Music and Persecution

Psalm 96:1-6, Luke 21:7-1

Literacy assessment practices: Moving from standardised to ecologically valid assessments in secondary schools

SSLI test protocol data revealed the dominance of 'central' literacy measures and 'local' subject-specific measures aligned to institutional requirements, curriculum and national examination content. These measures initiate secondary students into a pervasive culture of assessment that generally fails to support further learning; a culture antagonistic towards the use of assessment that reflect how expert teachers address subject-specific literacies. In a culture of content-focussed, high stakes assessment, the use of ecologically valid formative assessment that reveal what students can do with what they know, and that empower teachers to test like they teach, is marginalised. Consistent with Neisser's claim that some experimental measures may not reflect reality, the pedagogy and assessment protocols of many secondary schools fail to reflect the use of literacy and thinking tools, and so fail to reflect best evidence about teaching. Changes in school culture, teachers' pedagogical knowledge and the use of ecologically valid assessments are associated with shifts from transmission to co-construction approaches. Consistent with the work of David Corson the use of ecologically valid assessment that reflect the use of literacy and thinking tools is an inclusive, future-focussed literacy event, but the use of 'central' curriculum and institutional-linked measures is exclusive

Justifying the design and selection of literacy and thinking tools

Criteria for the design and selection of literacy and thinking tools that allow educators to justify what they do are described within a wider framework of learning theory and research into best practice. Based on a meta-analysis of best practice, results from a three year project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a secondary school literacy initiative in New Zealand, together with recent research from cognitive and neuro-psychologists, it is argued that the design and selection of literacy and thinking tools used in elementary schools should be consistent with (i) teaching focused (ii) learner focused, (iii) thought linked (iv) neurologically consistent, (v) subject specific, (vi) text linked, (vii) developmentally appropriate, and (viii) assessment linked criteria. Key words: Literacy, thinking, tools, justifying criteria

Testing like you teach: The challenge of constructing local, ecologically valid tests

In an educational context, local, ecologically valid tests can reflect the use of literacy and thinking tools. These tests present a challenge to central, content focused, high-stakes testing, and to transmission approaches to teaching. They require teachers to accept knowledge as a verb, and to design assessment protocols that reflect co-constructive ways of teaching. This article reports the outcome of praxis action research with middle and secondary school teachers who incorporated topic-appropriate literacy and thinking tools into their teaching. They also redesigned their local tests linked to high-stakes test protocols to reflect the use of these tools. A thematic analysis of observations and interviews suggests that this process impacted on the structural characteristics (morés) of the schools, and posed affective, cognitive and pedagogical challenges to teachers

Research based criteria for the design and selection of literacy and thinking tools

This paper describes criteria for the design and selection of literacy and thinking tools. The criteria are that tools should be: (i) teaching focused (ii) learner focused, (iii) thought linked (iv) neurologically consistent, (v) subject specific, (vi) text linked, (vii) developmentally appropriate, (viii) culturally responsive, and (ix) assessment linked

World-view perspectives

The foundation of a tolerant society is an ability to foster and respond to the diversity of perspective among its people. Cognitive psychologists have described how perspective influences information processing, while our innate ability to adopt perspective has been established by neuropsychology. Literature, through the use of point-of-view, together with results from researchers adopting socio-cultural paradigms suggests perspective is also a social construct. An ecologically-based framework is described that provides cohesion to the temporal, spatial, universal and other types of world-view perspective associated, predominantly, with indigenous cultures. Culturally responsible types of creative and critical thinking are evoked when world-view perspective is engaged while reading text and reading the world. World-view perspective provides us with a means of critiquing the construction of knowledge through the de-construction of dominant discourses, re-valuing of indigenous world-views and reducing the relational distance between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples

Six Keynote Papers on Consciousness with some Comments on their Social Implications: TSC Conference, Hong Kong, 10-14 June 2009

Six keynote papers presented at TSC 2009 — by Susan Greenfield, Wolf Singer, Stuart Hameroff, Jonathan Schooler, Hakwan Lau, and David Chalmers—are reviewed below in order to investigate to what extent social analysis can be usefully applied in different areas of consciousness studies. The six papers did not ostensibly address social aspects of consciousness; nevertheless I hope to show that it is often beneficial to consider the possible social implications in any consciousness- related work

Multiple Dirichlet Series for Affine Weyl Groups

Let $W$ be the Weyl group of a simply-laced affine Kac-Moody Lie group, excepting $\tilde{A}_n$ for $n$ even. We construct a multiple Dirichlet series $Z(x_1, \ldots x_{n+1})$, meromorphic in a half-space, satisfying a group $W$ of functional equations. This series is analogous to the multiple Dirichlet series for classical Weyl groups constructed by Brubaker-Bump-Friedberg, Chinta-Gunnells, and others. It is completely characterized by four natural axioms concerning its coefficients, axioms which come from the geometry of parameter spaces of hyperelliptic curves. The series constructed this way is optimal for computing moments of character sums and L-functions, including the fourth moment of quadratic L-functions at the central point via $\tilde{D}_4$ and the second moment weighted by the number of divisors of the conductor via $\tilde{A}_3$. We also give evidence to suggest that this series appears as a first Fourier-Whittaker coefficient in an Eisenstein series on the twofold metaplectic cover of the relevant Kac-Moody group. The construction is limited to the rational function field $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$, but it also describes the $p$-part of the multiple Dirichlet series over an arbitrary global field