This Sunday (January 27) ICES co-director E. Wayne Ross will be discussing the BC government’s proposed 10 year contract deal with the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation.
Tune into The World Today Weekend with Sean Leslie at 3:30pm PST on CKNW AM 980 radio.
Tagged BC Liberal party, BCTF, Christy Clark, CKNW, Contracts
Jeffrey Bealls, a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver tracks and reports on what he has calls predatory publishers and journals. In an article in The Scientist he explains what a predatory publisher is…
those that unprofessionally exploit the gold [author pays] open-access model for their own profit. These publishers use deception to appear legitimate, entrapping researchers into submitting their work and then charging them to publish it. Some prey especially on junior faculty and graduate students, bombarding them with spam e-mail solicitations. Harvesting data from legitimate publishers’ websites, they send personalized spam, enticing researchers by praising their earlier works and inviting them to submit a new manuscript. Many of these bogus publishers falsely claim to enforce stringent peer review, but it appears they routinely publish article manuscripts upon receipt of the author fee. Some have added names to their editorial boards without first getting permission from the scientists they list, among other unethical practices.
These publishers’ websites look legitimate, making it difficult to separate the professional from the unethical. Unfortunately, many scientists have been fooled. Dozens have asked me for a measure for determining legitimacy, but there is very little that can be measured directly. The only real measure is the publisher’s intent, which is hard or impossible to discern.
Bealls’ work illustrates the up and downsides for online publishing. Open access journals can be created at little to low cost, make scholarly work available to broad audiences at no cost, and frees scholars from surrendering copyright to their work and supporting for-profit publishers, who commodify scholarly work through embargoes and reprint fees. But, the ease of online publishing attracts scammers as well, giving new meaning to vanity publishing. Bealls is skeptical of the value of online over more traditional publishing in academe, asserting the value has not yet been determined. He has a point… we need to be analytic and reflective about what the consequences of open access journals are.
Bealls has compiled a list of predatory publishers and journals, and the criteria he uses for making “Bealls List.” Bealls also posts regularly on his blog, Scholarly Open Access.
Posted in Publishing
An instructor helps a student at a teachers-only firearms training class in Sarasota, Florida on January 16. (Reuters)
The Atlantic, Emily Richmond, January 22, 2013 — In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, lawmakers are moving quickly to respond to the public outcry to do more to ensure schools are safe. But will arming teachers — or putting an armed guard at every school in the nation, as the NRA has suggested — make a meaningful difference? Or would it actually increase the risk of harm, as some gun control advocates contend?
Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky recently addressed those concerns with a degree of candor that might not help advance his crusade to allow educators to pack heat. At an event with business leaders in Oldham County (as recorded by the Louisville Courier-Journal), Rand said the following: “Is it perfect? No. Would they always get the killer? No. Would an accident sometimes happen in a melee? Maybe.”
Labor groups and associations representing the nation’s school teachers and principals have already saidthat asking educators to be prepared to respond to an armed intruder with similar firepower is an unreasonable burden. At the same time, there’s also been a reported spike in interest among some teachers who say they want to know what their options are when it comes to protecting themselves — and possibly their students — from an armed intruder on campus.
For more than decade, the Utah Shooting Sports Council has offered free weapons training to teachers. The first class of the new year brought ten times the normal enrollment, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. The class covers the fundamentals of applying for a concealed weapons permit, carrying a weapon, and using it to respond to an emergency. And the training doesn’t just focus on how to respond with a gun. Teachers are also taught techniques such as “gouging an attacker’s eyes, choking an attacker and how to hide,” according to the Tribune.
Utah teachers are far from the only ones expressing increased interest in concealed weapons. There has also been a jump in inquiries at gun training clinics in Florida, according to the Palm Beach Post, even though the state bans nearly all weapons at public schools.
Read More: The Atlantic
It is testing season in British Columbia. As thousands of students are being subjected to the BC’s Foundation Skills Assessment, ICES co-director Sandra Mathison has offered up alternatives to the much-maligned test.
Vancouver Sun (January 16, 2013)
B.C. need not rely on the much-maligned FSA tests to gauge students’ skills
As schools prepare to give the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) tests next week, it may be the last time they are administered, at least in their current form.
