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Notwithstanding widely-held claims that assessment practices in higher education are relatively static, our understanding of the purposes of assessment and the nature of assessment practices has changed markedly over the past forty years. These changes are a response not only to recent developments in our conceptualisations of student learning but also to the demands a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world places on students. This book contains new perspectives on assessment and feedback provided by world renowned researchers on issues that are currently of great interest to both academic managers and teaching staff, as they try to make courses more effective and more appealing at a time when universities compete for incoming students. Rather than simply sharing recent inventions in assessment and feedback, the contributors to this book highlight the linkages between these innovations and new theorising and/or empirical research on assessment and student learning, thereby offering practices that are not only pioneering but evidence-based.

Assessment is an important part of effective teaching and learning. It allows achievements to be recognized and helps both teachers and learners to reflect on and review their performance and progress. While assessment has long been an end-of-learning activity to measure what learners can do, the outcome-oriented approach does not always foster learning motivation effectively. A new perspective now encourages ongoing appraisal in the classroom to improve learning. This book reflects current thinking of assessment with a stated focus on assessment for learning (AfL). It informs teachers about the latest developments and provides teachers with important tools for integrating assessment in the classroom. The discussions on assessment theories are in-depth and the examples used for illustrating the concepts are plentiful.

This innovative study of the baby boomer generation, who are now entering old age, breaks new ground in ageing research. This post-war cohort has experienced a range of social, cultural, and medical changes in regard to their notions of body, from the introduction of the Pill and the decoupling of sex and procreation to the H-Bomb and Earthrise. Yet, paradoxically, ageing is also universal. This exciting book reflects the intersection of time, ageing, body and identity to give a more nuanced and enlightened understanding of the ageing process.

Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world’s students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.

During the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in the United States—a place with a fast-disappearing middle class, persistent pockets of poverty, and striking gaps in educational and occupational achievement along class and racial lines. Low-wage workers and their families experienced a profound sense of exclusion from the techno-entrepreneurial culture, while middle-class residents negotiated both new and seemingly unattainable standards of personal success and the erosion of their own economic security. This book explores the imprint of the region's success-driven public culture, the realities of increasing social and economic insecurity, and models of success emphasized in contemporary public schools for the region's working- and middle-class youth. Focused on two disparate groups of students—low-income, “at-risk” Latino youth attending a specialized program exposing youth to high-tech industry within an “under-performing” public high school, and middle-income white and Asian students attending a “high-performing” public school with informal connections to the tech elite—the book offers an in-depth look at the process of forming aspirations across lines of race and class. By analyzing the successes and sometimes unanticipated effects of the schools' attempts to shape the aspirations and values of their students, the book considers the role schooling plays in social reproduction, and how dynamics of race and class inform ideas about responsible citizenship that are instilled in America's youth.

This book is principally about the management of student conduct in the classroom, which is the number one area of concern of many teachers. The chapters include discussions and real-life cases with specific reference to the influences of Chinese culture on Hong Kong classrooms. Numerous examples are provided to illustrate how positive learning environments can be created and maintained in the classroom. The topics covered include managing challenging behaviour, establishing classroom rules, conveying authority, and coping with bullying.

This book examines the social policies of the coalition government from 2010 to 2015, and outlines the incoming Conservative government’s approach during its first 100 days in office. Drawing on contributions on cross-cutting themes such as public expenditure and the governance of social policy, and on key service areas, including education, health and social security, it examines the key ideas underpinning the policies of the coalition government, the influences on policy, including the two governing parties, the legacy of New Labour, the financial crisis of 2008 and its interpretation, and ideology. The book argues that in most respects (although not all), the coalition government can be seen as having more in common with New Right approaches than those of New Labour’s Third Way or One Nation Conservatism. It suggests that that, combined with the emphasis on ‘austerity’ and large-scale public expenditure cuts, contributed to a reshaping of much of the welfare state, particularly in England, although the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom sought, in general, to move in a rather different policy direction. Looking at the first 100 days of the Conservative government the book concludes that the direction of travel under the coalition was likely to persist at least until the next general election, if not beyond.

Radical reforms are taking place to public service education in western style democracies. We identify the corporatisation of governance, and the role and influence of corporate elites within and external to institutions and public education. Supported by a Foreword from Professor Romuald Normand, we present 15 essays organised in two parts: one that examines this from a system perspective, and one that gives more attention to provision. These essays present primary research and analysis from a range of national settings, where corporatisation is examined and charted. We interrogate this data and analysis in order to identify major trends that are not only national but also global. The book makes an original and significant conceptual and empirical contribution to understandings and explanations of public policy.

