首页 | 本学科首页   官方微博 | 高级检索  
相似文献
 共查询到20条相似文献,搜索用时 46 毫秒
1.
Gaps in GCSE attainment have long been the concern of policy makers, academics, and social commentators, largely due to the importance of these exams for setting children on their future academic and career pathways. In the past a wide range of factors relating to the pupils, their families, and their schools have been found to account for differences in GCSE attainment. In this paper we examine the role of pupils’ beliefs in their own academic ability (academic self-concept). Using Next Steps data, we examine whether pupils with higher academic self-concept do better or worse in their GCSEs than pupils with lower academic self-concept. Results show that on average, controlling for other characteristics, having high academic self-concept increases GCSE scores by four grades. When we compare academic self-concept to measured achievement we find that both high and low attainers have higher probabilities of achieving five A*–C GCSEs and higher GCSE point scores on average if they have high academic self-concept than similarly able students who have lower academic self-concept.  相似文献   

2.
In England, students obtain General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) qualifications, typically at age 16. Certain GCSEs are tiered; students take either higher‐level (higher tier) or lower‐level (foundation tier) exams, which may have different educational, career and psychological consequences. In particular, foundation tier entry, if inappropriate, risks capping students' achievement because of the restricted range of attainable grades and reduced learning that may occur. Tiering decisions may be affected by other aspects of the education system in which they take place, such as by the timing of assessment. The move to linear assessment in 2012 provided a unique opportunity to compare tiering decisions for the same GCSE specifications when taken in a linear system, where students are exclusively assessed at the end of the course, with tiering decisions in a modular system, where students are assessed at different time points. Multilevel logistic regression was used to examine students' likelihood of being entered for the foundation tiers of GCSEs in science, language and mathematics in two exam sessions: June 2013, which allowed modular assessment, and June 2014, which required linear assessment. The analyses also investigated whether these effects depended on student characteristics. Results showed that foundation tier entry was less likely in the linear than modular system for GCSEs in science and languages, but more likely for one mathematics GCSE. This pattern contrasts with concerns that linear assessment may encourage general risk‐aversion, and instead indicates that effects on tiering decisions are more complicated, varying by subject and student factors.  相似文献   

3.
Abstract

This paper presents data that consider ways in which young people experience the curriculum through the lens of subject examination syllabuses (for GCSEs), their associated assessment techniques and structures, and educational policies at national and school level concerning subject choice. Drawing upon an original qualitative dataset from a mixed-methods study of students’ views and experiences of GCSE from Northern Ireland (NI) and Wales, the paper explores students’ perceptions of choice and fairness in relation to studying various subjects at GCSE. Factors of importance are the subjects available to them through subject option selections at the school level and the ways in which GCSE courses are then administered. In relation to notions of choice and fairness, the paper considers how students see access to the curriculum moderated by national- and school-level decisions regarding the assessment of GCSEs; the extent to which assessment techniques such as tiering, controlled assessment, and modularity, as well as school-level policy decisions about timing of entry to GCSEs (known as early entry) all combine to restrict students’ access to the full range of subjects and influence the ways in which they experience these subjects as curricula within their particular school settings.  相似文献   

4.
ABSTRACT

Background: In England, practical work is a major part of secondary school science and yet little research has examined students’ attitudes specifically to practical work.

Purpose: To examine students’ attitudes to practical work in biology chemistry and physics in secondary schools in England.

Sample: The study involved 607 students from Year 7 to Year 10 (aged 11–15) drawn from three state-maintained secondary schools in England. The schools were, broadly speaking, representative of schools in England in terms of academic measures such as GCSE outcomes, value-added performance and socio-economic area.

Design and methods: The research considered students’ attitudes in terms of an established analytical framework incorporating the affective, behavioural and cognitive (ABC) domains and used a mixed methods approach involving questionnaires, lesson observations, and focus group discussions.

Results: Whilst secondary students’ attitudes to practical work were, generally speaking, positive they were not constant and homogenous but change over time. The affective value of practical work was found to vary by subject although in all three sciences this value decreased, albeit at different rates, as students approached their General Certificate in Secondary Education examinations (GCSE) taken at age 16.

