Irish pre-service teachers’ expectations for teaching as a career: a snapshot at a time of transition

Recent graduates of teacher education programmes in Ireland are entering their careers at a time characterized by an erosion of teacher autonomy, increased bureaucratic demands, and narrower curriculum specifications. These changes are typical features of what Sahlberg (2011) has termed the global educational reform movement (GERM), and evidence suggests that they can have a negative impact on teacher morale, and on how teaching as a career is perceived. This, in turn, can have detrimental effects on teacher recruitment and retention. This study examined the career expectations of two cohorts of Irish pre-service teachers (n=491) at the point of transition between college and work. The data gathered were also used to investigate if recent changes to the B.Ed. programme are associated with any changes in career expectations. Overall, teachers indicated strong expectations on issues such as doing a worthwhile job, feeling satisfied with pupil achievement and fulfilling personal needs, however, expectations with regard to the adequacy of salaries were low, and appear to have diminished further throughout the period 2014 to 2016

Teacher perspectives on standardized testing of achievement in Ireland

In the years since 2007 the role of standardized testing in Irish primary (elementary schools has become increasingly prominent. All schools are now required to administer tests in English reading and mathematics in 2nd, 4th and 6th grades, and to report aggregated results to their Boards of Management and the Department of Education and Skills (DES). Schools are also required to share the results with parents/guardians at the three mandatory testing points and to do this in written format using end-of-year school reports DES, 2011. As of September 2017, the results are used at national level as part of the process involved in determining the allocation of special educational teaching resources to schools DES, 2017. The research described in this paper represents a collaboration between the Centre for Assessment Research, Policy and Practice in Education (CARPE) based at Dublin City University and the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) - the largest teachers' trade union in Ireland representing 95%+ of all teachers at the elementary level. In examining elementary teachers use of and attitudes to standardized tests at a time when the stakes associated with this form of assessment are growing, the research exemplifies the AERA 2020 conference theme: “The Power and Possibilities for the Public Good When Researchers and Organizational Stakeholders Collaborate.

MERIC and RADAR generator: tools for energy evaluation and runtime tuning of HPC applications

This paper introduces two tools for manual energy evaluation and runtime tuning developed at IT4Innovations in the READEX project. The MERIC library can be used for manual instrumentation and analysis of any application from the energy and time consumption point of view. Besides tracing, MERIC can also change environment and hardware parameters during the application runtime, which leads to energy savings. MERIC stores large amounts of data, which are difficult to read by a human. The RADAR generator analyses the MERIC output files to find the best settings of evaluated parameters for each instrumented region. It generates a Open image in new window report and a MERIC configuration file for application production runs

Influence of autoionizing states on the pulse-length dependence of strong-field Ne+ photoionization at 38.4 eV

International audienceUsing the time-dependent R-matrix approach, we investigate ionization of ground-state Ne +, irradiated by laser light with a photon energy of 38.4 eV at intensities 10 13 W cm −2, 2 × 10 13 W cm −2 and 10 14 W cm −2 as a function of pulse length. Although the photon energy is below the threshold for single-photon ionization, we obtain a significant contribution from single-photon ionization to the ionization probability due to the finite duration of the pulse. The two-photon ionization rates deduced from the calculations are consistent with those obtained in R-matrix-Floquet rate calculations. The ionization probability oscillates with pulse length, which is ascribed to population and depopulation of autoionizing states just above the Ne 2+ ground state, reached after absorption of a single photon. At an intensity of 10 14 W cm −2, pulse lengths longer than 50 cycles are required for two-photon ionization to dominate the ionization probability. Letter to the Editor 2 The development of free-electron lasers operating in the VUV and the X-ray domain has given experimentalists new ways of investigating multi-electron dynamics in strong laser fields. These new laser facilities have, for example, enabled experimentalists to investigate two-photon double ionization of Ne in the photon-energy regime where direct two-photon double ionization is energetically allowed, but sequential (Ne → Ne + → Ne 2+) double ionization is energetically not allowed since the photon energy is not sufficient to ionize Ne + with a single photon (eg. Sorokin et al 2007). At larger photon energies, sequential double ionization is allowed, but also in this process one can find signatures of the fact that the two different emission processes are not independent of each other (Fritzsche et al 2008). One of the grand challenges in theoretical atomic physics is the description of multielectron dynamics in complex atoms irradiated by intense laser pulses. Over the last 15 years, great progress has been made in the description of pure two-electron systems in intense laser fields, for example for two-photon double ionization processes (see, for example, Colgan et al 2002, Feng and van der Hart 2003, Laulan et al 2005, Feist et al 2008) as well as for multiphoton double ionization at 390 nm (Parker et al 2006). These calculations require substantial computational resources, such that the direct extension of these techniques to systems with more than two electrons, like Ne, is unfeasible at present. Other approaches are required to describe the behaviour of complex atoms in intense light fields. The most successful approach for the description of complex atoms in intense laser light at present is the R-matrix-Floquet approach. This approach was designed from the outset to treat complex atoms in intense light fields by combining the R-matrix approach with the Floquet Ansatz (Burke et al 1991). It has been applied to a wide range of problems, ranging from strong-field ionization of Ne and Ar at 390 nm, requiring absorption of at least eight and six photons respectively, (van der Hart 2006) to twophoton emission of the inner 1s electron from ground-state Li − (van der Hart 2005). More recently, the R-matrix-Floquet approach has been instrumental in indicating the importance of detailed atomic structure in two-photon ionization of Ne + (Hamonou et al 2008, Hamonou and van der Hart 2008). The theoretical investigation of ionization processes in Ne + is of particular relevance at the moment, due to the large number of strong-field multiple ionization studies on Ne at photon energies in the range between 38 and 50 eV. Ionization yields of various Ne ions were obtained by Sorokin et al (2007) at photon energies below the Ne + ionization threshold and above this threshold. Moshammer et al (2007) obtained detailed recoil momentum spectra for two-photon double ionization of Ne at 44 eV. Rudenko et al (2008) found that these recoil-ion momentum distributions differed strongly from the recoil-ion momentum distributions for two-photon double ionization of He at 44 eV. At 44 eV, sequential double ionization is allowed for Ne, whereas it is not allowed for He. The dominance of sequential double ionization of Ne was demonstrated experimentally by Kurka et al (2009). Whereas in previous work (Hamonou et al 2008, Hamonou and van der Hart 2009)

