Do Successor Parties Influence Public Attitudes toward the Past? Evidence from Young Democracies

What explains how citizens living in young democracies feel about their authoritarian past? While the impact of autocratic legacies on support for democracy and left–right placement has been thoroughly studied, we know less about the determinants of attitudes toward the past in post-authoritarian democracies. This study relies on survey data collected in Southern and Central European countries ten years after their transitions to democracy in order to test context-dependent variance in the relevance of ideology and party identification on citizen attitudes toward the past. The results show that classical factors such as regime type and mode of transition are not the main determinants of the politicization of attitudes toward the past and that the existence of a strong authoritarian successor party is associated with stronger politicization of the past.

Keynote: Rethinking measurement for accountable assessment

The underlying model for most formal educational measurement (e.g. standardised tests) is based on a very simple model: the student takes a test (possibly alongside other students). The complications of there being an instructional plan, actual instruction, interpretation of the outcome, and formulation of next steps, are all bypassed in considering how to model the process of measurement. There are some standard exceptions, of course: a pre-test/post-test context will involve two measurements, and attention to gain score, or similar. However, if we wish to design measurement to hold to Lehrer’s (2021) definition of ‘accountable assessment’ – as ‘actionable information for improving classroom instruction’ – then this narrow conceptualisation must be extended. In this presentation, I will posit a simple model that reflects the simple one-test context described above, and then elaborate on it by adding in a) a framework for design of the assessments that is keyed to educational interpretation, b) further rounds of data collection that can indicate changes in a student’s underlying ability, and c) provision for varied assessment modes that will allow for i) classroom-independent tasks that operate at the summative and meso levels, and ii) classroom-dependent tasks that operate at the micro level. The former are designed to provide a basis for triangulating student responses across different contexts, and the latter are designed to closely track the variation of student performance over time in a classroom instructional context. This framing will be exemplified in a in a K–5 elementary school that is seeking to improve the quality of instruction and students’ understandings of measure and arithmetic. The different levels of data collection will be instantiated by two different pieces of software, which operate at the micro level and the meso/summative levels respectively.

Impossible or just irrelevant? Unravelling the ‘authentic leadership’ paradox through the lens of emotional labour

The clamour for leaders to be authentic in enacting their roles is now widely heard in both the academic literature and popular media. Yet, the authentic leadership (AL) construct remains deeply problematic and arguably impossible to enact. Using the performance of emotional labour (EL) as a lens to view relational transparency, a core component of AL, our research surfaces the paradoxes inherent in this construct and their implications for practicing leaders. Our data reveal something of the mystery surrounding how practicing leaders are able to feel authentic even as they manage their emotions as a routine tool of accomplishing their leadership role. This apparent disconnect between the experiencing of authenticity and the actions/interactions in which this experience is embedded raises profound questions concerning authenticity as a phenomenon, how it is discursively constructed, its relationship to inauthenticity – especially in the practice of leadership – and even its relevance. Drawing on these concerns, we suggest an agenda for future research in relation to authenticity in leadership and highlight the value of EL as a challenging ‘test context’ for honing our understanding of what ‘authenticity’ might mean.

Systematic Literature Review on Web Performance Testing

Performance Testing is essential to ensure the quality and scalability of Web applications. A well-defined process may guide Performance Testing Engineer in conducting this task. We intended to enlighten some major inputs related to web performance testing. For this, we have formulated and executed a given protocol, according to the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) protocol in Software Engineering. So, 37 papers were selected/analyzed and we have extracted their most relevant contribution in order to answer our research questions. This analysis enabled us discovering preeminent performance testing profiles/roles, approaches, artifacts, methods, stages or phases and activity flows that have been reported in the literature. We believe that, despite those several studies that mapping performance test context, there are a few remarks in which a clarification might be needed, once there is no well-established process that comprises the whole activities mapped as well as established a relation with other studies. Therefore, this study intends to provide relevant input that one may establish a novel web performance testing process.

Students’ and parents’ attitude towards the SEE English test

This paper reports on a study that explored students’ and their parents’ attitudes towards the fairness and accuracy of the Secondary Education Examination (SEE)English test- a high stakes test in the Nepalese context. It is most probably the first empirical study that has extensively explored this area. The data generated through a longitudinal survey among 247 SEE candidates and semi-structured interviews with six students and their parents in both the pre-test and post-test contexts indicates that students had mostly positive attitudes towards the test fairness and its accuracy in the pre-test context but mostly negative attitudes in the post-test context. However, parents had mostly negative attitudes towards the test in both contexts. Both students and their parents raised questions regarding the accuracy and fairness of the listening and speaking test in the post-test context. Having collected both the qualitative and quantitative data, this study has gained a comprehensive picture of the complexity of the test impacts within the Nepalese educational context, as perceived by students and their parents. The implications of the study have also been highlighted.

A practical primer on processing semantic property norm data

Semantic property listing tasks require participants to generate short propositions (e.g., \<*barks*\>, \<*has fur*\>) for a specific concept (e.g., dog). This task is the cornerstone of the creation of semantic property norms which are essential for modelling, stimuli creation, and understanding similarity between concepts. However, despite the wide applicability of semantic property norms for a large variety of concepts across different groups of people, the methodological aspects of the property listing task have received less attention, even though the procedure and processing of the data can substantially affect the nature and quality of the measures derived from them. The goal of this paper is to provide a practical primer on how to collect and process semantic property norms. We will discuss the key methods to elicit semantic properties and compare different methods to derive meaningful representations from them. This will cover the role of instructions and test context, property pre-processing (e.g., lemmatization), property weighting, and relationship encoding using ontologies. With these choices in mind, we propose and demonstrate a processing pipeline that transparently documents these steps resulting in improved comparability across different studies. The impact of these choices will be demonstrated using intrinsic (e.g., reliability, number of properties) and extrinsic measures (e.g., categorization, semantic similarity, lexical processing). This practical primer will offer potential solutions to several longstanding problems and allow researchers to develop new property listing norms overcoming the constraints of previous studies.