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1.
Assessment for learning in the accountability era: Queensland, Australia   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
Developments in school education in Australia over the past decade have witnessed the rise of national efforts to reform curriculum, assessment and reporting. Constitutionally the power to decide on curriculum matters still resides with the States. Higher stakes in assessment, brought about by national testing and international comparative analyses of student achievement data, have challenged State efforts to maintain the emphasis on assessment to promote learning while fulfilling accountability demands. In this article lessons from the Queensland experience indicate that it is important to build teachers’ assessment capacity and their assessment literacy for the promotion of student learning. It is argued that teacher assessment can be a source of dependable results through moderation practice. The Queensland Studies Authority has recognised and supported the development of teacher assessment and moderation practice in the context of standards-driven, national reform. Recent research findings explain how the focus on learning can be maintained by avoiding an over-interpretation of test results in terms of innate ability and limitations and by encouraging teachers to adopt more tailored diagnosis of assessment data to address equity through a focus on achievement for all. Such efforts are challenged as political pressures related to the Australian government's implementation of national testing and national partnership funding arrangements tied to the performance of students at or below minimum standards become increasingly apparent.  相似文献   

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The changing ways child observation is being used by preschool teachers in the United States and Australia are described in relation to the accountability movement pressuring young children and their teachers in both countries. The costs of the accountability movement in early childhood education are explored, and a call for genuine accountability based on assessment strategies such as traditional child observation is made.  相似文献   

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In the current climate of accountability, political manoeuvring, changing curriculum, increasingly diverse student cohorts and community expectations, teachers, more than ever, need to develop the skills and abilities to be reflective and reflexive practitioners. This study examines national teacher professional standards from Australia and the UK to identify the extent to which reflexivity is embedded in key policy documents that are intended to guide the work of teachers in those countries. Using Margaret Archer's theories of reflexivity and morphogenesis, and methods of critical discourse analysis, we argue that these blueprints for teachers’ work exclude reflexivity as an essential and overarching discourse of teacher professionalism.  相似文献   

5.
As a result of the changes to school administration and curriculum in New Zealand over the last ten years, primary teachers have had to make significant changes to their assessment practices. This paper briefly reviews literature relating to the competing discourses of assessment that underpin teachers' practices and describes how the changes to New Zealand education have provoked a reconsideration of the balance between formative and summative assessment. It then reports findings from a qualitative investigation into how some primary teachers have attempted to accommodate these competing discourses and the effects these have had on their teaching practice. These results are discussed in light of the research literature and suggestions for changing national and school policies and practices to prioritise assessment for better learning over accountability conclude the paper. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.  相似文献   

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Any policy reform in education is highly effective when it is planned and implemented ‘holistically’ and yet, it is the most challenging way forward. Many countries in Asia have reformed their English language policies and syllabi in the last two decades due to the increasing value of the language worldwide. Motivated by a ‘communicative approach’ to English language teaching, Bangladesh was one of the countries that launched such a reform in the 1990s. However, this reform has been criticised for imposing the changes on teachers without preparing them sufficiently. More importantly, there is limited evidence as to how much the secondary English language assessment system is aligned with the changes introduced in the curriculum. In order to explore this gap, a medium-scale study was conducted in 38 secondary schools in Bangladesh, following a mixed methods approach. The findings highlighted a ‘mismatch’ between the intended English language learning outcomes and current assessment practices, including the resulting challenges faced by the teachers. This paper argues that language education reform is likely to fail if the assessment system is not aligned with the curriculum.  相似文献   

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This article examines major trends in testing and accountability reform in the United States over the past decade. The review covers the apex and decline of the national experimentation with a range of alternative assessments and the rise of test-based accountability as a central policy initiative. These trends signify that testing has become a widely utilized instrument for educational reform in America. Research on these trends indicates that high stakes testing does motivate teachers and administrators to change their practices, yet the changes they motivate tend to be more superficial adjustments in content coverage and test preparation activities rather than promoting deeper improvements in instructional practice. Further, the information provided by large scale assessments is primarily useful to measure school and system progress, but of more limited utility for instructional guidance. Most problematic is that the high stakes testing system in America has been repeatedly promoted as a substantive reform in itself. However, high stakes testing is a relatively weak intervention because, while it reveals shortcomings, it does not contain the guidance and expertise to inform response. The article concludes with suggestions on how to capitalize on the strengths of high stakes testing while minimizing its shortcomings.  相似文献   