In 2014 the UK government launched an investigation into the “Trojan Horse” affair: an alleged plot to “Islamify” several state schools in Birmingham. Twenty-one schools in Birmingham were subjected to snap Ofsted inspections and included in the various inquiries into the affair. The book's authors — one who was an expert witness in the professional misconduct cases brought against the teachers in the school, and the other, who researches the government's counter-extremism agenda — challenge the accepted narrative, arguing that a major injustice was inflicted on the teachers, and they go on to show how the affair was used to criticize multiculturalism and justify the expansion of a broad and intrusive counter-extremism agenda. The government cites the 'plot' in its argument about the need to develop a new counter-extremism strategy that confronts extremist ideology and not just threats of violence. However, the Kershaw Report and some other commentators argue that there was, in fact, no evidence of extremism.

This book is an introductory textbook on Hong Kong’s school curriculum. Written in an approachable style using illustrative case studies, the textbook provides an introduction to the basic concepts and theories of “curriculum” as a field of study. It also discusses how socio-political and economic changes as well as technology advancements help transform teachers’ roles and reshape curriculum policies. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including curriculum design, planning, implementation and evaluation. These discussions are included to help readers critically reflect on their roles as change agents in curriculum development.

By traveling through daily life at the school, A Curriculum of Fear investigates how students and school staff made sense of, negotiated, and contested the intense focus on national security, terrorism, and their militarized responsibilities to the nation. Drawing from critical scholarship on school militarization, neoliberal school reform, the impact of the global war on terror on everyday life in the U.S., and the political uses of fear, this book maps the social, political, and economic contexts that gave rise to the school’s Homeland Security program and its popularity. Ultimately, as the first ethnography of a high school Homeland Security program, this book traces how Milton was not only “under siege”—shaped by the new normal imposed by the global war on terror—it actively prepared for the siege itself.

Hong Kong is a fascinating place for the study of curriculum. Its schooling system is influenced by the legacies of a Chinese tradition and British colonialism and was developed at a time when, around the world, that state was taking more responsibility for the education of young people and educational policies were increasingly influenced by the impact of globalization. To this we can add the complexities of Hong Kong as a society—one that has witnessed major political and economic changes over the past 150 years or so, and particularly since the late 1970s. The dynamics produce an intricate interplay of innovation and conservatism, globalization and localization, liberalism and authoritarianism, devolution and centralization, and many other tensions. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to curriculum as a field of study in a way which highlights its inherent dilemmas and complexities by illustrating the diverse ways in which a curriculum can be developed and analyzed. It also presents a specific analysis of the Hong Kong school curriculum and highlights the ways in which the curriculum both reflects and changes in response to broader socio-political shifts.

The book focuses on governance of K-12 public schools. Governance – the work of institutions that set the rules under which schools must operate – can protect children and prevent misuse of public funds, but it can also prevent teachers and principals from doing their best for children. There are proposals to simplify governance changing by giving control to mayors, eliminating elected school boards, or eliminating local oversight entirely. This book approaches governance from a new angle: who governs is less important than what powers government has. We propose system of “constitutional” limits on what local governing bodies can do, and checks and balances to enforce these limits. The core of the governance system is a local Civic Education Council, a representative democratic body that has unique but also strictly limited powers: to decide what organizations may run schools, but to let individual schools employ teachers and principals; to withdraw support from unproductive schools and to seek better alternatives for children; and to allocate funds to schools based on enrollment but not to create a large central bureaucracy. This maintains local control, but also limits the purview of government action. The book explains constitutional governance in detail and lays out its implications for parents, students, teachers and their unions, state and federal government and the courts. Later chapters address how the laws defining the new system could be stabilized by a combination of structural change in government and political organization.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are living in a global era, yet schooling systems remain generally reactive and slow to adapt to shifting economic, technological, demographic, and cultural terrains. There is a growing urgency to create, evaluate, and expand new models of education that are better synchronized with the realities of today's globally linked economies and societies. This book examines one such model: the ethos and practices of the Ross Schools and their incubation, promotion, and launching of new ideas and practices into public education. Over the last two decades Ross has come to articulate a systematic approach to education consciously tailored for a new era of global interdependence. This book examines some of the best practices in K-12 education in the context of an increasingly interconnected world. The chapters explore how the Ross model of education, which cultivates in students a global perspective, aligns with broader trends in the arts, humanities, and sciences in the new millennium.

