Assessment has become an important topic of debate and even reform in many Western countries. It is equally important in other regions of the world, although less subject to reform. Yet discussions of assessment across cultural boundaries are not frequent and in a globalizing world this can be problematic. The purposes of this article, therefore, are to review concepts such as 'formative' and 'summative' assessment and how they have developed over time. A focus of this review will be to identify the implications of different kinds of assessment for student learning, especially in relation to the cultural contexts in which they take place. The article will argue that different forms of assessment can be directed towards different learning purposes, especially where cultural pressures dictate certain kinds of assessment practices. Valorizing one form of assessment over another may well be counterproductive in particular cultural contexts.
Curriculum implementation as both an educational practice and a policy conundrum has been the focus of academic research since the 1970s. A new perspective is taken in this article by borrowing from the literature on policy implementation in multilevel systems of government. The concepts
of 'hard' and 'soft' policy are used to show that policy-makers choose from a range of strategies and it is these choices rather than teacher attitudes that may account for the level of implementation of a policy. A case study of curriculum implementation in Hong Kong is used to show how 'hard'
and 'soft' policy can be identified in practice.
This research focuses on student–robot interaction in the learning environment of robotics education (RE) and attempts to explore how it cultivates students’ computational thinking (CT). Different from child–robot interactions as investigated in the social robot field, student–robot (S–R) interactions focus mainly on the process of interaction between learners and programmable robot kits in RE settings. At a four-week robotics summer camp in China, mixed-methods research was conducted. Forty primary school students and one dedicated robotics teacher participated in this research, while 32 students and the teacher completed all the lessons and data collection procedures of the summer camp. Results indicated that students’ CT skill increased during the summer camp and that the change in their CT skill was positively correlated to the time spent on S–R interaction. Additionally, how three kinds of S–R interaction—programming-computing, observational investigation, and participatory investigation—cultivated students’ CT were found. Moreover, the hierarchy of three S–R interactions and students’ role-shifting in the hierarchy were discussed. Previous studies rarely discussed S–R interaction; however, this kind of interaction should be explored because it provides more information about students’ natural learning process, which might be meaningful to RE practice.
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