Christine Brew

Education students and their teachers: comparing views on participative assessment practices

Beliefs about the validity and merit of self‐, peer‐ and group‐assessment practices are presented from 213 pre‐service primary teachers and 30 staff who teach them. Both groups were surveyed using comparable items. A subset of seven staff participated in semi‐structured interviews. Staff were far more supportive of peer‐ and self‐assessment practices than their students with both groups indicating modest support for group assignments. While pedagogical factors best represent the staff support for engaging students in assessment of their own and their peers’ work, several staff in interviews revealed that their high level of support for peer‐assessment was closely linked to a time‐saving factor. Peer‐assessment was more often used than self‐assessment while both practices were reported to have increased over the past two to three years. These findings are consistent with the reported increase in participative assessment practices in higher education generally. An important implication of this research is that in order to optimise the use of participative assessment, staff need to better prepare their students by modelling and communicating their reasons for adopting such practices.

Kolb’s Learning Style Instrument: Sensitive to Gender:

Kolb’s experiential learning theory, developed in the 1970s, continues to be influential in the educational and management fields. To complement his theory, Kolb developed a learning style preference instrument (LSI) that has been continually hampered by poor psychometric performance. Whether these problems are due to poorly differentiated theory and/or instrument error has been the focus of debate. The principal finding reported in the present study is that the LSI, as modified by Kolb in 1985, is gender sensitive for an Australian cohort of 1st-year university students. For females, the results of a factor analysis were consistent with Kolb’s theory. For males, the results were consistent with previous studies that found the instrument yielded scores with poor construct validity.

Valuing Social and Emotional Connectedness Among Learners at All Levels

Drawing on four studies conducted in Canada, the United States and Australia, this chapter explores recent trends in education, by addressing both the tension and the potential for confluence between typically competing paradigms: ‘school effectiveness’ – measuring from the top – and ‘school improvement’ – building from the bottom. Consistent with results from well-hewn values pedagogy, the authors argue that individual integrity and interpersonal relationships of trust are foundational to both ‘improvement’ and ‘effectiveness’. Evidence is presented that values education offers an opportunity to reflect and re-think priorities and emphases such that measurement regimes recede to their appropriate position, as providers of data for new kinds of conversations. Trust among adults emerged as an important factor in all studies. The inner leadership and collaborative learning processes associated with becoming emotionally prepared for the relational complexities of the role of school principal are addressed in the final study discussed briefly