Since the early 1990s, the federal role in education—exemplified by the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)—has expanded dramatically. Yet states and localities have retained a central role in education policy, leading to a growing struggle for control over the direction of the nation's schools. This book explains the uneven development of federal involvement in education. While supporters of expanded federal involvement enjoyed some success in bringing new ideas to the federal policy agenda, the book argues, they also encountered stiff resistance from proponents of local control. Built atop existing decentralized policies, new federal reforms raised difficult questions about which level of government bore ultimate responsibility for improving schools. The book's argument focuses on the role played by civil rights activists, business leaders, and education experts in promoting the reforms that would be enacted with federal policies such as NCLB. It also underscores the constraints on federal involvement imposed by existing education policies, hostile interest groups, and, above all, the nation's federal system. Indeed, the federal system, which left specific policy formation and implementation to the states and localities, repeatedly frustrated efforts to effect changes: national reforms lost their force as policies passed through iterations at the state, county, and municipal levels. Ironically, state and local resistance only encouraged civil rights activists, business leaders, and their political allies to advocate even more stringent reforms that imposed heavier burdens on state and local governments. Through it all, the nation's education system made only incremental steps toward the goal of providing a quality education for every child.

What has been done to achieve fairer and more efficient education systems, and what more can be done in the future? This book provides a comprehensive examination of crucial policy areas for education, such as differential outcomes, the poverty gradient, and the allocation of resources to education, to identify likely causes of educational disadvantage among students and lifelong learners. This analysis is supported by 20 years of extensive research, based in the home countries of the UK and on work in all EU 28 countries, USA, Pakistan, and Japan. The book brings invaluable insights into the underlying problems within education policy, and proposes practical solutions for a brighter future.

Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community. The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.

Economists and other researchers have accumulated abundant evidence that education increases workers’ productivity and thus increases their incomes. Education also leads to improvements in health and provides many other non-monetary benefits. Policymakers in developing countries also agree that there are important benefits from increasing the education of their citizens; governments in developing countries now spend about $700 billion each year on education. Despite this increased spending, 13% of children in developing countries do not finish primary school, and over one third do not enroll in secondary school. Even more worrisome is that there is a large amount of evidence that students in developing countries learn far less than students in developed countries. While spending even more money may increase enrollment and learning, most developing countries face serious budget constraints that prevent them from devoting significantly larger amounts of money to education. Thus there is an urgent need to find specific, and relatively inexpensive, policies that will lead to better education outcomes in those countries. Fortunately, there has been a large increase in research on education in developing countries in the last two decades, yet these findings are scattered in many different academic journals and other types of publications. Given this situation, this volume has three goals. The first is to take stock of what this recent research has found. The second is to present the implications of this research for education policies in developing countries. Finally, the third is to set priorities for future research on education in those countries.

Recent research has shown profound impacts of institutional settings of education systems on educational inequalities, i.e. systematic disadvantages and advantages in education being structured by characteristics like class, gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability and their intersections. The main education system characteristics which have been identified as driving forces are stratification (tracking), standardisation and vocational specificity. The text centres on questions of how and via which social factors and processes these characteristics of education systems produce inequalities – not only in educational attainment but also in status attainment and life chances. The first part of the book comprises contributions that focus on theory and methods to examine the effects of educational systems on educational inequalities. The second part contains works on the influences of social attributes on educational attainment in terms of competencies or credentials. The third and last part of the book centres on social inequalities in educational returns while including both job related factors (job prestige, income, etc.) and nonmonetary educational returns (health, well-being, etc.). Finally, a discussion on “good” and “bad” education systems centres on the question of how an ideal education system could look like.

Educational Goods advances a theory of how to combine values and evidence in decision-making about education. The book identifies three kinds of value that must be balanced against each other: a theory of the kind of educational outcomes schools should aim at; a theory of how educational opportunities should be distributed; and independent values that should be considered when they conflict with the first two kinds of value. The evidence that decision-makers should seek out and consider is that which bears on how these values will be realized through the choices they make, and the book articulates a distinctive method for thinking about the evidence in the light of the values. The method is illustrated through consideration of 3 central policy issues: school financing, school accountability systems, and school choice mechanisms