Conclusion: The affective value of practical work needs to be considered on a subject by subject basis, rather than, as is often the case currently in school, in terms of a generic attitude to science practical work. Furthermore, the affective value of practical work can be maximised by using more at the start of secondary education (Key Stage 3 – ages 11–14) with a gradual, subject-specific, reduction as students approach their summative public examinations (age 16) when their preference for non-practical, exam orientated, teaching increases.  相似文献   

5.
A key predictor of young people’s future outcomes is their level of academic achievement whilst at school. In England this is most commonly measured by achievement in GCSEs. However, not all pupils will have taken the same set of GCSE examinations as, for example, they may make different subject choices. For this reason, GCSE performance is often aggregated into a simple measure such as ‘mean GCSE grade’ before being used in statistical models. This paper investigates the merits of using an alternative method, based upon the relatively new technique of Generalised Boosting Models, which does not require for GCSE results in different subjects to be aggregated together. The importance of this research is that by evaluating the predictive performance of such a method we can ascertain how much useful information is lost in the process of GCSE aggregation. The results show that traditional predictions based upon simple aggregated measures of GCSE attainment are fairly similar to those based upon the more complex approach. This provides some confidence that, for the majority of outcomes, only a small amount of predictive information will be lost through the use of aggregated measures of GCSE performance.  相似文献   

6.
The United Kingdom's Department for Education has recently changed the nature of the AS‐level examinations normally taken by students aspiring to enter higher education degree courses one year into their post‐compulsory education. In the face of protests from universities and other institutions that this would both harm students’ progression towards the A‐level qualifications, on which entry to English universities is normally based, and make it difficult for universities determining which of their applicants were best placed to benefit from their degree courses, the Department conducted research which it claimed showed that degree outcome could be predicted as well from the results of GCSE examinations taken one year before AS‐levels as from AS‐levels themselves. This paper critiques those analyses and their conclusions showing, through a re‐analysis and extended interpretation of the Department's data, that AS‐levels provide a more reliable predictor of degree performance in 2011 than GCSEs and that many students who performed better at AS‐level than at GCSE gained a place, and performed well, at a university with high entrance standards.  相似文献   

7.
This article examines the cause of school type effects upon gaining a first class degree at Oxford University, whereby for a given level of secondary school performance, private school students perform less well at degree level. We compare the predictive power of an aptitude test and secondary school grades (GCSEs) for final examination performance, using data from the Oxford Admissions Study. Both metrics are predictive of final degree performance but the school effects are only statistically robust for arts students. Private school students perform less well in final examinations relative to their GCSE results when compared with state school students, but they do not under perform relative to their aptitude test scores or in gross terms. It is therefore argued that teaching effects, associated with private school students, distort secondary school grades as an indicator of academic potential in higher education when compared to state school students.  相似文献   

8.
Students’ academic performance is a key factor in evaluating the efficiency and quality of university degree programmes. Not only do personal characteristics and the students’ own performance affect these results, but so does the university’s academic organization. Based on a database that contains the overall results by course and exam period in three different degree programmes from 2007–15, we estimate what external factors influenced the percentages of students sitting for and passing exams. The analysis of the data panel shows that the order of the exams and the students’ continuity norms established by the university to penalize failing grades are two incentives that improve student performance only in the ordinary exam periods. These results also imply first keeping the incentive system at the university and secondly strategically using the exam calendar for the courses with the worst overall results.  相似文献   

9.
Students often are overconfident when they predict their performance on classroom examinations, and their accuracy often does not improve across exams. One contributor to overconfidence may be that students did not have enough experience, and another is that students may under-use their knowledge of prior exam performance to predict performance on their upcoming exams. To evaluate the former, we examined student prediction accuracy across 13 exams in an introductory course on educational psychology. For the latter, we computed measures that estimate the extent to which students use the prior exam score when predicting performance and whether students should use the prior exam scores. Several outcomes are noteworthy. First, students were overconfident, and contrary to expectations, this overconfidence did not decline across exams. Second, students’ prior exam scores were not related to subsequent predictions, even though prior exam performance showed little bias with respect to predicting future performance. Thus, students appear to under-use prior performance despite its utility for improving prediction accuracy about future exam performance.  相似文献   

