Department of Education Research Seminars

Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment (OUCEA) presents a look into the future of assessment featuring guest speakers. The guest speakers this year include Professor Art Graesser, a long-standing visiting professor and champion of OUCEA. Art Graesser is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology and the Institute of Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis, and Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Oxford. His talk will be followed by reflections from two guest speakers, Enterprise Professor Sandra Milligan, Director of the Assessment Research Centre at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, and our own Deputy Director of OUCEA, Associate Professor Joshua McGrane. Professor Therese N. Hopfenbeck, Director of OUCEA, will convene the seminar.

Panel presentations (Harry Daniels, Alison Woodhead and Lisa Cherry) for the Rees Centre Annual Lecture 2019 on school exclusion and issues for looked after and adopted children. Harry Daniels, Professor of Education This brief talk will provide a background to central aspects of exclusion from school and an overview of a new four year project led by Professor Harry Daniels and Associate Professor Ian Thompson at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education. A team of researchers operating across Oxford, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Reading and the London School of Economics (LSE) will develop a multi-disciplinary understanding of the political economies and consequences of school exclusion across the UK. The research will lead to a greater understanding of the cost of exclusions at individual, institutional and system levels, as well as pupils’ rights, entitlements, protection and wellbeing, and the landscapes of exclusion across the UK’s four jurisdictions. Alison Woodhead, Director of Public Affairs and Communications, Adoption UK Not all children have an equal start in life. But all children deserve an equal chance at school. For tens of thousands of adopted children in the UK, the reality of school is a daily struggle for survival. Many are failing academically as a result, and levels of exclusion are high. Through detailed surveys of families and teachers, interviews with schools and discussions with education experts, Adoption UK has identified significant gaps in understanding, empathy and resources that are preventing adopted children from having an equal chance to succeed at school. Lisa Cherry, Author and Trainer One area that has received a lot of attention and focus in regard to looked after children has been education. Statistics have shown consistently that children living away from home under perform at every key stage within education. Looked after children are five times more likely to face a fixed term exclusion and twice as likely to experience a permanent exclusion (Department for Education, 2017). This study focuses on what impact there has been on education and employment on care experienced adults who left care in the 1970’s and 1980’s and were excluded from school. The findings offer a narrative on education across the life course of those who have been looked after away from home and excluded from school that suggests a strong desire to engage with education into adulthood. Relationships and their impact upon the individual, negatively and positively, raise questions about impact on the participants but also the perceived understanding of impact that teachers and social workers have of their input. In conclusion, the data collected provides answers about impact and the journey that had been undertaken to recover a lost education. These findings are important as they inform further research. They offer a different narrative about what happens to people across the life course and enable some insights for educators about their opportunity for positive impact and the results that this can bring, that ultimately stay with a person throughout their life.

Professor Patricia Broadfoot, Emeritus Professor of Education, gives a presentation for the OUCEA conference.

Therese N. Hopfenbeck gives a talk for the Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice 25th Anniversary conference. Assessment for Learning 20 years after The Black Box. OUCEA was proud to host an all-day event at St Annes College Oxford celebrating 25 years of the influential journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

Jo-Anne Baird gives a talk for the Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice 25th Anniversary conference. Assessment for Learning 20 years after The Black Box. OUCEA was proud to host an all-day event at St Annes College Oxford celebrating 25 years of the influential journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

Ernesto Panadero gives a talk for the Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice 25th Anniversary conference. Assessment for Learning 20 years after The Black Box OUCEA was proud to host an all-day event at St Annes College Oxford celebrating 25 years of the influential journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.Ernesto Panader

Gordon Stobart gives a talk for the Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice 25th Anniversary conference. Assessment for Learning 20 years after The Black Box. OUCEA was proud to host an all-day event at St Annes College Oxford celebrating 25 years of the influential journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

Mary James gives a talk for the Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice 25th Anniversary conference. Assessment for Learning 20 years after The Black Box OUCEA was proud to host an all-day event at St Annes College Oxford celebrating 25 years of the influential journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

Dylan Wiliam gives a talk for the Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice 25th Anniversary conference. Assessment for Learning 20 years after The Black Box OUCEA was proud to host an all-day event at St Annes College Oxford celebrating 25 years of the influential journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

Paul Black gives a talk for the Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice 25th Anniversary conference. Assessment for Learning 20 years after The Black Box. OUCEA was proud to host an all-day event at St Annes College Oxford celebrating 25 years of the influential journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

Therese N. Hopfenbeck opens the conference; Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice 25th Anniversary conference. Assessment for Learning 20 years after The Black Box. OUCEA was proud to host an all-day event at St Annes College Oxford celebrating 25 years of the influential journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

