THE EARLY IMPACT OF THE REVISED LEAVING CERTIFICATE GRADING SCHEME ON STUDENT PERCEPTIONS AND BEHAVIOUR. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 85 JANUARY 2019

This report examines the early effects, on student perceptions and behaviour, of a change in the grading structure for the Leaving Certificate (LC) examination, which took place in 2017. Potential change in LC outcomes is an important policy issue, given the crucial role played by upper secondary grades in access to higher education (HE) and in (higher quality) employment in Ireland (Hannan et al., 1998; McCoy et al., 2010a; Smyth and McCoy, 2009). In Ireland, the terminal, externally assessed system, with its high-stakes character, has been found to profoundly influence the nature of learning and skills development experienced by young people (McCoy et al., 2014b; Burns et al., 2018; Smyth et al., 2011). This report assesses whether an adjustment in the grading system has had an impact on the perceptions and behaviour of the first cohort of students experiencing the new scheme, in their final year of school

STUDENT, TEACHER AND PARENT PERSPECTIVES ON SENIOR CYCLE EDUCATION. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 94 NOVEMBER 2019

The nature of senior cycle has been subject to much policy discussion. Most recently, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) initiated a review of senior cycle, with a scoping phase followed by consultation with casestudy schools and national seminars. Forty-one schools were involved in this process; they conducted consultations with staff and parents and NCCA staff carried out focus group interviews with junior and senior cycle students. This report draws on the two phases of the school-based consultation to document teacher, parent and student perspectives on the current senior cycle and potential directions for change. Because the schools volunteered for involvement, there should be caution in generalising to the broader population of schools. Nonetheless, the findings yield important insights into the benefits and challenges of senior cycle, closely mirroring findings from previous Irish research

Measuring the Effects of a Research-Based Field Experience on Undergraduates and K-12 Teachers

During the summer of 1999, a new type of field course was taught in five of eastern Utah's National Parks and Monuments. It targeted a combination of university undergraduates and K-12 teachers, emphasized development of participants' problem-solving skills, and assessed the effectiveness of several non-traditional teaching methods. The course's primary goal was to teach participants to develop and test their own ideas. The course was also designed to help participants learn to use tools and methods employed by research scientists. A mix of undergraduates and teachers was targeted so that the course could be used to introduce undergraduates to the concept of teaching as a career. Assessments of the course's effectiveness were made on the basis of the achievements of stated outcomes, and by pre-course and post-course testing. Educational levels: Graduate or professional

Reinventing College Physics for Biologists: Explicating an epistemological curriculum

The University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group (UMd-PERG) carried out a five-year research project to rethink, observe, and reform introductory algebra-based (college) physics. This class is one of the Maryland Physics Department's large service courses, serving primarily life-science majors. After consultation with biologists, we re-focused the class on helping the students learn to think scientifically -- to build coherence, think in terms of mechanism, and to follow the implications of assumptions. We designed the course to tap into students' productive conceptual and epistemological resources, based on a theoretical framework from research on learning. The reformed class retains its traditional structure in terms of time and instructional personnel, but we modified existing best-practices curricular materials, including Peer Instruction, Interactive Lecture Demonstrations, and Tutorials. We provided class-controlled spaces for student collaboration, which allowed us to observe and record students learning directly. We also scanned all written homework and examinations, and we administered pre-post conceptual and epistemological surveys. The reformed class enhanced the strong gains on pre-post conceptual tests produced by the best-practices materials while obtaining unprecedented pre-post gains on epistemological surveys instead of the traditional losses.Comment: 35 pages including a 15 page appendix of supplementary material

Nerd Harassment and Grade Inflation: Are College Admissions Policies Partly Responsible?

[Excerpt] In the eyes of American parents, college admissions officers control the single most important gate their children will ever pass through. Nearly all parents hope their child will go to college. Perceptions of what it takes to get into preferred colleges and universities profoundly affect the courses students take, the standards teachers set and the effort students put out. Many (but not all) of the admissions selection criteria favored by American colleges and universities unwittingly create incentives for educationally dysfunctional behavior by secondary school students, teachers and administrators and by voters in school budget referendums. How can college admissions criteria be causing so many problems? Some selection criteria are fine: the rigor and challenge of academic courses should be given heavy weight as should externally assessed achievement in these courses. This will induce students to take challenging courses and to work hard in them. They also induce administrators to offer rigorous courses (eg. AP and IB courses) and to hire teachers who have the thorough content background necessary to teach them. Most of the other commonly used selection criteria— aptitude test scores, rank in class, high school GPA, rank in class and high school reputation—send as many pernicious signals as they send positive signals

Philosophers’ Views on the Use of Non-Essay Assessment Methods: Discussion of an E-Mail Survey

This paper presents and discusses the results of an email survey which asked participants to share their views on the efficacy of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or matching questions as evaluation methods in philosophy courses. First, the structure of the survey and its contents are explained. Next, responses are broken down along the lines of student responses and teacher responses. In both cases, there was significant disagreement among respondents, though there were notable patterns emerged. Student arguments in favor of non-essay assessment emphasized the expedience; arguments against emphasized the inadequacy of such evaluation methods to the nuances of philosophical material. Teacher responses echoed student responses but included considerations of fairness, ambiguity in student answers, student motivation, and justifications for non-essay assessment in specific contexts. Finally, the author discusses respondents’ opinions on whether philosophy departments should ban non-essay questions. The author concludes by suggesting that the results of this survey merit attention as an indication of how widespread the difficulties of non-essay assessment are and as an indication of the diversity of views on the subject

A Conversation with Leo Goodman

Leo A. Goodman was born on August 7, 1928 in New York City. He received his A.B. degree, summa cum laude, in 1948 from Syracuse University, majoring in mathematics and sociology. He went on to pursue graduate studies in mathematics, with an emphasis on mathematical statistics, in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University, and in 1950 he was awarded the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. His statistics professors at Princeton were the late Sam Wilks and John Tukey. Goodman then began his academic career as a statistician, and also as a statistician bridging sociology and statistics, with an appointment in 1950 as assistant professor in the Statistics Department and the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, where he remained, except for various leaves, until 1987. He was promoted to associate professor in 1953, and to professor in 1955. Goodman was at Cambridge University in 1953--1954 and 1959--1960 as visiting professor at Clare College and in the Statistical Laboratory. And he spent 1960--1961 as a visiting professor of mathematical statistics and sociology at Columbia University. He was also a research associate in the University of Chicago Population Research Center from 1967 to 1987. In 1970 he was appointed the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, a title that he held until 1987. He spent 1984--1985 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. In 1987 he was appointed the Class of 1938 Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Sociology Department and the Statistics Department. Goodman's numerous honors include honorary D.Sc. degrees from the University of Michigan and Syracuse University, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS276 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Who's Making It: The Academic Achievement of Recent Boston Public School Graduates in the Early College Years

Examines the persistence, progress, and performance of Boston public school graduates in the first two years of college; contributing factors, including academic preparation, colleges' selectivity, and full-time or part-time attendance; and implications