Curriculum Reform, Assessment and National Qualifications Frameworks

This background paper engages with issues of secondary education reform in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since 2007 and uses the MasterCard framework of questions as a template for gathering evidence. The framework seeks answers in three broad areas of reform: curriculum, assessment/examination systems and national qualifications frameworks (NQFs). It specifically invited responses to the following questions: Curriculum- What kinds of curriculum reform have occurred in SSA since 2007?- How successful has the practical implementation of new curricula been?- Given the challenges, how can resource-constrained ministries implement curriculum reform?- To what extent has a/the new curriculum promoted 21st century skills (like creativity, critical thinking, cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence), as well as employability and entrepreneurial skills? Assessment- How successful has assessment reform been? National Qualifications Framework - What is the status of implementation of NQFs across SSA?- Have the approaches to NQF implementation promoted learning and the acquisition of skills necessary for employment?To ensure greater inclusivity, and to solicit a wide range of perspectives, we have chosen to review as broad a spectrum of publications as possible. This has meant that we have included research papers that, more often than not, would have been excluded from similar types of reviews. These include graduate students' masters and doctoral theses; and research papers published in journals that are not widely recognised. The net effect of widening the pool of sources is that many more researchers from, and working in, institutions on the continent have been referenced or included in the bibliography. The evidence gathering processes involved six linked activities: x Setting the search parameters and undertaking an electronic search. vi x Reviewing the document titles and abstracts; and sifting and excluding nonrelevant documents. x Once the primary and secondary sources have been identified, using high frequency citations to identify researchers in the field for follow up processes. x Reviewing the wider scholarship of identified scholars to gather additional 'grey' literature. x Identifying case studies, based on the analysis of these preliminary sources. x Site visits and case study write-ups Two system case studies were selected for close analysis: South Africa and Ethiopia. South Africa was selected because of its experience of three separate waves of curriculum reform in the past two decades, the extensive documentation of these curriculum reforms and as one of the first systems in the world to have introduced a national qualifications framework. Ethiopia was selected as it represents a rapidly developing country in which secondary education is likely to play a key role. It was also selected because of its recent review of its secondary education curriculum and examination system

Implementing PRISMA/DB in an OOPL

PRISMA/DB is implemented in a parallel object-oriented language to gain insight in the usage of parallelism. This environment allows us to experiment with parallelism by simply changing the allocation of objects to the processors of the PRISMA machine. These objects are obtained by a strictly modular design of PRISMA/DB. Communication between the objects is required to cooperatively handle the various tasks, but it limits the potential for parallelism. From this approach, we hope to gain a better understanding of parallelism, which can be used to enhance the performance of PRISMA/DB.\ud The work reported in this document was conducted as part of the PRISMA project, a joint effort with Philips Research Eindhoven, partially supported by the Dutch "Stimuleringsprojectteam Informaticaonderzoek (SPIN)

Implementation and evaluation of the sensornet protocol for Contiki

Sensornet Protocol (SP) is a link abstraction layer between the network layer and the link layer for sensor networks. SP was proposed as the core of a future-oriented sensor node architecture that allows flexible and optimized combination between multiple coexisting protocols. This thesis implements the SP sensornet protocol on the Contiki operating system in order to: evaluate the effectiveness of the original SP services; explore further requirements and implementation trade-offs uncovered by the original proposal. We analyze the original SP design and the TinyOS implementation of SP to design the Contiki port. We implement the data sending and receiving part of SP using Contiki processes, and the neighbor management part as a group of global routines. The evaluation consists of a single-hop traffic throughput test and a multihop convergecast test. Both tests are conducted using both simulation and experimentation. We conclude from the evaluation results that SP's link-level abstraction effectively improves modularity in protocol construction without sacrificing performance, and our SP implementation on Contiki lays a good foundation for future protocol innovations in wireless sensor networks

Session Types in a Linearly Typed Multi-Threaded Lambda-Calculus

We present a formalization of session types in a multi-threaded lambda-calculus (MTLC) equipped with a linear type system, establishing for the MTLC both type preservation and global progress. The latter (global progress) implies that the evaluation of a well-typed program in the MTLC can never reach a deadlock. As this formulated MTLC can be readily embedded into ATS, a full-fledged language with a functional programming core that supports both dependent types (of DML-style) and linear types, we obtain a direct implementation of session types in ATS. In addition, we gain immediate support for a form of dependent session types based on this embedding into ATS. Compared to various existing formalizations of session types, we see the one given in this paper is unique in its closeness to concrete implementation. In particular, we report such an implementation ready for practical use that generates Erlang code from well-typed ATS source (making use of session types), thus taking great advantage of the infrastructural support for distributed computing in Erlang.Comment: This is the original version of the paper on supporting programming with dyadic session types in AT

Actors that Unify Threads and Events

There is an impedance mismatch between message-passing concurrency and virtual machines, such as the JVM. VMs usually map their threads to heavyweight OS processes. Without a lightweight process abstraction, users are often forced to write parts of concurrent applications in an event-driven style which obscures control flow, and increases the burden on the programmer. In this paper we show how thread-based and event-based programming can be unified under a single actor abstraction. Using advanced abstraction mechanisms of the Scala programming language, we implemented our approach on unmodified JVMs. Our programming model integrates well with the threading model of the underlying VM