Harmony And Cacophony In Large Scale Assessments In Education

Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly frequent to come across the co-existence of multiple large-scale assessment surveys within national, subnational, or local settings. Despite the overlapping of tests, time, efforts, and economic resources invested in these “assessment assemblages”, much remains to be learned about their origins, development, tensions, frictions, outcomes, and challenges. Harmony and Cacophony in Large-scale Assessments in Education delves into these issues via a critical lens and offers a case in point against which readers can place their own situations. In other words, it serves as an empirically grounded thinking toolbox to help readers problematize emerging, ongoing, or upcoming challenges related to their large-scale assessment settings.

Large-scale assessments (LSAs) play a growing role in education policy decisions, accountability, and education planning worldwide. This book focuses on central issues that are key components of successful planning, development and implementation of LSAs. The book’s main distinction is its focus on practice- based, cutting-edge research. This is achieved by having chapters co-authored by world-class researchers in collaboration with measurement practitioners. The result is a how-to book whose language is accessible to practitioners and graduate students as well as academics. No other book so thoroughly covers current issues in the field of large-scale assessment. An introductory chapter is followed by sixteen chapters that each focus on a specific issue. The content is prescriptive and didactic in nature but based on the most recent scientific research. It includes successful experiences, exemplary practices, training modules, interesting breakthroughs or alternatives, and promising innovations regarding large-scale assessments. Finally, it covers meaningful topics that are currently taking center stage such as motivating students, background questionnaires, comparability of different linguistic versions of assessments, and cognitive modeling of learning and assessment.

This book addresses the important assessment themes, provides a perspective from which to view large-scale assessments, and lays the foundation for plausible interpretations of their results.

Instrumental Music Education: Teaching with the Musical and Practical in Harmony, 2nd Edition is intended for college instrumental music education majors studying to be band and orchestra directors at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels. This textbook presents a research-based look at the topics vital to running a successful instrumental music program, while balancing musical, theoretical, and practical approaches. A central theme is the compelling parallel between language and music, including "sound-to-symbol" pedagogies. Understanding this connection improves the teaching of melody, rhythm, composition, and improvisation. The companion website contains over 120 pedagogy videos for wind, string, and percussion instruments, performed by professional players and teachers, over 50 rehearsal videos, rhythm flashcards, and two additional chapters, "The Rehearsal Toolkit," and "Job Search and Interview." It also includes over 50 tracks of acoustically pure drones and demonstration exercises for use in rehearsals, sectionals and lessons. New to this edition: • Alternative, non-traditional ensembles: How to offer culturally relevant opportunities for more students, including mariachi, African drumming, and steel pans. • More learning and assessment strategies • The science of learning and practicing: How the brain acquires information • The philosophies of Orff and El Sistema, along with the existing ones on Kodály, Suzuki, and Gordon. • The Double Pyramid of Balance: Francis McBeth’s classic system for using good balance to influence tone and pitch. • Updated information about copyright for the digital age Evan Feldman is Conductor of the Wind Ensemble and Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Ari Contzius is the Wind Ensemble Conductor at Washingtonville High School, Washingtonville, NY Mitchell Lutch is Associate Professor of Music and Director of Bands at Central College in Pella, Iowa

This edited collection documents and deconstructs the concept of educational leadership within various education settings across the Mediterranean region, exploring the intersection of education, culture and geopolitics as shaped by the distinct social, religious, national, cultural and geographic contexts.

Over the last two decades, large-scale national, or provincial, standardised testing has become prominent in the schools of many countries around the globe. National Testing in Schools: An Australian Assessment draws on research to consider the nature of national testing and its multiple effects, including: media responses and constructions such as league tables of performance pressures within school systems and on schools effects on the work and identities of principals and teachers and impacts on the experience of schooling for many young people, including those least advantaged. Using Australia as the case site for global concerns regarding national testing, this book will be an invaluable companion for education researchers, teacher educators, teacher education students and teachers globally.

Within the rapidly expanding field of educational technology, learners and educators must confront a seemingly overwhelming selection of tools designed to deliver and facilitate both online and blended learning. Many of these tools assume that learning is configured and delivered in closed contexts, through learning management systems (LMS). However, while traditional "classroom" learning is by no means obsolete, networked learning is in the ascendant. A foundational method in online and blended education, as well as the most common means of informal and self-directed learning, networked learning is rapidly becoming the dominant mode of teaching as well as learning. In Teaching Crowds, Dron and Anderson introduce a new model for understanding and exploiting the pedagogical potential of Web-based technologies, one that rests on connections — on networks and collectives — rather than on separations. Recognizing that online learning both demands and affords new models of teaching and learning, the authors show how learners can engage with social media platforms to create an unbounded field of emergent connections. These connections empower learners, allowing them to draw from one another’s expertise to formulate and fulfill their own educational goals. In an increasingly networked world, developing such skills will, they argue, better prepare students to become self-directed, lifelong learners.

Report of the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS), that studied the extent to which young people have developed computer and information literacy (CIL) to support their capacity to participate in the digital age. The study focused on: variations in CIL within and across countries; aspects of schools, education systems and teaching associated with student achievement in CIL; the extent to which students' access to, familiarity with, and self-reported proficiency in using computers is associated with student achievement in CIL; and aspects of students' personal and social backgrounds associated with CIL. [p.15, ed].