This article seeks to clarify the purpose of high-stakes exam and its relationship with teaching and learning by elucidating the educational thought of the eminent neo-Confucian thinker Zhu...

In this paper, I aim to establish that, according to almost all democratic theories, instrumentalist considerations often dominate intrinsic proceduralist considerations in our decisions about whether to make extensive use of undemocratic procedures. The reason for this is that almost all democratic theorists, including philosophers commonly thought to be intrinsic proceduralists, accept ‘High Stakes Instrumentalism’. According to HSI, we ought to use undemocratic procedures in order to prevent high stakes errors - very substantively bad or unjust (...) outcomes. However, democratically produced severe substantive injustice is much more common than many proponents of HSI have realised. Proponents of HSI must accept that if undemocratic procedures are the only way to avoid these high stakes errors, then we ought to make extensive use of undemocratic procedures. Consequently, according to almost all democratic theorists, democratic theory ought, for practical purposes, to be reoriented towards difficult moral and empirical questions about the instrumental quality of procedures. Moreover, this is potentially very practically important because if there are available instrumentally superior undemocratic procedures, then wholesale institutional reform is required. This is one of the most potentially practically important findings of normative democratic theory. In spite of this, no-one has yet explicitly recognised it. (shrink)

People experiencing similar conditions may make different decisions, and their belief systems provide insight about these differences. An example of high‐stakes decision‐making within a complex social context is the Arab Spring, in which large numbers of people decided to protest and even larger numbers decided to stay at home. This study uses qualitative analyses of interview narratives and social media addressing individual decisions to develop a computational model tracing the cognitive decision‐making process. The model builds on work by (...) Abelson and Carroll (1965), Schank and Abelson (1977), and Axelrod (1976) to systematically trace the inferences connecting beliefs to decisions. The findings show that protest decisions were often based on positive emotions such as pride, hope, courage, and solidarity, triggered by beliefs about successful protest and self‐sacrifice. By contrast, decisions to stay at home were triggered by beliefs about safety, state approval, and living conditions. As one participant said, “When I heard about the revolution in Tunisia, my heart was filled with solidarity for the people.” In the words of a non‐participant: “When people are killed, we must be careful. There are more important things than protest: safety and stability.” This study of individual explanations about events identifies the role of emotions in high‐stakes decision‐making within complex social environments. (shrink)

Abstract‘High stakes testing’ is to be understood as testing with serious consequences for students, their teachers and their educational institutions. It plays a central role in holding teachers and educational institutions to account. In a recent article Randall Curren seeks to refute a number of philosophical arguments developed in my The Limits of Educational Assessment against the legitimacy of high stakes testing. In this reply I contend that some of the arguments he identifies are not mine, (...) and that others survive his critique. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of a within-subject experiment testing whether an increase in the monetary stakes by a factor of 50 – which had never been done before – influences individual behavior in a simple ultimatum bargaining game. Contrary to current wisdom, we found that lowest acceptable offers stated by the responder are proportionally lower in the high-stake condition than in the low-stake condition. This result may be interpreted in terms of the type of utility functions which (...) characterize the subjects. However, in line with prior results, we find that an important increase of the monetary stakes in the ultimatum game has no effect on the offers made by the proposer. Yet, the present research suggests that the reasons underlying these offers are quite different when the stakes are high. (shrink)

This paper assesses the role of shadow education (SE), i.e., organised learning activities outside formal schooling, in the lives of secondary school students of different social backgrounds and in different school settings, in a high-stakes context. It draws on multilevel analysis of longitudinal Growing Up in Ireland data, alongside narratives from in-depth case study research in 10 schools. Framed within a social reproduction approach, we show how access to SE as an educational resource is socially stratified, accessible to (...) those with greater levels of family resources, and those attending schools with higher socio-economic student intakes. SE is viewed as an investment, particularly among students with average and above average levels of prior attainment, while high attaining students are less likely to use SE. Perhaps reflecting the normalisation of SE in the Irish context, students do not directly link engagement in such tuition to their socio-emotional wellbeing. (shrink)

We challenge Johnson et al.'s assumption that people reduce unclear situations to a single narrative explanation and that such reduction would be adaptive for decision-making under radical uncertainty. Instead, we argue that people imagine and maintain multiple narrative possibilities throughout the decision-making process and that this process provides cognitive flexibility and adaptive benefits within the proposed model.