10.
ABSTRACT

This article draws on three sources of evidence that together indicate hermeneutical weaknesses in exam courses on Christianity in English Religious Education (RE). It scrutinises a single exam paper and an associated text book from a recent authorised course. It conceptually explores features of a new style of long Religious Studies (RS) exam question that is commonly set for the majority of students studying for a RS qualification at 15–16 years old. It combines these documentary sources with a focus group interview of teachers in the first year of teaching the new GCSE Religious Studies. The findings from the document analysis, conceptual analysis and focus group interview, together concur that there is a problem related to the use of fragmentary texts and the promotion of a particularly propositional conception of religion. These features are structured in by systemic elements. A small proportion of students follow text-based GCSE routes include a more detailed study of Biblical texts but the majority of 15–16-year-old students do not and so are exposed to this problem. These weaknesses could be ‘designed out’ of exams with smarter questions and mitigated against by curriculum content that specified the study of how texts are interpreted, as well as teacher expertise in the teaching and practise of hermeneutics.  相似文献   

11.
This research examines the effect of two testing strategies on academic achievement and summative evaluations in an introductory statistics course. In 2001, 63 students underwent an hourly midterm format; and in 2002, 68 students underwent a bi-weekly exam format. Other than the exam format, the class lectures and labs were identical in terms of content, structure, pace, and the cumulative final exam. Findings from the regression analyses show that students in the bi-weekly format performed better than the students in the hourly midterm format. On average, students who took the bi-weekly exams performed about 10 percentage points higher (one letter grade) on the exams during the semester and about 15 percentage points higher on the cumulative final exam compared to their peers who took hourly midterms. The benefits of the bi-weekly format were significantly greater among female students than male students. Finally, students in the bi-weekly format were less likely to drop the class and evaluated the class far more favorably. Carrie B. Myers is an Assistant Professor of Adult and Higher Education at Montana State University. She received her Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from Washington State University. Her research focuses on student and faculty development and assessment and evaluation. Scott M. Myers is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Montana State University. His areas of research are family demography and education. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Ph.D. in Demography from the Pennsylvania State University.  相似文献   

12.
英国14-19岁普通教育考试制度与高校入学机制的关系研究   总被引:4,自引:0,他引:4  
本文研究了英国14-19岁阶段普通教育的考试制度及其与高校入学机制的关系.分析了其以资格证书为基础的考试制度的特点、经验和问题,为我国普通高中考试制度改革和高校入学机制改革提供参照.  相似文献   

13.
14.
In Britain, educational qualifications gained at school continue to play an important and central role in young people’s educational and employment pathways. Recently there has been growing interest in documenting the lives of ‘ordinary’ young people. In this paper we analyse the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales in order to better document the experiences of those with ‘middle’ levels of school General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) attainment. The overall pattern of school GCSE attainment is one of increasing levels of performance. GCSE attainment is still highly stratified. Girls performed better than boys, and there were some marked differences in attainment for pupils from the main minority ethnic groups. Most notably, parental socio-economic positions are the most important factor. The analyses fail to persuade us that there are clear boundaries that demark a ‘middle’ category of school GCSE attainment. We conclude that sociologists should study ‘ordinary’ young people; however, school GCSE attainment is best understood as a continuum, and measures such as the number of GCSEs or point scores are preferable.  相似文献   

15.
大学生考试作弊问题日益凸显。运用质性研究方法探析个案大学本科生考试作弊根源,发现教师监考不严,考试内容偏重记忆性知识,学生学习投入不足是大学生考试作弊的直接原因。而学生的学业准备度低,自我管理能力不足,无法适应大学的学习要求是诱发大学生考试作弊的深刻原因。由此,该个案大学应通过加强教师应对学术诚信问题的培训,改革考试方式,为学生提供学业帮助和支持,完善学术诚信政策等一系列相应举措来消除学生考试作弊的根源,从根本上促进大学生的学习和发展。  相似文献   

