Assessment in senior outdoor education: A catalyst for change?

In recent times issues of sustainability and place, and human connectedness and care for outdoor environments, have been the subject of increasing professional dialogue in outdoor education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Attention has been drawn to the ways in which traditional, adventure-based conceptualisations of outdoor education shape pedagogical practice in particular ways, potentially obscuring opportunities to explicitly promote student connectedness to, and learning about and for the outdoors. This paper contributes to this evolving dialogue about the greening of outdoor education by specifically targeting assessment in senior school outdoor education. By initially establishing the interdependence of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, the potential that assessment has to constrain and/or drive this recent curriculum and pedagogical re-prioritising in outdoor education is made evident. We argue that it is possible for assessment to be a productive engine for student learning about sustainable relationships with the outdoors. Five interconnected catalysts are highlighted as being central to this: (i) the alignment process, (ii) using fresh eyes with current achievement standards, (iii) taking another look at curriculum in relation to assessment, (iv) writing programme-specific assessments, and (v) reflective decision making. These are suggested to be key considerations for outdoor educators for the potential of school-based outdoor education to be fully harnessed

Key competencies: Views from the gym floor.

The release of The New Zealand Curriculum (2007) will inevitably yield challenges and possibilities for teachers of Physical Education in both primary and secondary schools. In this paper I describe the vision and key competencies embedded in this new curriculum and discuss their relationship to Physical Education. Drawing on the voices of secondary school students, I interrogate the opportunities that students envisage for developing key competencies in Physical Education. I propose that students can, and do, afford significant insight into how teachers may enact key competencies in curriculum learning and that it is critical thinking that will enable both students and teachers to understand and relate to the movement culture in meaningful and relevant ways

A critical challenge: Developing student's critical abilities

The work of educators includes grappling with the challenges of bringing theoretical concepts and approaches into day-to-day physical education practice for quality programmes and the betterment of student learning. One of our most exciting challenges is in capturing the potential the Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 1999) and the New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 2007) present to us as physical educators. The curriculum has encouraged the development of socio-critical perspectives and inquirybased approaches to teaching and learning programmes (Culpan & Bruce, 2007; Fitzpatrick, 2010; Gillespie & Culpan, 2000; Wright, 2004). We (the writers) have tackled the theory to practice challenge of the development of student’s critical abilities from a range of positions within education. Our involvement in initial teacher education, teacher professional development, secondary physical education teaching and physical education advisory roles has meant we have needed to not only develop our own practice as educators, but also consider how to successfully enable secondary school students, teacher education students and practicing physical education teachers to understand and implement a socio-critical physical education curriculum. This paper focuses on processes, knowledge and understandings that support the development of student’s critical abilities

On the Physics of Size Selectivity

We demonstrate that two mechanisms used by biological ion channels to select particles by size are driven by entropy. With uncharged particles in an infinite cylinder, we show that a channel that attracts particles is small-particle selective and that a channel that repels water from the wall is large-particle selective. Comparing against extensive density-functional theory calculations of our model, we find that the main physics can be understood with surprisingly simple bulk models that neglect the confining geometry of the channel completely.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Phys. Rev. Lett. (accepted

The Viking surface sampler

A surface sampler subsystem for the Viking Lander has been designed, fabricated, cleaned, and successfully tested. Testing has included component level tests to qualification environment and subsystem level tests. This development hardware has also been integrated into a System Test Bed (STB) for the lander system. In addition to the normal dynamic and thermal environments the surface sampler hardware has been tested in an aircraft to simulate the effects of the reduced Martian gravity. Although problems have been encountered with the first-build and integration, the basic design appears to be sound and hardware qualification is scheduled for late 1973

Internal thermal noise in the LIGO test masses : a direct approach

The internal thermal noise in LIGO's test masses is analyzed by a new technique, a direct application of the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem to LIGO's readout observable, $x(t)=$(longitudinal position of test-mass face, weighted by laser beam's Gaussian profile). Previous analyses, which relied on a normal-mode decomposition of the test-mass motion, were valid only if the dissipation is uniformally distributed over the test-mass interior, and they converged reliably to a final answer only when the beam size was a non-negligible fraction of the test-mass cross section. This paper's direct analysis, by contrast, can handle inhomogeneous dissipation and arbitrary beam sizes. In the domain of validity of the previous analysis, the two methods give the same answer for $S_x(f)$, the spectral density of thermal noise, to within expected accuracy. The new analysis predicts that thermal noise due to dissipation concentrated in the test mass's front face (e.g. due to mirror coating) scales as $1/r_0^2$, by contrast with homogeneous dissipation, which scales as $1/r_0$ ($r_0$ is the beam radius); so surface dissipation could become significant for small beam sizes.Comment: 6 pages, RevTex, 1 figur

