International Journal of Information and Education Technology, 2016
Whereas the growth in global distance and online education has blossomed, especially with the arr... more Whereas the growth in global distance and online education has blossomed, especially with the arrival of massive open online courses (MOOCs), the same technological infrastructure permits unprecedented access to knowledge about students and their behaviors. This knowledge extends far beyond scores on tests to include the measurement of noncognitive factors such as persistence, and intrusive metadata such as geolocation information. Moreover, the growth in the internet of things (e.g., via smart phones and RFID chips) is rapidly complexifying the problem of intrusive data collection. In this paper, we review some of the policy challenges facing student privacy in online learning.
Website: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/publicpolicy/covid19/learning-inequalities-covid-19.page T... more Website: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/publicpolicy/covid19/learning-inequalities-covid-19.page The transition from face-to-face to distance (home and online) schooling is likely to generate educational loss. Using data from Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we estimate that loss to be more pronounced for children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds than for other children. In April 2020, one month into the COVID-19 lockdown: - Children in primary schools spent on average 2.4 hours per day doing schoolwork (compromising on average 2.2 offline lessons - a mix of worksheets, assignments and watching videos – and 0.6 online lessons) plus 2 hours per day of support from adults. - Children in secondary schools spent on average 3 hours per day doing schoolwork (compromising on average 2.3 offline lessons and 1 online lesson) plus 0.9 hours per day of support from adults. - Focusing on combinations of circumstances which are both common and policy releva...
In this short thought-piece, I attempt to capture the type of freewheeling discussions I had with... more In this short thought-piece, I attempt to capture the type of freewheeling discussions I had with our late colleague, Mika Seppälä, a research mathematician from Helsinki. Mika, not being a psychometrician or learning scientist, was blissfully free from the design constraints that experts sometimes ingest, unwittingly. I also draw on delightful conversations with the German research mathematician, Heinz-Otto Peitgen, a polyglot whose work includes advances in medical imaging and explorations in fractal geometry for K–12 students. Together, they taught me to reconsider foundational assumptions about learning, how to describe it, and how to grow it. Accordingly, I use this set of papers as a prompt for examining assumptions that numerical precision ensures scientific insight, that linear models best capture growth in learning, and that relaxing a fixation with time (exemplified by the reification of pre- and post-testing) might open up new topologies for describing, predicting, and pr...
Diagnoses of students' performance on procedural mathematical tasks need to display a certain lev... more Diagnoses of students' performance on procedural mathematical tasks need to display a certain level of stability and robustness if they are to be used as the basis for remediation, particularly with computer-delivered instruction. The purpose of this study was to compare two diagnostic approaches for describing students' errors in algebra-a bug analysis and a rule-space analysis-with the goal of investigating the relative stability of the diagnoses derived from these approaches. Consistent with the findings of recent studies, a relatively large number of bugs were unstable; stable bugs tended to be infrequent. In contrast, the results of the rule-space analysis yielded relatively more stable diagnoses. The results were discussed in light of their consequences for designing remediation. *3.01 Ca. smu Usnnw
Magis: Revista Internacional de Investigación en Educación, 2009
Research over the last twenty years on school choice and local markets in education has been cont... more Research over the last twenty years on school choice and local markets in education has been contradictory or inconclusive: some supports the movement to give parents more freedom in choosing schools; other findings support the view that greater choice further disadvantages the already disadvantaged. Irrespective of philosophical position, it can be said that school choice is driven by political economy in that its benefits and shortcomings are as a consequence of engagement with political or socio-economic imperatives. This paper juxtaposes some findings from the UK, the US and Europe in a socio-political context and discusses their theoretical implications. Key words author School choice. Key words plus School choice, research, school choice, sociopolitic aspects. Transference to practice This paper brings together international research on school choice and will enable policy makers and school leaders better to understand its benefits and disadvantages.
