Dr. Gabrielle Matters

New Zealand and Queensland teachers' conceptions of learning : transforming more than reproducing

Gavin T. Brown — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:03:36 PDT

Two major conceptions of learning exist: reproducing new material and transforming material to make meaning. Teachers'understandings of what learning is probably influence their teaching practices and student academic performance. To validate a short scale derived from Tait, Entwistle, & McCune's ASSIST inventory and to determine and compare the strength of agreement New Zealand and Queensland primary and secondary teachers had for both conceptions. Two survey studies with three populations provided valid data: 235 NZ Primary teachers in 2001, and 784 Primary and 614 Secondary Queensland teachers in 2003. A survey of 81 NZ secondary teachers in 2000 did not have enough participants to generate stable estimates. Five items defining learning were administered using a six point, positively-packed agreement rating scale. Data were analysed with MMLE confirmatory factor analysis with oblimin rotation. Multiple models were compared and results from the best fitting model (CFI and TLI>.90; RMSEA<.08) for all three samples are reported. Cohen's d effect size was used to determine significance of differences in conceptions mean scores. Psychometric properties of the two scales were good. Conceptions of learning were structured as two inter-correlated factors related to transforming and reproducing conceptions of learning. All samples agreed more with the transforming than the reproducing conception of learning; however, there were small group differences in mean scores. The response scale and items generated sufficient variation to detect differences in teachers' attitudes towards transforming and reproducing conceptions of learning.

Effective practice in assessment

Gabrielle Matters — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:59:13 PDT

Practising effective assessment means that educators need to be fully equipped and ready for action to deliver the goods. What are the goods in this case? For the author the answer is the very best evidence of the nature and quality of student learning so that teachers can get information to feed a higher goal. That higher goal is more and better learning for more and more students. What are the characteristics of a system that is fully equipped and ready for action? For the author the answer is quite simple: first and foremost, teachers possessing high-level assessment skills, contributing to student learning and effectively communicating the results of that learning. This article examines some of the principles that underpin effective assessment practice.

The relationship between assessment and curriculum in improving teaching and learning

Gabrielle Matters — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:57:17 PDT

The New Basics currently being trialed in Queensland schools is an integrated framework for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. It defines essential areas of learning, appropriate and effective approaches to teaching, affiliated modes of assessment and standards and assurances about student development at key points of schooling. The New Basics curriculum organisers are clusters of practices that are essential for survival in the worlds that students have to deal with. The framework incorporates Productive Pedagogies, which draw on the results of a recent longitudinal study conducted in Queensland state schools. The framework also includes Rich Tasks, which allow students to display their understandings, knowledges and skills through performance on transdisciplinary activities that have an obvious connection to the wide world. This paper elaborates these three elements, explores their interaction, and describes progress in trial schools towards the goal of improving teaching and learning.

The omit phenomenon in high-stakes achievement testing using an short- response format

Gabrielle Matters — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:53:15 PDT

To questions about the who, what and why of item omission on tests in short-response format, very few answers have been provided from a combination of the discipline areas of psychology and educational measurement. In this research study, an empirical approach is taken subsequent to the proposal of a theoretical model. It posits that the three clusters constituting 'presage' have effects, some direct, some indirect, some positive, some negative, on the 'product' - short-response omit rate - and also influence the hidden (and therefore unable-to-be-measured) 'process' - the interaction between item and person. Data were obtained on the 1997 QCS Test population (N = 29 273). A 120-item questionnaire was administered to a random sample of 1908 students, interviews were conducted with selected students, and information was extracted from the test construction matrix. The results are analysed in terms of background and psychological characteristics of the candidate and features of the testing process. It is concluded that the predeterminants of the propensity to omit short-response items include sex of candidate, type of school attended, test-irrelevant thinking, academic self- concept, test-taking strategies, and self-imposed difficulty. One of the subsidiary findings is concerned with attitudes to high- stakes testing, another with the consequences of the contextualisation of test items for a certain type of student.