OUCEA Annual Lecture, 25th May 2017, Ashmolean Museum In his presentation, Professor David Pearson, who serves as the Chair of the Standing Committee on Reading for NAEP provided an update on recent innovations in the conceptualisation and operationalisation of NAEP Reading. He explained that the Standing Committee provides oversight on passage selection, item development, and scoring to the Educational Testing Service and discussed the conceptual bases for new digital initiatives, as well as the progress made to identify and resolve challenges to an entirely new digital delivery of NAEP Reading. Professor Pearson also commented upon NAEP reading developments in relation to those recently undertaken by PIRLS and PISA. Professor Maggie Snowling, President of St John's College, University of Oxford acted as the discussant and focused her presentation upon the reasons and causes of poor reading comprehension. She explained that poor comprehenders have good decoding but they do not use context to support word reading as well as typical readers do.

Jessica Briggs, Centre for Research and Development in English Medium Instruction, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the EMI conference. The rapid growth of EMI in the tertiary sector raises some interesting questions for the Applied Linguistics and TESOL communities. For example, how and to what extent are English-medium lectures in Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts comparable? If an L2-English user decides to study at an English-medium university, will their academic achievement be a ected if they choose an EMI setting over an L1-English setting? Crucially, without big data on EMI classroom practices we are unable to provide a rm basis on which future research into EMI can be built. In this talk I will be presenting findings from a corpus-based research project which sought to open the door to the EMI lecture room to determine whether there are differences in the vocabulary usage pro les of EMI and L1-English lectures; to pinpoint where those differences lie; and to draw implications for students, researchers and practitioners who are engaged in English-medium tertiary education.

Tarja Nikula, Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyvåskylå, gives a talk for the EMI conference. This presentation is concerned with content and language integrated learning, CLIL. While research on CLIL and other forms of content-based instruction has revealed a great deal about benefits and challenges in teaching through the medium of a second/foreign language, the notion of integration itself and its impact on how language and learning are approached has only recently started to attract more attention (e.g. Llinares, Morton & Whittaker 2012; Nikula et al. 2016; Lin 2016). This presentation will argue that focus on integration invites a re-orientation to language and language skills as area-specific. Firstly, the implications of this at the conceptual level will be discussed. Secondly, how discipline-specificity is brought into being in processes of classroom interaction will be explored by examining data extracts from secondary level CLIL classrooms in Finland. It will be argued that approaching language skills as disciplinary has implications not only for academic research but also for teacher education in ways that extend well beyond CLIL to any educational context.

Ernesto Macaro (with Samantha Seiter, Jiangshan An, Jack Pun, Julie Dearden), Centre for Research and Development in English Medium Instruction, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the EMI Symposium. The exponential growth of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in Higher Education (HE) globally has driven a similar growth of empirical research on the subject. Of necessity this research to date has been exploratory, single institution-oriented and lacking a clear research agenda that a more established community of practice could have ensured. Moreover, HE research appears to be almost completely isolated, in its conceptualization, from EMI research in earlier phases of education despite the challenges that students might face as they transition from one phase to another. At EMI Oxford, we have carried out an extensive systematic review of EMI research worldwide. I will begin by presenting an overview of this research by brie y comparing the eld in the different phases of education. I will then focus on a synthesis of 83 studies undertaken in the HE sector before outlining what kind of research still needs to be undertaken in order to better inform EMI teachers, students and policy makers.

Professor David Kaplan (University of Wisconsin-Madison) gives a talk for the Department of Education Research Seminar series. Applying Bayesian statistical interference Professor Kaplan investigates the purpose and predictive validity of the PISA study. He finds that to develop PISA as an optimally predictive model, PISA would have to be considered as an indicator system; the important outcomes of education (cognitive or non-cognitive) would have to be defined; country-sensitive indicators would need to be developed; predictive models would need to be sensitive to changes in policy-relevant indicators; and prediction should be optimised by recognising and accounting for uncertainty every step of the way. "

Professor Eckhard Klieme (German Institute for International Educational Research, DIPF) gives a talk for the Department of Education Research seminar series. In this presentation Professor Klieme looks at what types of knowledge research and policy need from large scale assessments. He describes the design, indicator development and innovations in PISA 2015 before discussing four challenges: Interpreting 'factors affecting outcomes'; Cross-cultural equivalence; Assessing trends while changing mode, and balancing policy and research.

Professor Leonidas Kyriakides (University of Cyprus) gives a talk for the Department of Education Research Seminar Series. Professor Kyriakides presents the results of a systematic literature review that aimed to identify the impact of PISA on educational research and the draw implications from the literature for the design of PISA in order to maximise its contribution to educational research. He discusses the frequency of PISA related publication over time; the themes and variables examined; the geographic and linguistic distribution of publications; and the way in which PISA data was used for secondary data analysis.