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In this review chapter, I will discuss each of the three chapters in its own right, and then step back to take on larger issues implicit in the subtitle of the chapter: ‘Emerging Issues in Classroom Assessment.’ I will start this broader discussion from the vantage of the three chapter reviews, but will venture well beyond that before the end of the account.

This chapter advances a definition for “college-ready data-based reasoning�? and describes the development of the Critical Reasoning for College Readiness (CR4CR) Assessment. This assessment has both summative and formative elements, coordinated by an underlying learning progression. Drawing on a literature review on statistics curricula, we have developed (a) a framework for data-based reasoning at the college-entry level and (b) an instrument to measure two of the constructs in that framework: Linking Data to a Claim (LDC) and Formal Inference (FoI). The LDC construct describes student development in thinking about the link between data and the content of a statistical claim, while FoI describes student development in critical reasoning when making formal inference with respect to the notions of practical and statistical significance. Using the BEAR Assessment System (BAS) iterative approach for the instrument development, we found that the developmental progressions defined as FoI and LDC are promising, but that further iterations of the BAS cycle are needed.

A physical quantity (such as mass, temperature or electrical strength) appears as a field if it is distributed continuously and variably throughout a region. In distinction to a ’lumped’ quantity, whose condition at any time can be specified by a finite list of numbers, a complete description of a field requires infinitely many bits of data (it is said to ’possess infinite degrees of freedom’). A field is classical if it fits consistently within the general framework of classical mechanics. By the start of the twentieth century, orthodox mechanics had evolved to a state of ontological dualism, incorporating a worldview where massive matter appears as ’lumped’ points which communicate electrical and magnetic influences to one another through a continuous intervening medium called the electromagnetic field. The problem of consistently describing how matter and fields function together has yet to be fully resolved.

Understood at its most general, ‘classical mechanics’ covers the approach to physical phenomena that dominated science from roughly the time of Galileo until the early decades of the twentieth century. The approach is usually characterized by the assumption that bodies carry an inherent mass and well-defined positions and velocities. Bodies subsist within a three-dimensional absolute space and influence one another through reciprocal forces. These objects obey the three laws of motion articulated by Isaac Newton in 1686 in a deterministic manner: once a mechanical system is assembled, its future behaviour is rigidly fixed. Such ‘classical’ assumptions were eventually rejected by Einstein’s theory of relativity, where the assumption of a three-dimensional Euclidean space is abandoned, and by quantum mechanics, where determinism and well-defined positions and velocity are eschewed. Classical mechanics is frequently characterized as ‘billiard ball mechanics’ or ‘the theory of mechanism’ on the grounds that the science treats its materials in the manner of colliding particles, or clockwork. Such stereotypes should be approached with caution because the basic framework of classical mechanics has long been subject to divergent interpretations that unpack the content of Newton’s ‘three laws’ in remarkably different ways. These differing interpretations provide incompatible catalogues of the basic objects that are supposed to comprise the ‘classical world’ – are they point masses, rigid bodies or flexible substances? Or, as many writers have suggested, should mechanics not be regarded as ‘about’ the world at all, but merely as a source of useful but fictitious idealizations of reality? These foundational disagreements explain why classical mechanics has often found itself entangled in metaphysics. Much of modern philosophy of science is characterized by attitudes that were originally articulated during the nineteenth century’s attempts to clarify the grounds of classical mechanics.

This paper and the art project on which it draws, (between You and Me, Kalmar Konstmuseum 2009) acknowledges the presence of non-human-animals as co-partners in any human-animal dialogue with landscape. In the light of this, it focuses on the seal, a non-human-animal widely appropriated in Western culture, for a variety of human-animal representations and emotions. The specific geographical context of Iceland, offers access to a multiplicity of human-animal attitudes towards the non-human-animal and so to different conceptions of cultural value bestowed on the non-human-animal, which lead in turn to discrete modes of consumerist engagement. A number of people were interviewed on camera, each having had sustained contact with the seal, by means variously of observation, caring and hunting. From the interviews a variety of pictures emerged, about living with nature, in the past and in the present, but quite commonly resulting in the death of the animal, both physically and metaphorically. The space of encounter between humans and animals is haunted by this eclipse or obliteration. This practical research, conducted as visual art, explores the consequential splitting of the ‘representational’ animal from the ‘living’ animal and how this rupture is manifested as a series of new and seamless constructs.

Feral Attraction explores the disconnection between empiricism and cultural determinacy and consider the effects of cultural blindfolding in a context of environmental fatalism. The project focuses on the site of the Vestfjords, a remote area in the North West of Iceland, which became the theatre for the enactment of urban/rural ideological tensions and ultimately, a frenetic and awkward resolution involving the herding and eventual eradication of a community of feral animals. The Vestfjords is an environment, which during the twentieth century has been increasingly host to controversy surrounding the inexorable population drain from a rural to urban way of life involving two gradual processes. One was the migration of people from farming regions into coastal towns (including Reykjavik) and the abandonment of farms in large parts of the Vestfjords. The second was the persistent out-migration from the region as a whole, including its coastal towns, both small and large. The herding narrative that follows in some way mirrors the management of remote farming families and small communities, the continuing presence of which came to be considered from an administrative perspective, to be an unsustainable drain on the wider National project. Our art research project focuses on the significance of imagery in the story and on the particular resonance of visual information in the accumulation and instrumentalisation of knowledge as the events unfolded.