The discussion about alternatives to the FSAs is a sign of a healthy education system, where its constituents continually consider how best to know how schools are doing.
This is an excellent opportunity to examine alternative means to getting the snapshot of students’ literacy and numeracy skills that the FSA provides, but at great expense and with negative consequences for schools, teachers and students.
There are two viable sources of data that provide such a snapshot with significantly less disruption to teaching and learning, and that use high-quality tests administered to samples of students. These are the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) and the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).
The PCAP is administered by the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), an intergovernmental group formed in 1967 by the provincial ministers of education. This is an assessment of reading, mathematics and science achievement administered to eighth-graders every three years. All three areas are tested in each administration of the test, although during each test administration one subject is the primary focus.
The other large-scale assessment that provides a snapshot of student achievement in basic skills is the PISA, an international assessment instituted in 1997 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students. Seventy countries, including Canada, participate in the PISA.
The test alternates its focus on reading, mathematics and science achievement on a three-year cycle. Both of these testing programs recognize that school programs and curriculum can vary considerably, both across Canada and around the world. Neither assessment is tied to a particular curriculum, and the tests focus on the skills that would be considered basic for students across educational jurisdictions.
Both the PCAP and PISA include data about the context of learning, through surveys of teachers and students. Both assessments have been developed to answer big questions we all have about the quality of schools and student achievement. For example: How well are young adults prepared to meet the challenges of the future? Are they able to analyze, reason and communicate their ideas effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? Are some kinds of teaching and school organization more effective than others?
Both the PCAP and PISA achieve the goal of providing comprehensive and comparable results on student achievement through the use of sampling procedures — testing a carefully selected sub-group of all students.
In 2010, 32,000 Grade 8 students from 1,600 schools across Canada took the PCAP. In 2009, 23,000 students from 1,000 schools across Canada took the PISA.
This strategy provides trustworthy evidence of students’ basic skills, and does so with less burden to schools, teachers, students and taxpayers.
In the discussion of alternatives to or re-inventions of the FSA, careful consideration ought to be given to whether its primary intended purpose may already be met by other well-established, regularly administered assessment programs that allow us to understand student achievement in B.C. in relation to other provinces and countries.
It may be that much of what we wish to capture in the snapshot of how well B.C. students are learning foundational skills in reading, writing, and numeracy is already available.
If something other than a snapshot is the goal of a provincial student assessment program, then we need to think carefully about how to meet those other goals appropriately.
Sandra Mathison is a professor in the Faculty of Education at UBC. She is an expert on educational evaluation and her recently published book, The Nature and Limits of Standards Based Reform and Assessment, examines many issues related to government-mandated testing programs.
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Opinion+need+rely+much+maligned+tests+gauge+students+skills/7824430/story.html#ixzz2IA8f5vo7
With the administration of the FSA scheduled for next week in BC’s elementary schools, combined with the growing dissatisfaction with its value, coverage of the issues of assessing students and evaluating schools has been in the news. The impending provincial election has ramped up the discussion as the NDP party, favoured to win the election, offers its views on the FSA, in particular, and student assessment and evaluation more generally.
Recent stories in the Vancouver Sun highlight the potential changes that might occur should the NDP win the election. While there are conflicting comments from various parts of the NDP party (Adrian Dix, leader of the NDP has suggested a sampling rather than census testing procedure while Robin Austin, NDP education critic has suggested expanding the testing to other areas) what is clear is that the conversation about student assessment and accountability in British Columbia has shifted. The NDP are responding to the BCTF’s longstanding opposition to the FSA (and more especially the ranking of schools based on the FSA results), but also a growing critique of the testing program from parents, school trustees, and the BC Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils.
The dialogue about what next should be rich and lively, as not everyone agrees on where to go from here. At the moment, the NDP is suggesting a sample of students be tested, rather than the census testing that has been in place since 1998. The BCCPCA believes that educating parents about the test is more appropriate, although they provide little sense of how current practices can alter the school rankings, which they see as detrimental. The Great Schools Project, a group of concerned educators, offer a comprehensive platform for student assessment embedded within a more comprehensive plan for evaluating school quality.
Starting Monday, BC’s 4th and 7th graders will begin taking the FSA, but perhaps for the last time in its current form.
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