Attitudes toward Peer Assessment in Initial Teacher Education Students: An Exploratory Case Study

This paper explores the attitudes of Design and Technology (D&T) initial teacher education students toward peer assessment. Through a small scale case study, the research uses a quasi-experimental approach to examine participant’s perception of peer assessment prior and subsequent to a set of experiential intervention activities that were designed to develop a democratic and dialogic conceptulisation of peer assessment rooted in critical pedagogy. It was hypothesised that exposure to these intervention activities might alter participant’s perceptions of the peer assessment process. Findings from the research suggest this hypothesis to be accurate and appear to reveal a change in participant attitudes to peer assessment from one dominated by teacher-centred, or didactic, understandings to one where the role of student voice should be central. The subsequent interpretation and discussion seeks to illuminate the value of understanding how such an approach to peer assessment might help develop learners’ growing ability to take responsibility for their own learning and contribute to developing D&T assessment practice

The Philosophy of Pain - Introduction

Over recent decades, pain has received increasing attention as – with ever greater sophistication and rigour – theorists have tried to answer the deep and difficult questions it poses. What is pain’s nature? What is its point? In what sense is it bad? The papers collected in this volume are a contribution to that effort ..

Integrating student voice: assessment for empowerment

This paper charts the development of a conceptual model for student involvement in assessment practice. This development seeks, through an exploration of literature in the field, to locate pedagogy that: • supports partnerships in assessment that lead to empowered autonomous learners. • provides opportunities for student voice that support the students’ growing ability to think critically about – and take responsibility for – their own assessment. Accordingly, this paper uncovers a conceptual model located in critical pedagogy that might be argued to move away from a dominant discourse of assessment that illuminates the role of students as passive recipients, toward a discourse that supports the development of student autonomy and more effective student/academic partnerships. It puts forward a critical pedagogy of assessment that might involve an entirely new orientation, one that embraces a number of principles that may not be familiar in generic higher education assessment practice. These principles are rooted in dialogic interactions so that the roles of teacher and learner are shared and teacher and, particularly, student voices are validated. The paper goes on to suggest that by closely examining what is meant by the term student voice, it is possible to begin to envisage a conceptual model for integrating student voice into higher education assessment practice. Through this model, we might juxtapose the transformative goals of critical pedagogy with the transformative possibilities of student voice

Women and the environment in rural Mexico

Rural women in Mexico live in deteriorating environmental conditions. Do they care? Are they more interested than men in helping to stop this degradation? What knowledge of the environment do rural Mexican women have? Section One analyses some Western views: the eco-feminist movement which sees women as equivalent to nature and both as subordinates of men, the Western historical and anthropological literature on women and nature and selected writers who see women as saviours of the Third World. In Section Two it is demonstrated that it is difficult to know if Mexican women care about the environment or even what they know, because there is little published information. A partial answer may be inferred from what is known about their work. Rural Mexican women's work is the best proof of their environmental knowledge; their roles and work are examined and the causes of their absence from the literature are discussed. The literature review was supplemented by field work in four communities of south-eastern Mexico. This established that these women vary in their approach to natural resources, and that this approach is much influenced by their culture and by themselves as individuals. Some have very substantial knowledge. The fieldwork supported the view that women's relationship with the environment is highly specific by place, time, culture, class and other factors, but there is still some continuity in attitudes to the environment among women, perhaps in their role as "carers"

MEI Kodierung der frühesten Notation in linienlosen Neumen

Das Optical Neume Recognition Project (ONRP) hat die digitale Kodierung von musikalischen Notationszeichen aus dem Jahr um 1000 zum Ziel – ein ambitioniertes Vorhaben, das die Projektmitglieder veranlasste, verschiedenste methodische Ansätze zu evaluieren. Die Optical Music Recognition-Software soll eine linienlose Notation aus einem der ältesten erhaltenen Quellen mit Notationszeichen, dem Antiphonar Hartker aus der Benediktinerabtei St. Gallen (Schweiz), welches heute in zwei Bänden in der Stiftsbibliothek in St. Gallen aufbewahrt wird, erfassen. Aufgrund der handgeschriebenen, linienlosen Notation stellt dieser Gregorianische Gesang den Forscher vor viele Herausforderungen. Das Werk umfasst über 300 verschiedene Neumenzeichen und ihre Notation, die mit Hilfe der Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) erfasst und beschrieben werden sollen. Der folgende Artikel beschreibt den Prozess der Adaptierung, um die MEI auf die Notation von Neumen ohne Notenlinien anzuwenden. Beschrieben werden Eigenschaften der Neumennotation, um zu verdeutlichen, wo die Herausforderungen dieser Arbeit liegen sowie die Funktionsweise des Classifiers, einer Art digitalen Neumenwörterbuchs

Chicken or egg: links between approaches to gathering data through authentic assessment activity and ways of supporting sustainable assessment of creative performance

This paper draws on research conducted to explore issues of creativity and sustainable assessment in the context of primary/secondary transition. The research project (Capability and Progression in Transition through Assessment for Learning in Design and Technology: CAPITTAL-DT; McLaren et al. 2006) was undertaken in associate primary and secondary school settings in 2 local authorities in Scotland and was funded by the Determined to Succeed division within Scottish Executive Education Department (SEED). The research undertaken had two drivers. The first was evidence from within Scotland that both teaching and learning of Design and Technology was identified as weak (e.g. HMIE 2002, Dakers 2005), that of particular concern was the tendency for teachers to focus on making products rather than on thinking skills and creative processes and that assessment as part of learning and teaching was “good or better in only 24% of schools” (HMIE 2004). The second driver was research that had just been completed for the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) that explored approaches to assessing creativity within Design & Technology (the Assessing Design Innovation project, Kimbell et al. 2004). This research utilised an approach to authentic summative assessment that indicated additional potential to contribute to assessment for learning. These two drivers combined to provide both a research need and a research opportunity. The study involved learners from 7 schools. The participants (n=225) were in Primary 6 (10-11years old), Primary7 (11-12years old) and Secondary 1 (12-13 years old). Intervention and control research cohorts were created to take a quasi-experimental approach. The research gathered baseline and follow-up data before and after transition (either from Primary 6 to Primary 7, or from Primary 7 to Secondary 1) and, for intervention cohorts, tracked curricula experiences in the intervening 9-month period. The baseline and follow-up data was gathered through authentic assessment activities adapted and developed from the Assessing Design Innovation project. The dataset was created from: - a ‘Learner Attitudes Towards Creativity’ questionnaire; - an authentic assessment activity structure (Stables & Kimbell, 2000; Kimbell et al., 2004); - a ‘learner evaluation’ questionnaire. A range of data was created by the study: - quantitative performance data derived from a creativity assessment rubric (Kimbell et al, 2004); - quantitative attitudinal and evaluative data; - qualitative guided and free response data that was analysed using derived content analysis; - qualitative data derived from semi-structured interviews with teachers to provide illustrative accounts of the related learning and teaching that had been undertaken between baseline and follow-up data collection. This paper explores the relationship between the approaches used for data gathering, the findings from the data and the insights offered for further approaches to sustainable assessment. Analysis of the data showed links between the creative performance of learners, their attitudes to creativity, the level of sophistication they demonstrated in self and peer reflection and, most importantly, how these changed over the transition period. The ability to gather and relate these data was created by the use of the authentic assessment activity as the core stimulus for the data. This paper will provide an insight into how this was undertaken and explore the potential the approach offers other curriculum areas

Systematic review of the efficacy and safety of using mesh in surgery for uterine or vaginal vault prolapse

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comPeer reviewedPostprin