-assessment were developed during the project by a collaborative methodology involving practitioners from a range of post-16 education contexts. The cases were analysed with reference to key theoretical perspectives on formative assessment, particularly the work of Black and Wiliam (2009). In addition, Laurillard's Conversational Framework (2002, 2007) was used to locate practices of formative assessment within a wider concept of learning and teaching involving technologies, although a detailed discussion of the latter is not within the scope of this paper1

Retrieval, crawling and fusion of entity-centric data on the web

While the Web of (entity-centric) data has seen tremendous growth over the past years, take-up and re-use is still limited. Data vary heavily with respect to their scale, quality, coverage or dynamics, what poses challenges for tasks such as entity retrieval or search. This chapter provides an overview of approaches to deal with the increasing heterogeneity of Web data. On the one hand, recommendation, linking, profiling and retrieval can provide efficient means to enable discovery and search of entity-centric data, specifically when dealing with traditional knowledge graphs and linked data. On the other hand, embedded markup such as Microdata and RDFa has emerged a novel, Web-scale source of entitycentric knowledge. While markup has seen increasing adoption over the last few years, driven by initiatives such as schema.org, it constitutes an increasingly important source of entity-centric data on the Web, being in the same order of magnitude as the Web itself with regards to dynamics and scale. To this end, markup data lends itself as a data source for aiding tasks such as knowledge base augmentation, where data fusion techniques are required to address the inherent characteristics of markup data, such as its redundancy, heterogeneity and lack of links. Future directions are concerned with the exploitation of the complementary nature of markup data and traditional knowledge graphs. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-319-53640-8_1

The metric tide: report of the independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment and management

This report presents the findings and recommendations of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. The review was chaired by Professor James Wilsdon, supported by an independent and multidisciplinary group of experts in scientometrics, research funding, research policy, publishing, university management and administration. This review has gone beyond earlier studies to take a deeper look at potential uses and limitations of research metrics and indicators. It has explored the use of metrics across different disciplines, and assessed their potential contribution to the development of research excellence and impact. It has analysed their role in processes of research assessment, including the next cycle of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). It has considered the changing ways in which universities are using quantitative indicators in their management systems, and the growing power of league tables and rankings. And it has considered the negative or unintended effects of metrics on various aspects of research culture. The report starts by tracing the history of metrics in research management and assessment, in the UK and internationally. It looks at the applicability of metrics within different research cultures, compares the peer review system with metric-based alternatives, and considers what balance might be struck between the two. It charts the development of research management systems within institutions, and examines the effects of the growing use of quantitative indicators on different aspects of research culture, including performance management, equality, diversity, interdisciplinarity, and the ‘gaming’ of assessment systems. The review looks at how different funders are using quantitative indicators, and considers their potential role in research and innovation policy. Finally, it examines the role that metrics played in REF2014, and outlines scenarios for their contribution to future exercises

Interim evaluation of lifelong learning networks

The Open University's Centre for Higher Education Research and Information was commissioned in June 2007 to undertake a formative evaluation of Lifelong Learning Networks (LLNs). Research to inform the interim evaluation has been two-fold: desk research of LLN documentation and visits to and interviews with personnel involved in eight LLNs. The report's main conclusion was that LLNs are making progress in terms of encouraging institutions to offer curricula and put in place procedures that, in the fullness of time, could make a significant difference to the coherence, clarity and certainty of progression opportunities for vocational learners. However, it went on to say that it is too soon to be able to make substantive and well-evidenced statements about LLNs' overall progress on meeting this overarching objective of the LLN initiative