Drawing on their extensive research, Nichols and Berliner document and categorize the ways that high-stakes testing threatens the purposes and ideals of the American education system. For more than a decade, the debate over high-stakes testing has dominated the field of education. This passionate and provocative book provides a fresh perspective on the issue and powerful ammunition for opponents of high-stakes tests. Their analysis is grounded in the application of Campbell’s Law, which posits that (...) the greater the social consequences associated with a quantitative indicator, the more likely it is that the indicator itself will become corrupted—and the more likely it is that the use of the indicator will corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Nichols and Berliner illustrate both aspects of this “corruption,” showing how the pressures of high-stakes testing erode the validity of test scores and distort the integrity of the education system. Their analysis provides a coherent and comprehensive intellectual framework for the wide-ranging arguments against high-stakes testing, while putting a compelling human face on the data marshalled in support of those arguments. (shrink)

It is a familiar criticism of Subject-Sensitive Invariantism that the view makes incorrect predictions about cases in which the attributor of knowledge is in a high-stakes situation and the subject of the attribution in a low-stakes situation. In a recent paper in this journal, Brian Kim has argued that the mentioned type of case should be ignored, since the relevant knowledge ascriptions are inappropriate in virtue of violating an epistemic norm of presupposing. I show, pace Kim, that (...) the mentioned utterances do not carry factivity presuppositions. To this end I discuss a phenomenon known as presupposition suspension, which is widely associated with the presuppositions of epistemic factives such as know that p or discover that p. I argue further that the problem of unknown presuppositions discussed by Kim can be circumvented by slightly amending the cases at hand. In particular, I demonstrate that factivity presuppositions are unobjectionable in problem cases in which the high-stakes ascriber knows the presuppositions at issue to be true. (shrink)

One challenge for moderate invariantists is to explain why we tend to deny knowledge to subjects in high stakes when the target propositions seem to be inappropriate premises for practical reasoning. According to an account suggested by Williamson, our intuitive judgments are erroneous due to an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between first-order and higher-order knowledge: the high-stakes subject lacks the latter but possesses the former. In this paper, I provide three objections to Williamson’s account: (...) i) his account delivers counterintuitive verdicts about what it is appropriate for a high-stakes subject to do; ii) the high-stakes subject doesn’t need iterated knowledge in order to be regarded as appropriately relying on the relevant proposition in practical reasoning; iii) Williamson’s account doesn’t provide a good explanation of why the high-stakes subject would be blameworthy if she were relying on the relevant proposition in her practical reasoning. (shrink)

The present research investigates gender gaps in the results of secondary school exit exams in mathematics in Poland in 2015. The analysis shows that, in the basic level exam, males are highly overrepresented at the upper end of the score distribution. The same pattern did not exist in the extended-level Matura. Two explanations are offered here. The differences are driven by gender self-selection in high school programs. Students who decide on maths-related tracks have more maths lessons than other students. (...) Secondly, a student who takes the extended Matura also has to take the basic Matura exam. As a result, the population of students taking the basic Matura is highly differentiated in terms of maths competence and motivation. Additionally, the analysis of differential item functioning shows that only a few items were flagged as having DIF. (shrink)

This essay argues that what separates poor mothers from their middle class counterparts are many factors — not simply couples' ability to plan, the power of their choices, and agency. For example, power, social clout, and access to health care influence status and parenting. Historically, for white women choice has been about abortion; for many women of color, choice is about being able to be a mother. This essay begs the question whether real parallels can be drawn on questions of (...) contraception, abortion, and ART simply by examining class and to what extent race and sexual orientation matter in research on parenting. (shrink)

Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such catastrophes. In this paper, we argue that there are important new methodological problems which arise when assessing global catastrophic risks and we focus on a problem regarding probability estimation. When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really (...) providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in the modeling of the problem, or a mistake in the calculations. If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect. We develop this idea formally, explaining how it differs from the related distinctions of model and parameter uncertainty. Using the risk estimates from the Large Hadron Collider as a test case, we show how serious the problem can be when it comes to catastrophic risks and how best to address it. (shrink)

B\ig fraud, little lies -- Serial cheaters -- Storytelling and beautification -- Researching for results -- Corporate cooking -- Skewed competition -- Stealing authorship -- The funding effect -- There is no profile -- Toxic literature -- Clinical trials -- The jungle of journal publishing -- Beyond denial -- Scientific crime -- Slow science.

This article considers the motivations of teachers to pursue ongoing professional learning. During recent decades, the international policy context has been characterised by high-stakes accountability, but the implications of this agenda for teachers’ motivations toward professional learning remains under-explored. In this mixed methods study, combining a large teacher survey and in-depth teacher interviews, a new and significant concept of ‘instrumental motivation’ is generated to capture how high-stakes performance management policies damage the motivation of teachers to learn (...) professionally. This innovative approach, employing ordinal factor analysis and inductive/deductive hybrid thematic analysis inclusive of self-determination theory, reveals how the ‘instrumental motivation’ of teachers should be constrained and argues for the adoption of alternative motivational strategies to support effective professional learning in schools. (shrink)

The study investigated teachers’ conceptions of high-stakes and low-stakes assessments with a sample of 1,013 school teachers from China. In general, the assessment model indicated that school teac...

Of the many possible individual factors bearing on test preparation, one is how individuals’ motivational and cognitive perceptions affect test-driven preparation practices. This study reports an investigation into test preparation of a high-stakes writing test from the perspective of expectancy-value theory. Undergraduate students on their test preparation for the writing tasks of China’s Graduate School Entrance English Examination were recruited voluntarily from 11 universities in mainland China. The perceptions of GSEEE test takers, which included goal, task value, task (...) demand, and expectation of success, were identified. Five types of preparation practices were identified for the GSEEE writing tasks: memorizing practice, test familiarization, comprehensive learning, skills development and drilling practice. Structural equation modeling revealed that the expectancy-value model held up well for the paths from test takers’ perceptions to test-driven preparation practices, which were not construct-oriented but goal-motivated. The GSEEE test takers’ goal, determined by the high-stakes nature of admission test, explained their motivation and determined their behavior toward test preparation. Results also indicated that task demand was inadequate to be termed a strong factor in affecting test preparation. As such, the findings of this study offer evidence regarding how an expectancy-value model fit into test preparation mechanism and provide insights into the nature and scope of test preparation for high-stakes writing tests. (shrink)

The results of some high-stakes aptitude tests in Austria have revealed sex differences. We suggest that such discrepancies are mediated not principally by differences in aptitudes, skills, and knowledge but gender differences in test takers’ perceptions of the test situation. Furthermore, previous research has indicated that candidates’ evaluations of the fairness of the testing tool are of great importance from an institutional point of view because such perceptions are known to influence an organization’s attractiveness. In this study, we (...) aimed to investigate how women and men perceive and evaluate certain aspects of a high-stakes test situation by using the results and evaluations of an actual medical school aptitude test (753 applicants; 59% women). Test takers voluntarily evaluated the test situation and rated specific aspects of it (e.g., the fairness of the selection tool) and provided information regarding their test anxiety immediately after they completed the 4-hour test. Data analyses indicated small, albeit significant sex differences in participants’ perceptions of the test. Men described the test situation as slightly giving more opportunity to socialize and possessing more opportunity to deceive than women did. Furthermore, the perception of the test situation did not directly predict the test results, but it served as a moderator for the indirect effect of test anxiety on test results. By contrast, there were significant direct effects but no indirect effects of situation perception on evaluations of the fairness of the selection tool: The more the test situation was perceived as a high-pressure situation, the lower the fairness ratings of the testing tool. Results were discussed with reference to gender roles and test fairness. (shrink)

