scholarly journals Perspectives on the Emergency Remote Assessment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariana Cernicova-Buca

The unprecedented health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic put on hold traditional educational practices. Emergency remote teaching was adopted as a response, with various degrees of success and satisfaction around the globe. This perspective chapter focuses on the remote emergency assessment as a measure to ensure the completion of the educational cycle for students caught in the 2020 crisis, after debates around the relevance and soundness of such activities both for students, and for society at large. Some voices enthusiastically champion the technological innovation and point to the benefits brought by the computer-assisted assessment, while others warn against the ‘one-size-fit-all’ approach and insist that the emergency measures need a careful examination and, although lessons can be taken away from the situation, the traditional patterns should be kept in place.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 6110
Author(s):  
Mariana Cernicova-Buca ◽  
Gabriel-Mugurel Dragomir

The response of most educational institutions to the health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic was the adoption of emergency remote teaching and assessment. The paper aims to evaluate students’ satisfaction with assessment activities in a Romanian university and to identify elements pertaining to sustainable assessment in the post-pandemic period. A collaborative research strategy was developed with students being invited as co-researchers for data collection by distributing an online questionnaire and for interpretation of the results in a focus group. The factor analysis of the responses to the survey extracted two pillars pertaining to students’ appraisal of remote assessment activities: Knowledge, and leisure and stress. The discussion in the focus group showed that the research helped participants to process and reason their experience with remote assessment activities in the summer of 2020. Students missed their academic rituals and interactions with peers and teachers. Despite their enthusiasm for technological innovation and the benefits brought by computer assisted assessment, students are inclined towards preserving human evaluators, preferably from their familiar teachers, in educational settings resembling pre-pandemic academic life. A sustainable, resilient model of education needs to be based on retaining features identified as acceptable by students as examinees.


1975 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-375
Author(s):  
M. A. Akhtar

I am grateful to Abe, Fry, Min, Vongvipanond, and Yu (hereafter re¬ferred to as AFMVY) [1] for obliging me to reconsider my article [2] on the demand for money in Pakistan. Upon careful examination, I find that the AFMVY results are, in parts, misleading and that, on the whole, they add very little to those provided in my study. Nevertheless, the present exercise as well as the one by AFMVY is useful in that it furnishes us with an opportunity to view some of the fundamental problems involved in an empi¬rical analysis of the demand for money function in Pakistan. Based on their elaborate critique, AFMVY reformulate the two hypo¬theses—the substitution hypothesis and the complementarity hypothesis— underlying my study and provide us with some alternative estimates of the demand for money in Pakistan. Briefly their results, like those in my study, indicate that income and interest rates are important in deter¬mining the demand for money. However, unlike my results, they also suggest that the price variable is a highly significant determinant of the money demand function. Furthermore, while I found only a weak support for the complementarity between money demand and physical capital, the results obtained by AFMVY appear to yield a strong support for that rela¬tionship.1 The difference in results is only a natural consequence of alter¬native specifications of the theory and, therefore, I propose to devote most of this reply to the criticisms raised by AFMVY and the resulting reformulation of the two mypotheses.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (26) ◽  
pp. 73-78
Author(s):  
Maria Antonietta Maria Antonietta Sbordone ◽  
Barbara Barbara Pizzicato

Over the course of its history, design has never lost sight of nature as a term of comparison, sometimes taking from it, sometimes moving away from it. To investigate the complex relationship between the two terms, design and nature, we cannot ignore the evolution of man and how it has been profoundly influenced by technological innovation, which is the most evident result of science. Tracing an evolutionary line of design thinking, a double trajectory can be registered: on the one hand the tension towards progress and the myth of the machine, on the other hand the idea of a harmonious co-evolution with nature and the need to be reconnected with it. Besides, it is progress that allows mankind to thoroughly investigate natural mechanisms and make them their own. Contemporary design, autonomous but at the same time increasingly interdisciplinary, has got blurred boundaries which intersect with the most advanced fields of biological sciences. This evolution has opened up a whole new field of investigation that multiplies the opportunities of innovation, especially from a sustainability-oriented point of view. Today the dramatic breaking of the balance between man and nature has turned into the concept of permanent emergency, which is now matter of greatest interest for design, a design that attempts to react, mend, adapt to change in an authentically resilient way.