Enabling the UCD-SPH code on the Xeon Phi

11 pages, 10 figures, 9 references. Other author's papers can be downloaded at http://www.denys-dutykh.com/This white-paper reports on our efforts to enable an SPH-based Fortran code on the Intel Xeon Phi. As a result of the work described here , the two most computationally intensive subroutines (rates and shepard_beta) of the UCD-SPH code were refactored and parallelised with OpenMP for the first time, enabling the code to be executed on multi-core and many-core shared memory systems. This parallelisation achieved speedups of up to 4.3x for the rates subroutine and 6.0x for the shepard_beta subroutine resulting in overall speedups of up to 4.2x on a 2 processor Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 machine. The code was subsequently enabled and refactored to execute in different modes on the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor achieving speedups of up to 2.8x for the rates subroutine and up to 3.8x for the shepard_beta subroutine producing overall speedups of up to 2.7x compared to the original unoptimised code. To explore the capabilities of auto-vectorisation the shepard_beta subroutine was refactored which results in speedups of up to 6.4x for the shepard_beta subroutine relative to the original unoptimised version of the shepard_beta subroutine. The development and testing phases of the project were carried out on the PRACE EURORA machine

Measuring Teachers’ Assessment for Learning (AfL) Classroom Practices in Elementary Schools

Assessment for Learning (AfL) may be conceptualized as minute-to-minute, day-by-day interactions between learners and teachers with the improvement of learning as the principal focus. This paper traces the development of an AfL measurement instrument (scale) that can be used for research purposes prior to, during and following professional development in the area. Rasch measurement procedures were applied to data drawn from a convenience sample of 594 teachers from 44 elementary schools in Ireland to create a scale consisting of 20 items distributed across four key AfL assessment strategies: learning intentions and success criteria, questioning and classroom discussion, feedback, and peer-and self-assessment.  This scale, the Assessment for Learning Measurement instrument (AfLMi), has good psychometric properties and is interpretable in a way that makes it potentially useful during system wide improvement initiatives focused on AfL

High stakes assessment policy implementation in the time of COVID-19: the case of calculated grades in Ireland

This paper provides a perspective on the manner in which Irish post-primary teachers interpreted and implemented a set of guidelines created by the Department of Education and Skills (DES) in Ireland when faced with the cancellation of the traditional high stakes Leaving Certificate (LC) examination due to COVID-19. Subject teachers were asked to engage with a system of calculated grades whereby they would estimate a percentage mark and a class rank for each of their students before meeting with school colleagues to agree a final set of data to be submitted for national standardisation. This was a remarkable event in Irish education as teachers had never before been directly involved in assessing their own students for certification purposes. Data from a survey conducted with teachers (n = 713) show that a wide variety of evidence was used to support their judgements and that the DES guidelines were not always implemented as intended. Challenges highlighted in the paper include decision making around grade boundaries, the lack of evidence for newer subjects, negotiating with school colleagues, and anticipating the impact of national standardisation. The study findings will be of interest to future initiatives involving the professional judgement of teachers in high stakes contexts

A validity perspective on interviews as a selection mechanism for entry to initial teacher education programmes

Across the world, teacher quality has come to be recognised as one of the most important variables affecting student outcomes; consequently, the regulation of entry into the profession is the subject of iterative review. The traditional ‘one-off’ interview, involving an interviewee and two or more interviewers, is a common, but not unproblematic, selection mechanism in the field. In particular, the modest positive correlation between performance at interviews and in clinical settings raises questions about using interviews as a selection mechanism for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes. In this paper, we draw on validity theory and some key commentaries and studies in the research literature to offer a perspective on the extent to which the traditional interview provides data that can be used to make good decisions about applicants for ITE. The paper proposes a validity-based framework for use by practitioners to enhance the conceptualisation, design and evaluation of interviews in the process of teacher selection