ABSTRACT The uses to which educational effectiveness research (EER) is put by policymakers cannot... more ABSTRACT The uses to which educational effectiveness research (EER) is put by policymakers cannot be blamed on the field, but it is apparent that it has become aligned with the utilitarianism of Western government policy and transnational bodies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This alignment was not consciously adopted – it is more the case that in the absence of its own asserted philosophy, EER simply defaulted to that world view – but as the field shifts to a “dynamic” model and meta-syntheses, the need to reconsider the current paradigm becomes urgent. This paper attempts to reclaim the field philosophically for the academics who work in it and for the policymakers who rely on its science. It is beyond the scope of the paper to present a full comprehensive philosophy, but it describes, as a first step towards one, a new manifesto based on John Rawls’s work on justice as fairness.
This paper explores issues of choice and opportunity in Jersey schools. Within a 'closed' island ... more This paper explores issues of choice and opportunity in Jersey schools. Within a 'closed' island context, it gives voice to concerns that families have about the schools their children can attend, the subjects they can study, the extra-curricular activities they can pursue and the wider opportunities they perceive they have (or do not have) as a result of their education. Data collection was undertaken across both state and private sectors, primary and secondary schools, and included questionnaires, focus groups and interviews with school governors, headteachers, business leaders, teachers, pupils and parents. Our findings, which have application to insular communities around the world, reveal restricted outcomes associated with the reputational stigma of some schools, the limitations in how subject choices are actualised in schools and unequal academic attainment across the system, especially for the children of immigrant workers.
Measuring ethnic diversity currently amounts simply to counting ethnicities. This makes it imposs... more Measuring ethnic diversity currently amounts simply to counting ethnicities. This makes it impossible to correlate with achievement, to track changes over time or to compare institutions in a meaningful way. It is not clear, for example, whether it is more diverse to have many ethnicities with a large majority in one or two categories, or to have fewer ethnicities with a larger proportion in each. This article is not about race per se, but develops indices from cryptography and ecology to solve the problem of measuring diversity properly. Using data from freedom of information requests and university admissions offices, it analyses the ethnic diversity of undergraduate recruitment at Oxford and Cambridge universities over the past 10 years to resolve one of the most controversial issues in higher education today. It finds that both Oxford and Cambridge universities have increased ethnic diversity by more than 25% over the last decade, but that the problem of under-recruitment of black UK students remains. The article is an important contribution to research methodology, with clear applications in the field of school effectiveness, and informs the debate on social justice in education, particularly in a period of significant demographic change across Europe.
This paper introduces and explores the concept of 'salutogenesis' as a way of interpreting school... more This paper introduces and explores the concept of 'salutogenesis' as a way of interpreting school leadership research and its findings in two significant areas: its effect on student outcomes and the motivation of incumbents. In its original setting, salutogenesis describes an approach that focuses on health, rather than on disease, but regards both as points on the same continuum. 'Pathogenesis' is the opposite, more traditional view. The two make very different ab initio assumptions: pathogenesis starts by regarding illness as a departure from the natural state and something to be cured; salutogenesis regards illness as the natural condition, and health as something to be created. In the context of adapting these concepts to schooling, where 'illness' can be read as 'dysfunction', the latter approach would take the view that schools are inherently imperfect and chaotic places, and that the aim of leadership is therefore to create a more functional state. The pathogenic approach, on the other hand, assumes that the natural state is inherently stable so that the purpose of leadership is to ward off malfunction.
