scholarly journals Analyzing Assessments Practices for Indigenous Students

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane P. Preston ◽  
Tim R. Claypool

The purpose of this article is to review common assessment practices for Indigenous students. We start by presenting positionalities—our personal and professional background identities. Then we explain common terms associated with Indigeneity and Indigenous and Western worldviews. We describe the meaning of document analysis, the chosen qualitative research design, and we explicate the delimitations and limitations of the paper. The review of the literature revealed four main themes. First, assessment is subjugated by a Western worldview. Next, many linguistic assessment practices disadvantage Indigenous students, and language-specific and culture-laden standardized tests are often discriminatory. Last, there is a pervasive focus on cognitive assessment. We discuss how to improve assessment for Indigenous students. For example, school divisions and educators need quality professional development and knowledge about hands-on assessment, multiple intelligences, and Western versus Indigenous assessment inconsistencies. Within the past 20 years, assessment tactics for Indigenous students has remained, more or less, the same. We end with a short discussion addressing this point.

Author(s):  
Brenda K. Gorman

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are obligated to judiciously select and administer appropriate assessments without inherent cultural or linguistic bias (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA], 2004). Nevertheless, clinicians continue to struggle with appropriate assessment practices for bilingual children, and diagnostic decisions are too often based on standardized tests that were normed predominately on monolingual English speakers (Caesar & Kohler, 2007). Dynamic assessment is intended to be a valid and unbiased approach for ascertaining what a child knows and can do, yet many speech-language pathologists (SLPs) struggle in knowing what and how to assess within this paradigm. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present a clinical scenario and summarize extant research on effective dynamic language assessment practices, with a focus on specific language tasks and procedures, in order to foster SLPs' confidence in their use of dynamic assessment with bilingual children.


Author(s):  
Ana Villanueva ◽  
Ziyi Liu ◽  
Yoshimasa Kitaguchi ◽  
Zhengzhe Zhu ◽  
Kylie Peppler ◽  
...  

AbstractAugmented reality (AR) is a unique, hands-on tool to deliver information. However, its educational value has been mainly demonstrated empirically so far. In this paper, we present a modeling approach to provide users with mastery of a skill, using AR learning content to implement an educational curriculum. We illustrate the potential of this approach by applying this to an important but pervasively misunderstood area of STEM learning, electrical circuitry. Unlike previous cognitive assessment models, we break down the area into microskills—the smallest segmentation of this knowledge—and concrete learning outcomes for each. This model empowers the user to perform a variety of tasks that are conducive to the acquisition of the skill. We also provide a classification of microskills and how to design them in an AR environment. Our results demonstrated that aligning the AR technology to specific learning objectives paves the way for high quality assessment, teaching, and learning.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 263
Author(s):  
Chris Campbell ◽  
Tran Le Nghi Tran

This paper reports on a pilot study that was conducted during a technical trial of a new ePortfolio system at a large Australian university. Students from a large (n = 325) first-year educational technology course were given the opportunity to use the new ePortfolio system weekly as part of their reflective practice at the end of the hands-on tutorial classes and also through a blogging assignment that required six posts throughout the semester. Although the students reflecting on their work and ePortfolios themselves are not new concepts, this paper reports how assessment practices can be improved using ePortfolios and how students can improve their reflective practice through simple and regular use throughout the 12-week semester that the study was conducted. From the class, 208 students responded to the survey with the results being positive. The students were able to use the system easily and did not report many problems with crashing or freezing. The lessons learnt form an important part of this study for future iterations with these reported in the paper.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Sylvia Schmelkes

The National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (INEE) in Mexico has begun to meet the challenges in evaluating indigenous children and teachers and the educational programs and policies targeted to them. Several evaluation projects are described in this paper. One is the “Previous, Free and Informed Consultation of Indigenous People,” which focuses on quality of education they receive. A second is the design of a protocol for reducing cultural and linguistic bias in standardized tests, which requires oversampling of indigenous students and the involvement of anthropologists, linguists and indigenous teachers in item development. A third is an indigenous language evaluation for candidates for entry into the teaching profession, which they must pass before they can work in indigenous schools. A fourth is the development of a qualitative instrument for evaluating teacher performance. The instrument asks evaluated teachers to contextualize their planning; scorers decide whether the plan is adapted to the cultural context and the characteristics of the children. The projects described are only a starting point. In the near future, several dilemmas, such as the apparent trade-off between contextualization and quality, have to be faced and solved.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Alan Ringo