Interactive Teaching Across Culture and Technology

Remember the time when you had a teacher in front of a blackboard endlessly talking, sometimes in a rambling way to students? Those days are gone. This project is a proof of that and aims at palliating students’ boredom. Interactive Teaching Materials across Culture and Technology (INTACT) intends to present an alternative way in the teaching paradigm as it intends to be a resourceful tool in the teaching/learning process. Both teachers and students can work together cooperatively and collaboratively, two different ways well explained by Mary Glynn and Ildikó Szabó further ahead. Teachers will no longer become the centre of learning but they will become guides and facilitators throughout all the learning process. Students can learn from their teachers but the latter can also learn from the former. The novelty here is that learners are engaged online in a different set of activities and among students. Therefore, the INTACT platform caters for an online collaborative learning community comprised of both students and teachers. As Sarolta Lipóczi so well puts it, the crux of the matter is ‘learning to learn too’. The teaching paradigm is changing and we are witnessing different approaches and techniques in pedagogical matters. In this context, at the basis of the INTACT project is a display of a wide array of new techniques and methodologies that account for active learning based on multimodal teaching and learning resources. Students will thus interact cognitively and in a constructivist way with different materials, such as visuals, texts, audio, to name a few. INTACT offers students and teachers options so that they can choose several actions in the course of the learning unit, for instance watch, browse, select, compare and manipulate all the resources available. Bearing in mind this short introduction to the project, in Part 2 Mary Glynn and Ildikó Szabó give us a better definition of INTACT and the educational arguments underlying its foundation. They also focus on the difference between collaborative and cooperative learning and on the importance of bilingualism and the advantages of CLIL, now one of the trendiest bilingual teaching methods, In part 2, we find a sample of resources ranging from Biology to second language learning. In the first learning unit, Toni Cramer and Steffen Schaal from the University of Education-Ludwigsburg, Germany, conceived an 8-lesson unit plan on the Human Immune System. Through these 8 lessons, students will learn how to explain blood types, to describe the parts of the human immune system model and collect data and interpret the spreading of diseases using adequate simulations, among other useful knowledge. The second and the third learning units are targeted at primary school students. The authors’ main purpose, Mary Glynn, from St. Patrick’s College in Dublin and Mariangeles Caballero from Universidad Complutense – Faculty of Education in Madrid, respectively, is to enhance students’ knowledge on science and technology by exploring and applying scientific ideas and concepts. Magnetism and the Human Circulatory system are therefore the proposals presented by the authors. Framed in the Geography programme of the 7th grade of the 3rd cycle of the basic education, for a target audience aged 12-13 years old, Maria Antónia Martins, from Emídio Garcia Secondary School in Bragança-Portugal, conceived the fourth learning unit on Elements and Climate factors regarding the Translational Motion and the Seasons of the Year. The temperature element was chosen to be studied throughout 3 lessons. In the course of these, students should not only be capable of relating the diurnal and annual variation of the temperature according to the movements of the earth but also to understand the relation between the annual variation of the temperature and the latitude of the place. The fifth and the sixth learning units aim at improving foreign language and social skills while at the same time students are taken back in time, thus broadening their knowledge on culture and history. Through the most suggestive title: ‘Legends and heroes – To be a Knight in King Arthur’s court’, Ildikó Szabó, from the Kecskemét College, Teacher Training Faculty in Hungary, takes us on a tour through medieval times meeting the needs of several learning styles, such as acoustic, kinaesthetic and visual. Sarolta Lipóczi, also from the Kecskemét College, Teacher Training Faculty, conceived the sixth learning unit titled ‘Mozart as a child and his travels’ a way to learn German as a foreign language. In this unit, primary school students are given the story of a famous musician born in Austria. Students thus develop cultural knowledge and language competences through exciting learning objects and activities. In part 3, Birgit May, Annika Jokiaho and Vítor Gonçalves, with the collaboration of José Exposto make a brief overview of the INTACT platform, explaining the methods adopted and highlighting more technical issues related to results achieved during the the project. Subchapter 3.2. reflects on good practices resulting from the whole project. It also records the national teams’ experience in working with the others for accomplishing the various tasks as well as the numerous unexpected and unavoidable problems that came up in the three years during which the project was completed. Being all said, we truly hope that this ebook can become an appetiser to the project, largely to make both students and teachers frequent users of the interactive platform

Brooking no excuses: university staff and students are encouraged to develop their engagement

Brooking no excuses: university staff and students are encouraged to develop their engagement This paper will explore the internal and external factors that have prompted the University of East Anglia's decision to give Public Engagement into a more central role within the Universities Corporate Plan. It will illustrate how the SEARCH Action Learning Programme facilitated the design, implementation and delivery of new Staff and Student Development Programmes that aim to provide the confidence, skills and mentorship that will encourage staff to develop their engagement activities. We will use a SWOT analysis to discuss the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the Public Engagement Practitioner. As part of this, we will explore how many of the issues we face as Science communicators with the public are similar to issues encountered by Communicators within the Arts and Humanities disciplines. Finally we will outline and detail our future plans, opportunities and vision that will enable us to move this agenda forward

Normative and Audience Discourses on Public Service Journalism at a “Critical Juncture”: the Case of TVE in Spain

The concept of journalism, its metatheory and, in particular, public service journalism is regulated by feedback between political models (legal and normative framework), academic precepts and social practices. Scant attention has been paid to date to the impact that these models have on citizens’ discourses, which is especially relevant at “critical junctures”, i.e. periods in which the old institutions are collapsing and require renovation (McChesney, 2007). Hence, this paper addresses the issue in the Spanish context in order to explore the similarities and differences between the academic/legal/normative framework and audience discourses. The former has been studied using documents, reports and legislation, and the latter explored by means of discussion groups with viewers of the newscasts of Televisión Española (TVE)