This paper employs _Conversation Analysis_ to investigate a specific interactional environment in Swedish police interviews (PIs): sequences where the interviewee asserts an inability to recollect specific events, and the police subsequently challenge this assertion. The police interview serves as a crucial setting for reconstructing past events and identifying the distribution of knowledge among participants. While previous research has delved into the cognitive mechanisms underlying memory retrieval in PIs, there exists a scarcity of empirical investigation of how memories and their associated (...) knowledge are interactionally managed within this high-stakes activity. Prior Conversation Analytic studies exploring how epistemic dimensions shape social interaction form the theoretical basis for the current study, including research indicating how ‘forgetfulness’ can be strategically employed as an interactional resource. Only a few studies have targeted recorded high-stakes interviews in Swedish, and the lack of such is problematic since international research have highlighted the influence of cultural and social factors on conditions and outcomes. Data used for this study comprises anonymized audio recordings (N = 51) from a preliminary murder investigation, making a valuable contribution to the understanding of interactional practices in Swedish police interviews. Results indicate a discrepancy in orientation between the police and the interviewee. The former treats the memories as accessible _knowables_ possible to retrieve, in contrast to the latter, who uses the police’s challenge as a vehicle for contesting the ‘impossible action of remembering.’. (shrink)

: The purposes of this critical analysis are to clarify why high stakes testing reforms have become so prevalent in the United States and to explain the connection between current federal and state emphases on standardized testing reforms and educational opportunities. The article outlines the policy context for high stakes examinations, as well as the ideas of testing and accountability as major tenets of current education reform and policy. In partial explanation of the widespread acceptance and (...) use of standardized tests in the United States, we argue that there is a pervasive testing culture, in addition to other contributing factors such as administrative utility, profit motives, and political ideology. Finally, we offer a critique of high stakes testing reforms in light of concerns about equality of educational opportunity. (shrink)

Gerald Nissenbaum, JD and John Sedgwick. 2010. Sex, love and money: Revenge and ruin in the world of high-stakes divorce Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11673-010-9243-5 Authors Katrina A. Bramstedt, Clinical Ethicist, Program in Medicine & Human Values, California Pacific Medical Center, 2395 Sacramento St, 3rd floor, San Francisco, CA 94115, USA Journal Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Online ISSN 1872-4353 Print ISSN 1176-7529 Journal Volume Volume 7 Journal Issue Volume 7, Number 3.

A series of high-profile ethical lapses by senior military professionals has generated calls from levels as high as the commander in chief for a renewed emphasis on military ethics. Leaders engaged in professional military education (PME) across the joint force have worked to ensure their programs support this call. This paper explores and assesses the ethics education programs at the service senior leader colleges (war colleges). There are three fundamental questions facing those charged with teaching ethics to senior (...) military officers. What are the desired outcomes of ethics education? How should the curriculum be structured to achieve those outcomes? And, finally, what is the correct faculty composition to develop and employ that curriculum? Using the answers to those questions to produce a rough framework for a model war college ethics education program, this paper then compares the current war college programs to this model form in order to determine areas of strength and weakness. This analysis reveals that the existing ethics education programs at the war colleges compare favorably to the model program structure. However, leaders at these institutions could further strengthen their programs by creating and empowering an "ethics team" that includes trained ethicists and military practitioners and by conducting more robust faculty development programs for nonethicists."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Cancer is a major burden on populations and health systems internationally. The development of innovative cancer medicines is seen as a significant part of the solution. These new cancer medicines are, however, expensive, leading to limited or delayed access and disagreements among stakeholders about which medicines to fund. There is no obvious resolution to these disagreements, with stakeholders holding firmly to divergent positions. Access to cancer medicines was recently explored in Australia in a Senate Inquiry into the Availability of New, (...) Innovative, and Specialist Cancer Drugs in Australia. We analysed the resultant Senate Report to identify competing stakeholder values. Our analysis illustrates that there are four main “goods” prioritized by different stakeholders: 1) innovation, 2) compassion, 3) equity, and 4) sustainability. We observe that, with the exception of sustainability, all of these “goods” put pressure on payers to provide access to cancer medicines more quickly and based on less rigorous evaluation processes. We then explore the consequences of giving in to such pressure and suggest that deconstructing the implicit values in calls for “enhanced access” to cancer medicines is necessary so that more nuanced solutions to the challenge of providing access to these high cost medicines can be found. (shrink)