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With increasing school autonomy, often coupled with greater accountability requirements, school leaders are increasingly responsible for new human resource management tasks. Policies to improve the teaching workforce, therefore, cannot do without policies to improve the school leadership profession. Teachers' effectiveness depends, among others, on effective school leaders who shape teachers' working environment and influence their motivations. Furthermore, as recent research indicates, school leaders are the second most important school-level factor affecting, even if mainly indirectly through their influence on teachers, student learning after classroom instruction. Considering the role school leaders play for the effective school-level management of teachers and for teaching and learning through their pedagogical leadership, it is essential that school leaders are adequately prepared and supported for their role. As part of their school reform programmes, more and more countries have been introducing a range of evaluation and assessment policies to improve school, school leadership and teaching practices. The individual appraisal of schools leaders and teachers is a key component of evaluation and assessment policies. This article explores if, and how, individual school leader appraisal can develop school leaders' pedagogical leadership, a key element of which is teacher management. It analyses the policy approaches of several European countries and the extent to which formal frameworks in these countries focus on developing pedagogical leadership. The article concludes with ideas for policy to strengthen appraisal as a tool to improve school leaders' practices and behaviours and their competencies for pedagogical leadership and teacher management.  相似文献   

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香港及中国内地两地在上世纪90年代末起均积极推动教育改革,以发展优质/素质教育为主要的发展方向,以期培养适切的人才,提高两地的国际竞争力。基于此,两地均强调课程改革,引入新的教学法,如专题研习/研究性学习,强调问责性的评核机制。面对教与学的种种改革,教师的工作出现了新的转变及挑战,本文比较两地在教改情境下,如何透过教师评鉴保证及提升教育质素,两地教师如何以不同策略作响应,呈现两地教师在工作评鉴下的处境。  相似文献   

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In an effort to increase student readiness for college and career, many States have adopted new academic standards encouraged by education reform advocates. These standards are commonly referred to as the Common Core Standards. Schools from States that have adopted the Common Core Standards have been compelled to significantly restructure their existing curriculum and adjust how they teach that curriculum. These requirements can be particularly onerous for rural schools. Neoliberalism is the underlying political philosophy undergirding these changes in the current school reform movement and is similar to the political philosophy that drove the changes in agricultural policies in the mid 20th century. Neoliberal political and economic philosophy as it correlates to education policy is buttressed by three values: (1) education fosters economic growth; (2) education policy modeled on efficiency and business practices; (3) high stakes testing to measure what a student has learned. These values have created an educational policy structure that attempts to quantify student learning, teacher effectiveness and school district value. By understanding the similarities between agricultural policies in the mid 20th century and current education policies, rural schools and communities will be able to change the narrative surrounding the education of their children.  相似文献   

11.
Abstract

In a context of increasing demand for quality and equity in education and a sharp focus on accountability, classroom teachers are also expected to support and improve learning outcomes for pupils in response to their individual needs. This paper explores three issues: how teachers understand assessment in relation to their students’ learning, the curriculum and their pedagogical choices; how teachers’ capacity to use assessment to improve students’ learning can be developed through career-long professional learning (CLPL); and how teachers’ learning can be implemented and sustained in schools, both locally and nationally. In considering these issues, recent thinking about learning and assessment and CLPL are considered alongside empirical evidence from the development and implementation of assessment processes and approaches to professional development in Scotland. The paper emphasises the importance of a dynamic framework of CLPL that recognises the individuality of teachers’ learning needs and the consequent need for tailored professional learning opportunities with different combinations of support and challenge at school, local and national levels.  相似文献   

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One of the major innovations in the recent wave of education reform in Hong Kong is the target‐oriented curriculum. An interesting feature of this new curriculum initiative was its amoebic characteristics – changing shape and focus in its course of development. It was reshaped from an assessment system for accountability purposes to a centrally developed curriculum initiative for improving teaching and learning, and finally to a school‐based curriculum development. In this paper, this course of development and the reasons behind it will be described and analysed. The study suggests that the two‐tier educational policy and implementation system in Hong Kong is a major cause leading to such a phenomenon. If this system were not improved, the possibility of achieving real changes at the school and classroom level would be low.  相似文献   

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中国基础教育的课程改革,已经在全国各地广泛地开展起来,新课程改革无疑要求教师变革教学方式,而更要求学生变革学习方式和树立学习新理念、现代学习观。在新课程改革背景下,学生应树立四大学习新理念:变革性学习理念,全面性学习理念,创新性学习理念,灵活性学习理念;应树立十大现代学习观:终身学习观,多元学习观,自主学习观,创造学习观,发现学习观,快乐学习观,高效学习观,联系学习观,全面学习观,优化学习观。  相似文献   

