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This book presents a number of fundamentally challenging perspectives that have been brought to the fore by the national tests on religious education (RE) in Sweden. It particularly focuses on the content under the heading Ethics. It is common knowledge that many teachers find these parts difficult to handle within RE. Further, ethics is a field that addresses a range of moral and existential issues that are not easily treated. Many of these issues may be said to belong to the philosophical context, in which “eternal questions” are gathered and reflected upon. The first chapters highlight the concepts of ethical competence and critical thinking. In the following chapters the concept of ethical competence is analyzed with regard to teachers'objectives and to students'texts, respectively. These chapters pursue a more practice-related approach and highlight specific challenges identified from both teacher and student perspectives. Next, the book raises the issue of global responsibility. What kind of critical issues arise when handling such matters at school? Further, can contemporary moral philosophers contribute to such a discussion? In turn, the book discusses the role of statistical analyses with regard to national tests, while the closing chapters present international perspectives on the book's main themes and concluding remarks. The book's critical yet constructive approach to issues regarding assessment in ethics education makes a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate among researchers as well as to the everyday communication on testing in schools and classrooms. As such, it will appeal to scholars in ethics education and researchers in the field of assessment, as well as educators and teachers interested and engaged in the task of testing ethics in school contexts where curricular demands for valid and authoritative evaluation may provide important guidelines, but may also pose challenges of their own.

This book analyses and discusses the recent developments for assessing research quality in the humanities and related fields in the social sciences. Research assessments in the humanities are highly controversial and the evaluation of humanities research is delicate. While citation-based research performance indicators are widely used in the natural and life sciences, quantitative measures for research performance meet strong opposition in the humanities. This volume combines the presentation of state-of-the-art projects on research assessments in the humanities by humanities scholars themselves with a description of the evaluation of humanities research in practice presented by research funders. Bibliometric issues concerning humanities research complete the exhaustive analysis of humanities research assessment. The selection of authors is well-balanced between humanities scholars, research funders, and researchers on higher education. Hence, the edited volume succeeds in painting acomprehensive picture of research evaluation in the humanities. This book is valuable to university and science policy makers, university administrators, research evaluators, bibliometricians as well as humanities scholars who seek expert knowledge in research evaluation in the humanities.

Calls for renewed moral education in America's schools, offering dozens of programs schools can adopt to teach students respect, responsibility, hard work, and other values that should not be left to parents to teach.

This work is concerned with appraising the contemporary ethical impact of lifelong learning ideology and advocacy on education, through focusing on trends in educational policy and management that flow from the ideology. It has its origins in the author's concern that many of those trends are being defmed and promoted, or opposed, without an adequate understanding of their ethical dimensions. The 21 trends examined in this work are seen as defming important dimensions of the quite radical changes in educational policy and management that are flowing from the practical realisation of lifelong learning ideology and advocacy. In here evaluating those trends from an ethical perspective, the thesis is developed that they lead inevitably to distinctive ethical dilemmas or tensions in the lived experience of educational participants. The dilemmas, though, are not seen as realities that can intelligently be either avoided or resolved. They are, rather, inescapable features of the trends, although they and the experience of them may be managed intelligently to a greater or lesser extent. This analysis is premised on the belief that an understanding of the dilemmas may be of practical value in assisting educators, and policy makers and managers, to live and work more intelligently with them and to better manage the educational changes that are defmed by the trends. It may thereby contribute to moderating the excesses, sillinesses, and inanities so often evident in the directing and managing of refonns associated with the trends and to reduce the anguish and pain associated with them.