Digital Disruption in Teaching and Testing

This book provides a significant contribution to the increasing conversation concerning the place of big data in education. Offering a multidisciplinary approach with a diversity of perspectives from international scholars and industry experts, chapter authors engage in both research- and industry-informed discussions and analyses on the place of big data in education, particularly as it pertains to large-scale and ongoing assessment practices moving into the digital space. This volume offers an innovative, practical, and international view of the future of current opportunities and challenges in education and the place of assessment in this context

Primary Sources in K–12 Education: Opportunities for Archives

Recent developments in the field of K–12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade) education have made archival resources essential tools for many teachers. Inquiry-based learning, document-based questions, and high stakes standardized testing have converged to make primary resources an important teaching tool in elementary and secondary education. Teaching and testing K–12 students require analysis of primary documents, so that archival records take their place alongside the test tube and the textbook in many American classrooms. These trends represent an opportunity for archives to expand their patron base, establish contacts in the community, contribute to the vitality of public education in their communities, and cultivate the next generation of archives’ users, donors, and supporters. This paper encourages archivists to consider K–12 students and their teachers when planning programs, digital products, and services

Metaphoric competence and communicative language ability

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance as well as the ubiquity of metaphor in language. Despite this, the ability of second language learners to use metaphors is often still not seen as a core ability. In this paper, we take a model of communicative competence that has been widely influential in both language teaching and language testing, namely Bachman (1990), and argue, giving a range of examples of language use and learner difficulty, that metaphoric competence has in fact an important role to play in all areas of communicative competence. In other words, it can contribute centrally to grammatical competence, textual competence, illocutionary competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Metaphor is thus highly relevant to second language learning, teaching and testing, from the earliest to the most advanced stages of learning

Singing Their Stories: A Musical Narrative of Teaching and Testing

This musical, arts-based educational research describes the lived experiences of four K-12 New Orleans educators who believe that end-of-year standardized tests hinder their ability to teach in ways they believe are best. Using songwriting as a form of data elicitation and narrative restorying, this study documents the lived experiences of teachers who have experienced test-related cognitive dissonance. While curricular narrowing and other test-related practices have been studied in many contexts, the perspectives of New Orleans teachers are barely documented. Thus, this study fills a content gap in the testing literature. Musically restorying the data contributes to the accountability literature in three main ways. First, restorying the data as song renders the findings evocatively — that is, in ways that capture the emotion with which the data was originally imbued. Second, because this study is performative (the results were sung live in the community), the opportunity exists to ignite a local conversation aimed at helping teachers navigate testing/teaching conundrums. Finally, as music is one of the least utilized forms of art-based research, this study fills a methodological gap in the arts-based research repository

New parameters for the teaching (and testing) of English Pronunciation

The recent (2018) Companion Volume to the Common European Framework offers an overhaul of many of the scales of descriptors, including, notably, phonology. A single, skeletal, scale for 'phonological control' is replaced by three scales, describing overall control, sound articulation, and prosodic features. In each of these, the focus has become intelligibility, rather than proximity to a native speaker accent. In this article I examine the development of pronunciation teaching since the communicative revolution, and the rise of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in which intelligibility is crucial. The article concludes with a reflection on how (if at all) the revised framework could inform an 'ELF' aware assessment of pronunciation

Multiple Intelligences: Theory and Application

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences has challenged the historical view of intelligence as a fixed quantity since he first published Frames of Mind in 1983. Gardner prefers to describe cognitive ability as a set of eight intelligences. Once merely a theoretical perspective, Gardner’s view of intelligence can be seen in a new light with the advances in brain research in the field of neuroscience. The connection between how the mind is organized and the education of students suggests a need for additional classroom teaching and testing applications. A focus on traditional linguistic and logical teaching and testing strategies must broaden to include strategies that meet the needs of diverse learners. Yet, can neuroscience and its implications for education co-exist with the No-Child-Left-Behind classroom

The Evolution of Teaching and Testing Aviation English for Brazilian Air Traffic Controllers

This presentation will outline some interesting facts and information about a decade of ATCO training and testing in Brazil, concerning courses offered, people trained on the job, test development and test applications. There will be some information about methodology used in the courses and the Blended Learning Training Program, as well as the creation of a research group to support the practices. It will be possible to see the evolution of the processes through time. The numbers are impressive and reflect a country with the size of a continent