Programme evaluation and educational policy development : an exploration

<p>Programme evaluation in education began as a form of public inquiry and has developed into a tool for informing policy development. This process has accompanied the government's focus on outcomes rather than outputs and the current global demand for accountability. In recent years there has been an increase in the letting of contracts by the New Zealand Ministry of Education for the production of evidence to support educational policy and this has included the evaluation of programmes designed to improve teaching and raise student achievement. The study reports the historical development of programme evaluation and the different schools of thought which have evolved. It outlines the management of formative programme evaluation within the Ministry of Education's Research Division and describes Rist's approach to policy making, used in the Numeracy Development Project. Two large-scale programmes, the Strengthening Education in Mangere/Otara (SEMO) Project and the Numeracy Development Project, are discussed as examples of initiatives involving programme evaluation. The results of both have informed policy and have been extended more widely. The relationship between research and programme evaluation is discussed with reference to the Performance-Based Research Fund.</p>

Programme evaluation and educational policy development : an exploration

<p>Programme evaluation in education began as a form of public inquiry and has developed into a tool for informing policy development. This process has accompanied the government's focus on outcomes rather than outputs and the current global demand for accountability. In recent years there has been an increase in the letting of contracts by the New Zealand Ministry of Education for the production of evidence to support educational policy and this has included the evaluation of programmes designed to improve teaching and raise student achievement. The study reports the historical development of programme evaluation and the different schools of thought which have evolved. It outlines the management of formative programme evaluation within the Ministry of Education's Research Division and describes Rist's approach to policy making, used in the Numeracy Development Project. Two large-scale programmes, the Strengthening Education in Mangere/Otara (SEMO) Project and the Numeracy Development Project, are discussed as examples of initiatives involving programme evaluation. The results of both have informed policy and have been extended more widely. The relationship between research and programme evaluation is discussed with reference to the Performance-Based Research Fund.</p>

Public inquiry in the periods of social turbulence (based on the materials of sociological research in Tomsk)

This article discusses the questions associated with the impact of social turbulence and exacerbation regimes upon the society. The topic is viewed in the context of the effect of behavioral deviations upon public administration from the perspective of the need for changing its content in the conditions of escalation of crisis situation. The author verifies the hypotheses on the shift of value orientations of the population from the rational plane to the irrational, as well as the formation of public inquiry for the &ldquo;strong&rdquo; state. The article aims to identify the attitude of Tomsk population towards the global and local agenda of rapid processes through assessing their own behavior and appeals to the government institutions on the examples of situations caused by outbreak of coronavirus pandemic and transformation of real estate market in the city. Research methodology employs documentary analysis, formalized interview, statistical data processing, and logical inductive-deductive inference. The article obtains new empirical data related to the behavioral assessment of the population in the conditions of social turbulence and its effect upon the formation of public inquiry. The main result consists in indicating the need for transformation of the system of public administration in the periods with nonlinear dynamics and high speeds in implementation of the policy of strengthening the regulatory impact upon maintaining the spheres most affected by the crisis. The presented materials are valuable for the employees of government and administrative branches, as well as researchers dealing with the problematic of social turbulence.

EXPRESS: STRUGGLING TO MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL: THE EMOTIONAL PROCESS OF SENSEMAKING FOLLOWING AN EXTREME INCIDENT

Organizations operating in extreme contexts regularly face dangerous incidents they can neither prevent nor easily control. In such circumstances, successful sensemaking can mean the difference between life and death. But what happens afterwards? Our study of emergency management practitioners following a major bushfire reveals a process of post-incident sensemaking during which practitioners continue to make sense of the incident after it ends, during the subsequent public inquiry, and as they try to implement the inquiry’s recommendations. Different varieties of sensemaking arise during this process as practitioners rely on different forms of coping to develop and share new understandings, which not only make sense of the original incident, but also enable changes to help the organization deal with future incidents. Our study also shows that practitioners experience a range of emotions during this process, some of which inhibit sensemaking while others – particularly different forms of anxiety – can facilitate it. Our study makes an important empirical contribution to recent theoretical work on varieties of sensemaking and provides new insights into the complex role of emotions in sensemaking in extreme contexts.

Deviations in Mastering the Word Stress by Medical Students from other Slav Countries and Approaches to their Overcoming

The current article represents some research in the drawbacks and violations of placing the correct word stress by foreign students, coming from other Slav countries, while reading in a loud voice. What is being analyzed is the pedagogical observation as well as the statistical public inquiry that took place between 2017 and 2021 among 54 M.Sc. students from the Department of Medicine at The Medical University – Pleven. All relevant data, based on the research work, differentiate into subcategories the fluctuations in the application of the accent norm. The results from the priority arrangement as regards the five factors, having an impact on the correct oral output, have been summarized according to their difficulty rate from 1st to 5th grade. In the teaching programme, the necessity for distinct accent rules and regulations has been duly reasoned. It is very important, within each and every module, for one to offer additional lexico-grammatical exercises and phonological assignments which could facilitate teaching the Bulgarian word stress and automate its precise use in the verbal communication for medical purposes.

Mobilizing knowledge

Many linguistic studies have analyzed the ways in which reported speech is used to mobilize knowledge in academic writing, but there have been far fewer such studies of knowledge mobilization in non-academic genres. This study analyzes the functions of reported speech in a Canadian quasi-judicial public inquiry report, a genre that is intertextually situated between research genres (through academic expert witnesses) and policy genres (through its role in making policy recommendations to the government). All instances of explicitly marked citation and reported speech in the commission report were identified and coded by function. The findings show citation and reported speech had specific functions that contributed to knowledge mobilization by discursively creating evidence, transporting worldviews and values, and changing knowledge status in the legal genres. The analysis also raises theoretical questions in linguistics, resulting in the argument that reported speech is not a static, formal category but a discursive status negotiated by the participants.

Revisiting the Universal Service Obligation Scheme

In this Journal’s tradition of revisiting past papers which have relevance to today’s events, this article reminds us of the value of the paper “Better telecommunications services for all Australians.” (2015) by Reg Coutts. This paper makes five interrelated recommendations to replace the current Universal Service Obligation (USO) policy in Australia, given the NBN rollout and customer preference for mobile services anywhere anytime. Some of its recommendations were arguably taken up by the Productivity Commission’s Public Inquiry into the USO in 2016-17, and implemented by the Australian Government in the form of a new Universal Service Guarantee.