Browse

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.

The rise of Far Right populism poses major challenges for communities, exacerbating divisions, hate speech and hate crime. This book shows how communities and social justice movements can effectively tackle these issues, working together to mitigate their underlying causes and more immediate manifestations. Showing that community-based learning is integral to the development of strategies to promote more hopeful rather than more hateful futures, Mayo demonstrates how, through popular education and participatory action research, communities can develop their own understandings of their problems. Using case studies that illustrate education approaches in practice, she shows how communities can engineer democratic forms of social change.

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.

In the light of high-profile Supreme Court cases surrounding affirmative action, this book looks at the actors involved in the debate and what they are saying. That is, the book looks at who is setting the line of discussion in the Supreme Court by look at legal documents arguing for and against the case as well as the framing techniques they use to make their arguments noteworthy. Findings demonstrate that while supporters are made of a heterogeneous array of individuals and groups with a stake in affirmative action in higher education (e.g., students, professors, etc.), opponents are mainly represented by think tanks and other interest groups. Furthermore, this book finds that frames vary greatly between the groups, with supporters raising concern of what eliminating the policy will mean for minority students and opponents conversely arguing that such a policy is dangerous for our society and for those who merit inclusion into elite universities would not benefit from affirmative action. This book uses prominent sociological theories to put these arguments in broader contexts.

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.

The call for science curriculum reform has been made over and over again for much of the twentieth century. Arguments have been made that the content of the curriculum is not appropriate for meeting the individual and social needs of people living in the modern world; that the curriculum has become overstuffed with topics and does not serve students especially well; and above all, that the curriculum does not generate the student learning it is expected to produce. The latest volume in a continuing series of publications from the AAAS designed to reform science education, Designs for Science Literacy presupposes that curriculum reform must be considerably more extensive and fundamental than the tinkering with individual courses and subjects that has been going on for decades. Designs deals with the critical issues involved in assembling sound instructional materials into a new, coherent K-12 whole. The book pays special attention to the need to link science-oriented studies to the arts and humanities, and also proposes how to align the curriculum with an established set of learning goals while preserving the American tradition of local responsibility for the curriculum itself. If fundamental curriculum reform is ever to occur, a new process for creating alternatives will have to be developed. Designs for Science Literacy provides the groundwork for such a process.

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.