la REPORT SECURITY CLASSIFICATION lb RESTRICTIVE MARKINGS Unclassified 2a SECURITY CLASSIFICATION... more la REPORT SECURITY CLASSIFICATION lb RESTRICTIVE MARKINGS Unclassified 2a SECURITY CLASSIFICATION AUTHORITY 3. DISTRIBUTION /AVAILABILITY OF REPORT-__-_Approved for public release; 2b DECLASSIFICATION / DOWNGRADING SCHEDULE distribution unl imi ted. 4. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER(S) 5 MONITORING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER(S) ARI Research Note 88-71 6a NAME OF PERFORMING ORGANIZATION 6b. OFFICE SYMBOL 7a NAME OF MONITORING ORGANIZATION
Utilitarian economists use the term ‘utility’ carefully, but as was mentioned above there are two... more Utilitarian economists use the term ‘utility’ carefully, but as was mentioned above there are two distinct views of it: the ‘satisfaction/happiness’ view and the ‘desire-fulfilment’ view. The happiness approach goes back to Bentham and has been used extensively by Marshall (1890), Pigou (1920) and others. The desire-based approach was pioneered by Sidgwick and developed by Ramsey (1926), Harsanyi (1976), Hare (1981), Mirrlees (1982) and others: A plausible case can be made for taking either happiness, or desire-fulfilment … as guides to a person’s well-being. It would be odd to claim that a person broken down by pain and misery is doing very well, and no less peculiar to think of a person whose desires are systematically violated as achieving a high level of well-being. The issue is not whether either of these views have some plausibility — they both clearly do. The real question is whether either happiness or desire-fulfilment provides an adequate approach to well-being in general, and not just in rather special cases. (Sen, 1985a: 17–18)
All major writers in the field of commercial leadership - from those espousing behaviourist and c... more All major writers in the field of commercial leadership - from those espousing behaviourist and contingency theories, to the latest transformational approaches - have highlighted the importance of the early years in-post. Indeed, most research from the commercial sector suggests that this initial stage of leadership is critical to subsequent and long-term success in the same organisation. It is more than a question of credibility, though it is that at a minimum. It impacts on the confidence, actualisation and motivation of self and others. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some incumbents never fully recover from bad starts, and others recover only just in time and with disproportionate effort as they pass through zones of uncertainty. Notwithstanding that fact, there is a paucity of similar research in education, though we know so much more is at stake: the need for same-staff retention is greater; there is more front-end interaction with stakeholders; and the implications for failure extend beyond the organisational to the social and economic. This paper is based on preliminary findings from a research project that followed a number of secondary school headteachers in their first year of headship & makes comparisons with more experienced managers. It acknowledges the uniqueness of each setting for each individual headteacher and school, and seeks to avoid ‘hyper rationality’.
International Journal of Information and Education Technology, 2016
Whereas the growth in global distance and online education has blossomed, especially with the arr... more Whereas the growth in global distance and online education has blossomed, especially with the arrival of massive open online courses (MOOCs), the same technological infrastructure permits unprecedented access to knowledge about students and their behaviors. This knowledge extends far beyond scores on tests to include the measurement of noncognitive factors such as persistence, and intrusive metadata such as geolocation information. Moreover, the growth in the internet of things (e.g., via smart phones and RFID chips) is rapidly complexifying the problem of intrusive data collection. In this paper, we review some of the policy challenges facing student privacy in online learning.
Website: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/publicpolicy/covid19/learning-inequalities-covid-19.page T... more Website: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/publicpolicy/covid19/learning-inequalities-covid-19.page The transition from face-to-face to distance (home and online) schooling is likely to generate educational loss. Using data from Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we estimate that loss to be more pronounced for children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds than for other children. In April 2020, one month into the COVID-19 lockdown: - Children in primary schools spent on average 2.4 hours per day doing schoolwork (compromising on average 2.2 offline lessons - a mix of worksheets, assignments and watching videos – and 0.6 online lessons) plus 2 hours per day of support from adults. - Children in secondary schools spent on average 3 hours per day doing schoolwork (compromising on average 2.3 offline lessons and 1 online lesson) plus 0.9 hours per day of support from adults. - Focusing on combinations of circumstances which are both common and policy releva...
In this short thought-piece, I attempt to capture the type of freewheeling discussions I had with... more In this short thought-piece, I attempt to capture the type of freewheeling discussions I had with our late colleague, Mika Seppälä, a research mathematician from Helsinki. Mika, not being a psychometrician or learning scientist, was blissfully free from the design constraints that experts sometimes ingest, unwittingly. I also draw on delightful conversations with the German research mathematician, Heinz-Otto Peitgen, a polyglot whose work includes advances in medical imaging and explorations in fractal geometry for K–12 students. Together, they taught me to reconsider foundational assumptions about learning, how to describe it, and how to grow it. Accordingly, I use this set of papers as a prompt for examining assumptions that numerical precision ensures scientific insight, that linear models best capture growth in learning, and that relaxing a fixation with time (exemplified by the reification of pre- and post-testing) might open up new topologies for describing, predicting, and pr...