16.
In the class session following feedback regarding their scores on multiple-choice exams, undergraduate students in a large human development course rated the strength of possible contributors to their exam performance. Students rated items related to their personal effort in preparing for the exam (identified as student effort in the paper), their ability to perform well on the exams (identified as student ability), and teacher input that might have affected their exam performance. Students rated most student effort items higher than teacher input and student ability items. Notwithstanding, across all exams, ratings of student ability and teacher input correlated more strongly with exam performance than did student effort ratings. High and low performers on the exams differed significantly on ratings of student ability and teacher input, but were more similar on ratings of student effort.  相似文献   

17.
Students often complain about their perceived disconnect between the time and effort spent studying and their subsequent performance on exams. Robert Bjork''s research asserts that retrieval of stored information acts as a memory modifier, and that using tests as learning events creates “desirable difficulties that enhance learning.” To determine the effect of utilizing testing as a learning event in the introductory (majors) biology classroom, we used an online homework platform to give required quizzes throughout the course. Analysis of exam grades earned by those taking 100% of pre-exam quizzes indicates that not only does this group have a significantly higher exam average than the group of students who took 0% of the pre-exam quizzes, but they also have a significantly higher exam average than the class average. Through detailed, statistical analysis, the benefit of quizzing is demonstrated to be significant for students of diverse academic abilities. Pre-exam quizzing using an online homework platform is an effective way to increase student performance on exams and allows class time to be utilized for teaching activities.  相似文献   

18.
In England, pupils aged 16 take the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations for a range of subjects. The current assessment models for GCSE include a two-tier structure for some subjects and a non-tier model for the others. The tiered subjects have a higher tier designed for high achieving pupils and a lower tier for low achieving pupils. The higher tier paper is targeted at grades A*–D (with A* the highest grade available), while the lower tier paper at grades C–G (with G the lowest grade). The UK government has proposed a comprehensive reform of GCSEs. It suggested that, with tiered papers, pupils are forced to choose between higher and lower tier papers, which will place a cap on the ambition of those entering for the lower tier. The government therefore suggests avoiding tiering in the reformed GCSEs when possible. This paper discusses the technical and equity issues with the use of tiered examinations in current GCSEs and reviews potential alternative assessment approaches for effective differentiation between pupils for the reformed GCSEs.  相似文献   

19.
This research explored the measurement characteristics of two science examinations and the potential to use access arrangements data to investigate how students requiring reading support are affected by features of exam questions. For two science examinations, traditional and Rasch analyses provided estimates of difficulty and information on item functioning. For one examination, the performance of students eligible for support from a reader in exams was compared to a ‘norm’ group. For selected items a sample of student responses were analysed. A number of factors potentially making questions easier, more difficult or potentially contributing to problems with item functioning were identified. A number of features that may particularly influence those requiring reading support were also identified.  相似文献   

20.
Abstract

Researchers are becoming increasingly interested in the use of transformational leadership theory in higher education teaching (often referred to as transformational instructor-leadership). Much of this body of research investigates a direct association between transformational instructor-leadership and student outcomes. In the present study, we take a step further by investigating (a) student engagement as a mechanism in the relationship between transformational instructor-leadership and students’ academic performance and (b) structural distance as a moderator of the relationship between transformational instructor-leadership and student engagement. Using a sample of 183 students across the UK, the findings supported student engagement as a full mediator, but did not support structural distance as a moderator. This study contributes to theory by (a) showing a key underlying process through which transformational instructor-leadership is related to students’ academic performance and (b) empirically examining all three dimensions of student engagement. Limitations, suggestions for future research and practical implications are discussed.  相似文献   

设为首页 | 免责声明 | 关于勤云 | 加入收藏

Copyright©北京勤云科技发展有限公司  京ICP备09084417号