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Since the mid-eighties, national organizations have been working together in an effort to reform schools and, more specifically, to reform teaching. Paralleling the movement toward developing curriculum standards for students, professional standards for teachers have also been developed for the purpose of teacher education program accreditation. The objective of this national coalition is to strengthen the teaching profession and raise its standards—eventually enhancing the quality of student learning—by redesigning teacher licensing and accountability requirements for teacher education programs, and engaging teachers in on-going professional development. In this study we address three specific questions: (1) what representations of teaching and teachers are portrayed in the professional teaching standards, their related policies and assessment? (2) how are standards-based reform policies affecting teacher education programs? (3) what representations or conceptions of teaching and teachers are currently reflected in teacher education programs in the context of this reform? To address these questions two states were selected as test cases. Reform documents, policies and practices, as well as interviews with key participants in the reform (e.g., teacher educators, state-level administrators) are described and analyzed, and constitute the evidential basis for this study. The patterns emerging from the data indicate that teacher educators’ degrees of resistance or cooperation with externally imposed frameworks is influenced by their conception of teaching, education and its purpose. Further, as teacher educators uncritically participate in the standards-based movement it becomes impossible for them to entertain alternative perspectives on teaching and education outside of the framework provided to them by the standards.  相似文献   

16.
Standards-based education reforms and intensified accountability regimes are now a feature of most countries’ agendas to improve the quality of their teaching workforces. One of the direct consequences of these reforms is a requirement that teachers demonstrate their ongoing participation in forms of professional development or professional learning throughout their careers. Along with this, there has been a narrowing of what is acknowledged by standards-based accountability regimes as discipline-based professional knowledge and ‘valuable’ professional development. This essay is a dialogic, reflexive account of a professional learning and writing project for English teachers and teacher educators in Australia, begun in 2013, called the stella2.0 project. The project builds on the groundbreaking work of the STELLA project in Australia from the turn of the century, and some other models of teacher writing projects across the world. Drawing on Cavarero, we critically scrutinize writing and storytelling in the dialogic professional community of the stella2.0 project, and in the process ‘speak back’ to standards-based reform policies that undermine English educators’ agency and professionalism.  相似文献   

17.
This article investigates how learning outcomes, a concept inspired by an Anglo-Saxon curriculum approach, are expressed in policy documents, with an emphasis on expectations articulated to teachers. Developments in education policy for the last two decades reflect a widespread expansion of learning outcome orientation in curricula and assessment in most of the modern world. These developments have led to changes in how education is governed and practised, and this makes it necessary to form critical concepts to understand how curricula are formed and functioned today. The research questions of the study are: How is learning outcome-oriented policy defined in key policy documents and what are the implications of these policies for the teaching profession? The topic is investigated through a document content analysis of key policy documents. A complex picture of teachers emerges in which they are to be both controlled and autonomous. The study also identifies a strong belief in ‘alignment between teachers’ competences and practices and students’ life opportunities. The findings indicate that the policies move back and forth between different parameters for describing teachers and teaching, and as such, teachers must be able to adapt as chameleons in the context of each policy.  相似文献   

18.
In the context of a broader research study on the intercultural understanding of teachers in Australia, Japan and Thailand, this paper focuses on approaches to learning and the role of assessment in shaping such approaches. Popular contrasts portray Asian learners as compliant and favouring rote memorisation and Western learners as independent and favouring deep, conceptual learning. Yet Asian students frequently outperform their Western counterparts in competitive tests purported to measure higher cognitive skills. Biggs and his associates have challenged the stereotypical view of Asian students as rote learners as a Western misperception. But data from the present cross-cultural study suggest it is more than a Western misperception, being shared by teachers in Japan and Thailand. With this background, this paper then explores the role of assessment through an analysis of examination papers in the three countries at the high stakes, year 12 level. This analysis of the ways in which knowledge and comprehension are assessed identifies different practices across cultures but not ones corresponding to the rhetoric on contrasting approaches to learning. Rather it concludes that assessment tasks classified superficially as comprehension can be approached through memorisation and conversely, those often classified as memorisation can require careful reading, thought and interpretation, while drawing from an extensive knowledge base. A shared understanding of the nature of assessment tasks in different cultures thus has the potential to dissolve the demarcation of culturally embedded learning styles and to enhance deep learning grounded in specialist knowledge for scholars, be they students or teachers, in all cultures.  相似文献   

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ABSTRACT

Assessment is a major component of education, significant in directing what is identified as valued student learning. This paper is framed within an understanding of imperative and exhortative policy. Two paradigmatically different, and potentially contesting, assessment policy directions in Australian education – educational accountability to monitor school and teacher performance, and teacher assessment practices to improve learning (assessment for learning [AfL] or formative assessment) – are examined for their impact on teacher professionalism. Both approaches have official endorsement in Australian policy. Mandated participation in national tests is indicative of educational accountability assessments under national direction. While also endorsed nationally, AfL implementation is reliant on state and territory direction. Our examination reveals tensions in the alignment of both policies. This is evident in the impact of accountability assessment on AfL implementation, in particular, teachers’ understandings of valued assessment evidence. We conclude that a paradigmatic shift to support student learning in Australian schools is a policy imperative that includes the need for professional development and learning support for teachers.  相似文献   

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