Diagnoses of students' performance on procedural mathematical tasks need to display a certain lev... more Diagnoses of students' performance on procedural mathematical tasks need to display a certain level of stability and robustness if they are to be used as the basis for remediation, particularly with computer-delivered instruction. The purpose of this study was to compare two diagnostic approaches for describing students' errors in algebra-a bug analysis and a rule-space analysis-with the goal of investigating the relative stability of the diagnoses derived from these approaches. Consistent with the findings of recent studies, a relatively large number of bugs were unstable; stable bugs tended to be infrequent. In contrast, the results of the rule-space analysis yielded relatively more stable diagnoses. The results were discussed in light of their consequences for designing remediation. *3.01 Ca. smu Usnnw
Magis: Revista Internacional de Investigación en Educación, 2009
Research over the last twenty years on school choice and local markets in education has been cont... more Research over the last twenty years on school choice and local markets in education has been contradictory or inconclusive: some supports the movement to give parents more freedom in choosing schools; other findings support the view that greater choice further disadvantages the already disadvantaged. Irrespective of philosophical position, it can be said that school choice is driven by political economy in that its benefits and shortcomings are as a consequence of engagement with political or socio-economic imperatives. This paper juxtaposes some findings from the UK, the US and Europe in a socio-political context and discusses their theoretical implications. Key words author School choice. Key words plus School choice, research, school choice, sociopolitic aspects. Transference to practice This paper brings together international research on school choice and will enable policy makers and school leaders better to understand its benefits and disadvantages.
ABSTRACT The uses to which educational effectiveness research (EER) is put by policymakers cannot... more ABSTRACT The uses to which educational effectiveness research (EER) is put by policymakers cannot be blamed on the field, but it is apparent that it has become aligned with the utilitarianism of Western government policy and transnational bodies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This alignment was not consciously adopted – it is more the case that in the absence of its own asserted philosophy, EER simply defaulted to that world view – but as the field shifts to a “dynamic” model and meta-syntheses, the need to reconsider the current paradigm becomes urgent. This paper attempts to reclaim the field philosophically for the academics who work in it and for the policymakers who rely on its science. It is beyond the scope of the paper to present a full comprehensive philosophy, but it describes, as a first step towards one, a new manifesto based on John Rawls’s work on justice as fairness.
This paper explores issues of choice and opportunity in Jersey schools. Within a 'closed' island ... more This paper explores issues of choice and opportunity in Jersey schools. Within a 'closed' island context, it gives voice to concerns that families have about the schools their children can attend, the subjects they can study, the extra-curricular activities they can pursue and the wider opportunities they perceive they have (or do not have) as a result of their education. Data collection was undertaken across both state and private sectors, primary and secondary schools, and included questionnaires, focus groups and interviews with school governors, headteachers, business leaders, teachers, pupils and parents. Our findings, which have application to insular communities around the world, reveal restricted outcomes associated with the reputational stigma of some schools, the limitations in how subject choices are actualised in schools and unequal academic attainment across the system, especially for the children of immigrant workers.
Measuring ethnic diversity currently amounts simply to counting ethnicities. This makes it imposs... more Measuring ethnic diversity currently amounts simply to counting ethnicities. This makes it impossible to correlate with achievement, to track changes over time or to compare institutions in a meaningful way. It is not clear, for example, whether it is more diverse to have many ethnicities with a large majority in one or two categories, or to have fewer ethnicities with a larger proportion in each. This article is not about race per se, but develops indices from cryptography and ecology to solve the problem of measuring diversity properly. Using data from freedom of information requests and university admissions offices, it analyses the ethnic diversity of undergraduate recruitment at Oxford and Cambridge universities over the past 10 years to resolve one of the most controversial issues in higher education today. It finds that both Oxford and Cambridge universities have increased ethnic diversity by more than 25% over the last decade, but that the problem of under-recruitment of black UK students remains. The article is an important contribution to research methodology, with clear applications in the field of school effectiveness, and informs the debate on social justice in education, particularly in a period of significant demographic change across Europe.