Purpose This paper aims to outline an emerging trend that is replacing traditional retirement; this trend is called “protirement.” Protirement is defined as early retirement from professional work with the positive idea of pursuing something more fulfilling and has originated from the “blend of pro- and retirement.” Design/methodology/approach This paper’s approach is to define the trend of protirement and then back the idea with data and cases of where and how this is implemented by human resources (HR) organizations. Findings Retirement, in its traditional sense, is becoming increasingly unattainable for individuals but is also less necessary than it has been in the past. People are living longer and healthier lives, and in fact, data show that working in some meaningful and valuable manner actually increases life-span and allows more time to save for the day when one cannot work anymore. Research limitations/implications The findings in this paper should spark others to do more research into the area of aging workforce and new models that will leverage senior workers for the benefit of individuals, organizations and society at large. Practical implications HR executives and their organizations will need to drive change in the areas of recruitment (senior workers), pension planning and saving and HR policies around retirement. Social implications People productivity has been in decline for over 10 years now. The authors are going to need all hands on deck to help fix this and overcome the economic challenges created by the 2020 pandemic. Leveraging senior workers brings deep expertise into the workplace that could be lost otherwise, improving productivity and organization learning. Originality/value This paper takes an idea coined in the 1960s and brings it into the 21st century, when and where it is really needed. This long-forgotten idea is being resurrected to help deal with today’s workplace challenges.


2021 ◽  
pp. 786-802
Author(s):  
Philip Manow

IN 1990, Gøsta Esping-Andersen published The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, a work which has turned out to be the single most important and decisive contribution to welfare state research in the past thirty to forty years. In essence, Esping-Andersen argued that we can observe systematic variation in the character of the developed welfare states of the West, which he grouped into three distinct welfare state models: a Scandinavian social democratic model, a conservative continental European model, and a liberal Anglo-Saxon model. This chapter provides a short description of Esping-Andersen’s three regimes; introduces a fourth, Southern European model, which will then be described in somewhat more detail; and outlines a historical and genealogical account of the development of all four models. Finally, the chapter briefly expands on the comparative perspective with a short discussion on whether the regime concept or the understanding of distinct welfare models can also be applied to other regions, such as Latin America and Asia.


Author(s):  
Marcio R. M. da Bessa ◽  
Antonio C. P. Brasil

To take better advantage of the water quality monitoring systems and modeling processes practices in Amazon reservoirs, this study carried out a strategic methodology to couple these two tools. As a result, Information Monitoring and a Modeling Cycle are presented in this paper. The authors integrate the well-known Processes of Simulation and Systems of Monitoring & Assessment practices and incorporated improvements realized by efforts over the past 15 years, that is, UN/ECE Task Force on Monitoring & Assessment, and National Water Quality Monitoring Council and Brazilian Reservoir (NWQMC/USA) monitoring programs.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 601
Author(s):  
María Soledad Catoggio

This paper systematizes and analyzes the links and exchanges between the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF)) and the world of religion. My hypothesis is that these links are inextricable from the mode of operation that defined the EAAF, which can be called “forensic activism”. This kind of activism, outside the State, combined scientific expertise with humanitarian sensitivity, defined by its autonomy from the human rights movement and the national scientific system (both academic and university). Moreover, religion emerged constantly from the type of work undertaken, between the living and the dead. Thus, beliefs, with their prohibitions, rituals, and ways of making sense of suffering and their tools for coming to terms with grief, coexisted with the EAAF’s development. These findings emerge from a qualitative research design combining document analysis, in-depth interviews, and participative observation of scientific disclosure open to the public provided by the EAAF over the past three years.


Author(s):  
Abatihun Alehegn Sewagegn ◽  
Boitumelo Molebogeng Diale

Authentic assessment plays a great role in enhancing students' learning and makes them competent in their study area. Studies indicate that assessment is authentic when the tasks have real-life value and students perform real-world tasks. Therefore, this chapter shows how lecturers practice authentic assessment to enhance students' learning in a higher education institution. To achieve this, the authors used a phenomenological qualitative research design. An interview was used to collect data. The result indicated that lecturers are highly dependent upon traditional assessment methods, which have no significant contribution to the competency of students. The practice of authentic assessment methods as a tool to enhance students' learning is limited. Therefore, the authors can conclude that enhancing students' learning using authentic assessment in their study areas is untenable if the lecturers continue to utilize their current assessment practices.


Author(s):  
Bret Van Poppel ◽  
Michael D. McKay ◽  
A. O¨zer Arnas ◽  
Daisie Boettner

For the past five semesters, the Water Turbine Competition has added significant excitement and motivation to the historically dreaded Fluid Mechanics course offered in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the United States Military Academy. The Water Turbine Competition is an adaptation of the national Hydropower Contest. Teams of two or three students build a water turbine that will lift a weight using only the potential energy stored in a tank of water that is suspended above ground level. The water turbine project has proven to be an exciting and beneficial educational tool.


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