2019 ◽  
pp. 438-510
Author(s):  
Sheilagh Ogilvie

This chapter addresses how guilds dealt with technological innovation. Innovation is a final sphere in which market failures are widespread in premodern economies, as in modern ones. On the one hand, contemporaries frequently complained that guilds blocked new techniques and practices. On the other hand, guilds were in a position to generate cartel rents, and this might have encouraged their members to incur the costs of invention. Guilds might also have encouraged diffusion of technological knowledge through compulsory apprenticeship, mandatory travelling by journeymen, or the spatial clustering of practitioners. Guilds could also affect innovation unintentionally by things they did for other reasons. Guilds thus provide a rich context for investigating the role of different institutional mechanisms in encouraging the invention and diffusion of innovations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 65-74
Author(s):  
Christelle HOPPE

This article presents the highlights of the learning experience within the teaching-learning scheme of French as an additional language as it was proposed to international students at the university to ensure pedagogical continuity during the health crisis between April and June 2020. Through vignettes that give an overview of the course, it proposes, on the one hand, to reflect on the pedagogical choices that were made in order to measure their effects effectively. On the other hand, it looks at the role of the tasks and the way in which they stimulate interaction, articulate or organise the cognitive, conative and socio-affective presence at a distance in this particular context. What emerges from the experience is that the flexible articulation of a set of tasks creates an organising framework that helps learners to shape their own curriculum while supporting their engagement. Overall, the pedagogical organisation of the device has led to potentially beneficial creative and socio-interactive use.


Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri

There is a commonly agreed way to articulate the logical form of a conscious state: it a state such that there is something it is like for a subject to be in it. This formula has the important virtue that it enables us to separate out two distinct aspects in the phenomenology of an experience: what is experienced, the ‘quality’ of the experience; and how it is experienced, that it is experienced as being for-a-subject. A careful examination of the syntax of the ‘what it’s like …’ construction reveals that the colloquial phrase ‘subject of experience’ is polysemic. On the one hand it might mean the subject in whom the experience is occurring. Let me call this the ‘locative of manifestation’. This host self, an inhabited self, is more commonly identified with the physical human being, or the human being’s brain or neuropsychological state, but Pessoa gives instead a phenomenological interpretation of the notion. The phrase might also mean the subject affected by the experience. The affected subject is the one to whom the experience is addressed, so I will call this the ‘accusative of manifestation’. The accusative of manifestation is, evidently, conceptually distinct from the locative of manifestation. Finally, the phrase might mean the subject who is undergoing the experience, the one who lives through the experience, the ‘dative of manifestation.’


Author(s):  
Niall Curry ◽  
Elaine Riordan

Technological innovation in supporting feedback on writing is well established in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) literature. Regarding writing development, research has found that intelligent CALL systems that respond instantly to learners' language can support their production of better-written texts. To investigate this claim further, this chapter presents a study on learner use of Write & Improve (W&I). The study, based on learner engagement with W&I and learner and teacher surveys and focus groups, demonstrates that learners find W&I to be engaging and motivating. Moreover, there is evidence of improvements in learner writing practices and written language proficiency. For teachers, W&I can render feedback more efficient, allowing them to focus on more complex aspects of learner texts, while spelling and syntactic accuracy are addressed by W&I. Issues also emerge in the use of W&I, which present problem areas for teachers and learners and which signal important future considerations for CALL research.


Author(s):  
Urszula Załuska ◽  
Alicja Grześkowiak ◽  
Cyprian Kozyra ◽  
Dorota Kwiatkowska-Ciotucha

This paper introduces into the analysis the concept of the ambassador of people with disability in the workplace. A kind and friendly person in the workplace, who creates a positive atmosphere around people with disabilities, may play a crucial role in their adaptation on the open labor market. Presence of such a person is especially important in entities that did not previously employ people with disabilities. It is vital that employers who would like to employ people with disability possess knowledge about demographic and professional characteristics that predispose employees to perform this special role. On the one hand, in this article we attempted to evaluate the differentiation in the perception of the issue of disability due to demographic and professional characteristics of respondents, and, on the other hand, to identify features that favor being an “ambassador of people with disabilities” in the workplace. The study was conducted in 2019 on the representative samples of Internet users from 8 European countries using Computer-Assisted Internet Interviews. For the purposes of the study, we used the Attitudes to Disability Scale WHOQOL Group test and a proprietary questionnaire. As for the methods of analysis, we relied on the classical analysis of variance and logistic regression. The conducted study showed that the perception of the issue of disability is significantly related to demographic and professional characteristics of respondents, and that the role of the ambassador is the most appropriate for a middle-aged woman with a good knowledge of disability issues, indecisive in the workplace.


1996 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arend Lijphart

India has been the one major deviant case for consociational (power-sharing) theory, and its sheer size makes the exception especially damaging. A deeply divided society with, supposedly, a mainly majoritarian type of democracy, India nevertheless has been able to maintain its democratic system. Careful examination reveals, however, that Indian democracy has displayed all four crucial elements of power-sharing theory. In fact, it was a perfectly and thoroughly consociational system during its first two decades. From the late 1960s on, although India has remained basically consociational, some of its power-sharing elements have weakened under the pressure of greater mass mobilization. Concomitantly, in accordance with consociational theory, intergroup hostility and violence have increased. Therefore, India is not a deviant case for consociational theory but, instead, an impressive confirming case.


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