This paper introduces and explores the concept of 'salutogenesis' as a way of interpreting school... more This paper introduces and explores the concept of 'salutogenesis' as a way of interpreting school leadership research and its findings in two significant areas: its effect on student outcomes and the motivation of incumbents. In its original setting, salutogenesis describes an approach that focuses on health, rather than on disease, but regards both as points on the same continuum. 'Pathogenesis' is the opposite, more traditional view. The two make very different ab initio assumptions: pathogenesis starts by regarding illness as a departure from the natural state and something to be cured; salutogenesis regards illness as the natural condition, and health as something to be created. In the context of adapting these concepts to schooling, where 'illness' can be read as 'dysfunction', the latter approach would take the view that schools are inherently imperfect and chaotic places, and that the aim of leadership is therefore to create a more functional state. The pathogenic approach, on the other hand, assumes that the natural state is inherently stable so that the purpose of leadership is to ward off malfunction.
la REPORT SECURITY CLASSIFICATION lb RESTRICTIVE MARKINGS Unclassified 2a SECURITY CLASSIFICATION... more la REPORT SECURITY CLASSIFICATION lb RESTRICTIVE MARKINGS Unclassified 2a SECURITY CLASSIFICATION AUTHORITY 3. DISTRIBUTION /AVAILABILITY OF REPORT-__-_Approved for public release; 2b DECLASSIFICATION / DOWNGRADING SCHEDULE distribution unl imi ted. 4. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER(S) 5 MONITORING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER(S) ARI Research Note 88-71 6a NAME OF PERFORMING ORGANIZATION 6b. OFFICE SYMBOL 7a NAME OF MONITORING ORGANIZATION
Utilitarian economists use the term ‘utility’ carefully, but as was mentioned above there are two... more Utilitarian economists use the term ‘utility’ carefully, but as was mentioned above there are two distinct views of it: the ‘satisfaction/happiness’ view and the ‘desire-fulfilment’ view. The happiness approach goes back to Bentham and has been used extensively by Marshall (1890), Pigou (1920) and others. The desire-based approach was pioneered by Sidgwick and developed by Ramsey (1926), Harsanyi (1976), Hare (1981), Mirrlees (1982) and others: A plausible case can be made for taking either happiness, or desire-fulfilment … as guides to a person’s well-being. It would be odd to claim that a person broken down by pain and misery is doing very well, and no less peculiar to think of a person whose desires are systematically violated as achieving a high level of well-being. The issue is not whether either of these views have some plausibility — they both clearly do. The real question is whether either happiness or desire-fulfilment provides an adequate approach to well-being in general, and not just in rather special cases. (Sen, 1985a: 17–18)
All major writers in the field of commercial leadership - from those espousing behaviourist and c... more All major writers in the field of commercial leadership - from those espousing behaviourist and contingency theories, to the latest transformational approaches - have highlighted the importance of the early years in-post. Indeed, most research from the commercial sector suggests that this initial stage of leadership is critical to subsequent and long-term success in the same organisation. It is more than a question of credibility, though it is that at a minimum. It impacts on the confidence, actualisation and motivation of self and others. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some incumbents never fully recover from bad starts, and others recover only just in time and with disproportionate effort as they pass through zones of uncertainty. Notwithstanding that fact, there is a paucity of similar research in education, though we know so much more is at stake: the need for same-staff retention is greater; there is more front-end interaction with stakeholders; and the implications for failure extend beyond the organisational to the social and economic. This paper is based on preliminary findings from a research project that followed a number of secondary school headteachers in their first year of headship & makes comparisons with more experienced managers. It acknowledges the uniqueness of each setting for each individual headteacher and school, and seeks to avoid ‘hyper rationality’.
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Papers by Anthony Kelly