Auditing the Numeracy Demands of the Middle Years Curriculum

The National Numeracy Review Report recognized that numeracy development requires an across the curriculum commitment. To explore the nature of this commitment we conducted a numeracy audit of the South Australian Middle Years curriculum, using a numeracy model that incorporates mathematical knowledge, dispositions, tools, contexts, and a critical orientation. All learning areas in the published curriculum were found to have distinctive numeracy demands. The audit should encourage teachers to promote numeracy in even richer ways in the curriculum they enact with students

Assessing the relevance of higher education courses

The establishment of the European Higher Education Area has involved specifying lists of professional competencies that programs are expected to develop, and with this the need for procedures to measure how every course within a higher education program is aligned with the program’s competencies. We propose an instrument for characterizing this alignment, a process that we call assessing the relevance of a course. Using information from the course syllabus (objectives, contents and assessment scheme), our instrument produces indicators for characterizing the syllabus in terms of a competence list and for assessing its coherence. Because assessment involves quality, the results obtained can also be used to revise and improve the course syllabus. We illustrate this process with an example of a methods course from a mathematics teacher education program at a Spanish university

How Well Do Ontario Library Web Sites Meet New Accessibility Requirements?

New changes to Ontario law will require library web sites to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). This study evaluates 64 Ontario university, college, and public library web sites to see how well they comply with WCAG 2.0 guidelines at present. An average of 14.75 accessibility problems were found per web page. The most common problems included invalid html, poor color contrast, incorrect form controls and labels, missing alt text, bad link text, improper use of headings, using html to format pages, using absolute units of measure, and issues with tables and embedded objects

The State of State Science Standards 2012

American science performance is lagging as the economy becomes increasingly high tech, but our current science standards are doing little to solve the problem. Reviewers evaluated science standards for every state for this report and their findings were deeply troubling: The majority of states earned Ds or Fs for their standards in this crucial subject, with only six jurisdictions receiving As. Explore all the state report cards and see how your state performed

Total Physical Response in the Foreign Language Classroom

The following research addresses a critical question in the field of foreign language education; specifically, the research was conducted at a high school in the Spanish 2 classroom. First, the question was decided upon after careful observation of 95 Spanish students in Spanish 2. Many students struggle with communicating with one another; communication is a key component in learning a foreign language. The students struggled because they did not know vocabulary words to communicate. Therefore, this research studies the effect of Total Physical Response in the foreign language classroom. TPR is a method which requires students to physically respond to words. TPR also assumes that by producing words, students then understand the words. the research question is as follows: Will total physical response increase vocabulary retention in second tear Spanish students? To collect this data, there were three different methods used: observation, student interviews, and data collection. The data collection shows the average scores between two different classes. One, the control class, learned the vocabulary as normal. There was no difference in the methodology and no use of TPR. The data shows that the class who used TPR scored an average of 2.64 points higher. Additionally, initial observation showed that students were more engaged when using TPR