Are Australian boys underachieving? An analysis using a validity-reliability framework based on the work of Lee Cronbach and Pamela Moss

Gabrielle Matters — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:31:55 PDT

Recently, in Australia, many newspaper headlines have announced that girls areoutperforming boys academically. Educational journals have published articles onthe topic and conference speakers have referred to it.This paper examines the achievement of boys in modern classrooms. By referringto Cronbach's perspectives on validity arguments (1988), especially the politicaland operationist perspectives, and Moss's notions of reliability warrants (1994),especially as they relate to inconsistency and critical community, we use apreviously promulgated 'validity-reliability' framework to analyse the academicachievement of boys. In the process, we refer to the relative achievements of girlsand boys in the common curriculum and we explore the thesis that thefeminisation of education contributes to apparent shifts of balance in achievementbetween the sexes.[ISBN: 0 7242 7594 0]

New basic pedagogies that promote mulitliteracies

Susan Grieshaber — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:25:51 PDT

This work-in-progress paper focuses on pedagogical approaches within two multi-age New Basics classrooms (Years 1, 2 and 3) in two state schools in Queensland, and explores how these pedagogies encourage children to manipulate ideas and information. It depicts classroom and technology environments that enable students to solve problems and come to new meanings and understandings. Additionally, it raises issues for consideration such as the uncertainty of achieving instructional outcomes in classroom technologies environments. While teachers create for children activities or technologies environments that are aimed at achieving deeper understanding and enhancing higher order thinking, there can be no certainty that these cognitive outcomes will always be achieved. However, when teachers provide opportunities for children to investigate with technologies to research assigned topics, there is sharing of ideas that are 'unscripted' and evidence that these ideas are sustained and applied, thereby providing experience with tasks requiring higher order thinking and promoting the use of multi literacies. This paper traces ways that teachers and children in two New Basics classrooms use technologies to scaffold learning experiences that enable young children to engage in the construction of knowledge through substantive conversations about a range of topics. Video excerpts show children using simple and more sophisticated technical skills, including: exploring a range of programs, such as PowerPoint, HyperStudio, Appleworks, as well as the Internet to obtain information; making choices, both random and considered, by clicking a range of options within different programs; problem solving, with the capacity to describe what they are doing; using technical language and exploring the meaning of terms within programs (e.g., stack, new card, basic); collaborative working arrangements that enable substantive conversations between children as they discuss and share knowledge and information and create visual and verbal images.

Meeting the challenges of short response items in the Queensland Core Skills Test : a report on the 1991 pilot study

Gabrielle Matters — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:09:41 PDT

The Board of Senior Secondary School Studies (BSSSS) is developing the Queensland Core Skills (QCS) Test, which will be administered to Queensland Year 12 students for the first time in September 1992. One paper of the QCS Test will consist of Short Response Items (SRIs).The SRI format is new to Queensland. SRIs present significant challenges to test constructors in their design, selection, presentation and marking. In 1991, following the initial developmental stages, the Board conducted a pilot study involving a 30-item paper, 4500 students, 42 schools and 55 markers.This report documents that pilot study. It describes the Board's experiences in implementing the Government's decision to include SRIs in the QCS Test, by relating one cycle of the design process in action - creating and refining items, selecting and sequencing items and presenting them as a testpaper, then administering and marking that test.It records what happened at each stage, what was learned along the way, what issues emerged, and what changes in procedure are planned.This report does not debate issues already discussed in the Vivian Report (1990), in the community, and in earlier reports on tertiary entrance such as the Pitman Report (1987). No answers are supplied to the questions: 'Why have a core skills test?'; 'Why have short answer questions?' Nor are the relative merits of the two other modes of assessment - extended writing and multiple-choice - documented here.The results of the pilot study suggest ways in which the challenges presented by SRIs can be met in the first year of administering the test, and that SRIs provide worthwhile information about student achievement not accessible through the other modes.[ISBN: 072425094]

The Queensland Core Skills Test : implications for the mathematical sciences

Gabrielle Matters — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:06:24 PDT

The focus of the Queensland Core Skills (QCS) Test is on the assessment of individual and group student performance on 49 common curriculum elements; that is, the cognitive skills that are the threads of the senior curriculum. The first part of this paper provides a general introduction to the QCS Test: its purposes, its features, what it tests and the process by which it is designed. A highly desirable property of the QCS Test is that students of any given subject are not necessarily advantaged or disadvantaged in regard to performance on any particular item. On the other hand, mathematics is one of the few subjects that students can be assumed to have studied to Year 10. The second part of this paper focuses on the ways in which test construction and implementation ensure that the QCS Test is grounded in the senior school curriculum while fostering subject-independent measurement of student performance. [ISBN: 072426034X]

Standards and assessment at Year 12 - commonality and assessment in English nationally

Gabrielle Matters — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:16:52 PDT

Across the curriculum landscape in Australia - a dog's breakfast?

Gabrielle Matters — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:15:42 PDT