There is conflicting experimental evidence about whether the “stakes” or importance of being wrong affect judgments about whether a subject knows a proposition. To date, judgments about stakes effects on knowledge have been investigated using binary paradigms: responses to “low” stakes cases are compared with responses to “high stakes” cases. However, stakes or importance are not binary properties—they are scalar: whether a situation is “high” or “low” stakes is a matter of degree. (...) So far, no experimental work has investigated the scalar nature of stakes effects on knowledge: do stakes effects increase as the stakes get higher? Do stakes effects only appear once a certain threshold of stakes has been crossed? Does the effect plateau at a certain point? To address these questions, we conducted experiments that probe for the scalarity of stakes effects using several experimental approaches. We found evidence of scalar stakes effects using an “evidence seeking” experimental design, but no evidence of scalar effects using a traditional “evidence-fixed” experimental design. In addition, using the evidence-seeking design, we uncovered a large, but previously unnoticed framing effect on whether participants are skeptical about whether someone can know something, no matter how much evidence they have. The rate of skeptical responses and the rate at which participants were willing to attribute “lazy knowledge”—that someone can know something without having to check—were themselves subject to a stakes effect: participants were more skeptical when the stakes were higher, and more prone to attribute lazy knowledge when the stakes were lower. We argue that the novel skeptical stakes effect provides resources to respond to criticisms of the evidence-seeking approach that argue that it does not target knowledge. (shrink)

According to a prominent claim in recent epistemology, people are less likely to ascribe knowledge to a high stakes subject for whom the practical consequences of error are severe, than to a low stakes subject for whom the practical consequences of error are slight. We offer an opinionated "state of the art" on experimental research about the role of stakes in knowledge judgments. We draw on a first wave of empirical studies--due to Feltz & Zarpentine (2010), (...) May et al (2010), and Buckwalter (2010)--which cast doubt on folk stakes sensitivity, and a second wave of empirical studies--due to Pinillos (2012) and Sripada & Stanley (2012)--said to vindicate it, as well as new studies of our own. We conclude that the balance of evidence to date best supports Folk stakes insensitivity, or that all else equal, stakes do not affect knowledge ascription. (shrink)

Contextualists and Subject Sensitive Invariantists often cite the knowledge norm of assertion as part of their argument. They claim that the knowledge norms in conjunction with our intuitions about when a subject is properly asserting in low or high stakes contexts provides strong evidence that what counts as knowledge depends on practical factors. In this paper, I present new data to suggest they are mistaken in the way they think about cases involving high and low stakes (...) and I show how insensitive invariantists can explain the data. I exploit recent work done on the distinction between flouting a norm and being blamed for that violation to formulate a rigorous theory of rational expected blameworthiness that allows insensitive invariantists to explain the data cited. (shrink)

What is at stake in high school philosophy education, and why? Why is it a good idea to teach philosophy at this level? This essay seeks to address some issues that arose in revising the Ontario grade 12 philosophy curriculum documents, significant insights from philosophy teacher education, and some early results of recent research funded by the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada. These three topics include curricular disputes, stories of transformation from philosophy student to philosophy (...) teacher, and preliminary research findings. All underscore the importance and complexity of philosophy education, as well as its challenges and benefits, including the cross-curricular benefits philosophy education imparts to the study of other subject areas. Collectively, these serve as a springboard for asking some larger and broader philosophical questions about the teaching and learning of philosophy, and they demonstrate that this is a promising new area of study and of teaching for philosophers of education. I will raise some questions about philosophy that will help frame the next stage in the SSHRC research into the teaching and learning of philosophy in Ontario, and which I contend are new and fundamental questions to ask about philosophy itself. (shrink)