Assessment in senior secondary physical education. Questions of judgement

The ways in which various aspects of senior physical education courses should be assessed and whether some can, or indeed should be incorporated in external examinations, are matters of longstanding professional debate across Australia and internationally. Differences in current practice across Australasia reflect an ongoing lack of consensus about how assessment requirements and arrangements and particularly, examinations in senior physical education, can best address concerns to ensure validity, reliability, equity and feasibility. An issue never far from such debates is that of ‘professional judgement’ and more specifically, whether and how professional judgement does and/or should ‘come into play’ in assessment. This paper reports on research that has explored new approaches to examination assessment and marking in senior physical education, using digital technologies. It focuses specifically on the ways in which ‘professional judgement’ can be deemed to be inherent to two contrasting methods of assessment used in the project: ‘analytical standardsbased’ assessment and ‘comparative pairs’ assessment. Details of each method of assessment are presented. Data arising directly from assessors’ comments and from analysis which explored intermarker reliability for each method of assessment and compared results generated by internal teacher assessment, standards-based and comparative pairs assessment, is reported. Discussion explores whether the data arising can be seen as lending weight to arguments for (i) more faith to be placed in professional judgement and (ii) for the comparative pairs methods to be more widely employed in examination assessment in senior physical education

A hybrid moment equation approach to gas-grain chemical modeling

[Context] The stochasticity of grain chemistry requires special care in modeling. Previously methods based on the modified rate equation, the master equation, the moment equation, and Monte Carlo simulations have been used. [Aims] We attempt to develop a systematic and efficient way to model the gas-grain chemistry with a large reaction network as accurately as possible. [Methods] We present a hybrid moment equation approach which is a general and automatic method where the generating function is used to generate the moment equations. For large reaction networks, the moment equation is cut off at the second order, and a switch scheme is used when the average population of certain species reaches 1. For small networks, the third order moments can also be utilized to achieve a higher accuracy. [Results] For physical conditions in which the surface reactions are important, our method provides a major improvement over the rate equation approach, when benchmarked against the rigorous Monte Carlo results. For either very low or very high temperatures, or large grain radii, results from the rate equation are similar to those from our new approach. Our method is faster than the Monte Carlo approach, but slower than the rate equation approach. [Conclusions] The hybrid moment equation approach with a cutoff and switch scheme is applicable to large gas-grain networks, and is accurate enough to be used for astrochemistry studies. The layered structure of the grain mantle could also be incorporated into this approach, although a full implementation of the grain micro-physics appears to be difficult.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Economic Efficiency of U.S. Organic Versus Conventional Dairy Farms: Evidence from 2005 and 2010

We estimate an input distance function for U.S. dairy farming to examine the competitiveness of organic and non-organic dairy production by system and size. Across organic/non-organic systems and size classes, size is the major determinant of competitiveness based on various measures of productivity and returns to scale.Organic, Non-organic, Input Distance Function, Livestock Production/Industries, Production Economics,

Small U.S. Dairy Farms: Can They Compete?

The U.S. dairy industry is undergoing rapid structural change, evolving from a structure including many small farmers in the Upper Midwest and Northeast to one that includes very large farms in new production regions. Small farms are struggling to retain competitiveness via improved management and low-input systems. Using data from USDA’s Agricultural Resource Management Survey, we determine the extent of U.S. conventional and pasture-based milk production during 2003-2007, and estimate net returns, scale efficiency, and technical efficiency associated with the systems across different operation sizes. We compare the financial performance of small conventional and pasture-based producers with one another and with largescale producers. A stochastic production frontier is used to analyze performance over the period for conventional and pasture technologies identified using a binomial logit model. Large conventional farms generally outperformed smaller farms using most economic measures – technical efficiency, various profitability measures, and returns to scale.Pasture-based system, technical efficiency, returns to scale, dairy, Livestock Production/Industries, Productivity Analysis,