Online Education And Degree. Part 20. ANDROGYNY.

Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek andras (avSpaq—man) and gyne {yovx\—woman) referring to either the absence of any distinguishing masculine or feminine traits, as in the Hijras of India, or the combination of both masculine and feminine characteristics, whether spiritual, psychological, or physiological.
Most Western cultures presume a binary opposition between male and female. In the 1950s, June Singer revived a mystical interest in androgyny, reconciling the "masculine" and "feminine" aspects of a single human, restoring the balance between what Jung called animus and anima. Like Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung, Singer treated androgyny as archetypal, in which the divided self yearned for the complete reunion of male and female. This understanding of androgyny as a metaphysical ideal was implicit in shamans or deities like Buddha, Shiva, Kuan Yin, and Elohim. Even so, Singer believed that the sexes were naturally differentiated: that males are generally aggressive, dominant, hard, and logical, and women are passive, compliant, soft, and intuitive.
In 1974, Sandra Bern published the Bern Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), a self-test listing 20 socially desirable female traits, 20 socially desirable male traits, and 20 considered to be neutral. Male traits included "forceful," "analytical," and "self-sufficient"; female traits included "sympathetic," "loyal," and "compas-sionate"; and neutral items included "truthful," "sincere," and "friendly." Scores revealed the respondent's self-reported possession of socially desirable, stereotypically masculine and feminine personality characteristics. An individual who received high scores for both female and male traits was defined as androgynous, whereas one with low scores in both was described as undifferentiated. Gender traits had little correlation with the ascribed sex of participants. Like Singer and Jung, Bern believed that people who had androgynous psychological traits were the most effective and well-functioning individuals in society.
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At this time, Constructivism claimed that gender was socially constructed and could therefore be changed at will. Resistance to gender binaries and heterosexuality took the form of transvestitism, or performances as drag queens or drag kings. Kate Bornstein, having performed as a cross-dressing performance artist and encouraged the self-construction of "who you are," used surgery to change herself in 1998 to a "male-to-female lesbian transsexual" but has now settled into being neither male nor female, a gender outlaw.
To describe a born male as "lesbian" indicates some of the conceptual change required by this new gender fluidity, but it did not necessarily accommodate androgyny. A medical category, gender identity disorder, was created to describe those who felt incompatibility between their felt identity and their anatomy. Improvements in surgical processes made it possible to normalize anatomies as normalized male or female, and medical research sought to explain sex "transgres-sions" (gender identity disorder, cross-dressing, or homosexuality) physiologically in order to remove blame and effect a "cure." A few transsexuals, like female-to-male Jamison Green, rejected such normalizing "cures" and accepted their androgynous status to the extent of having hormone treatment but not requiring a surgically constructed penis or denying their past.
Despite a relatively low level of sexual dimor-phism in humans, Charles Darwin had naturalized the sex binary in The Descent of Man by referring to naturally selected sex differences between male and female in gonads, sex organs, body mass, amount and placement of body hair, intelligence, psychological traits such as aggression, and child-rearing practices. But he tended to overlook the high amount of androgyny in the natural world, for instance, in worms and snails. About 30% of the fish species on a coral reef start out as males and end as females, or vice versa, or are both male and female at the same time. Could humans be naturally androgynous?
In 1993 in Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argued that even though we construct gender, our material bodies sometimes prevent us from conforming to social norms. Earlier in Gender Trouble, she claimed that drag queens in their "queer performativ-ity" demonstrate resistance to being required to "perform" normal dichotomous roles of male or female which they do not feel. The existence of physically androgynous humans challenges those dichotomies at an even more profound level.
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Anne Fausto-Sterling estimates conservatively that 1 in 1,000 persons is born with androgynous physiological features. Previously called hermaphrodites, they are now medically defined as intersex, a term, like androgyny, applied to any person with characteristics determined as neither exclusively male nor female, or combining features of both. The most common cause of so-called sexual ambiguity is congenital adrenal hyperplasia, an endocrine condition in which the adrenal glands produce unusually high levels of virilizing hormones. In genetic females, this leads to an appearance that may be slightly masculinized (large clitoris) to quite masculine. Another form of intersex is andro-gen insensitivity syndrome, in which people born with masculinizing Y chromosomes do not develop male morphology. Other physiological androgynes show chromosome variations such as 47XXY, 45XO, or mosaics. Far from being revered as complete or ideal persons, such anatomical androgynes are usually classified as male or female sex at birth and surgically or hormonally transformed into either male or female in childhood, with remaining variations of the male-female binary seen as transgressive.
Bern and Fausto-Sterling argue that the danger of perpetuating the male-female binary lies in the fact that cultural roles and norms remain dictated by males and highly polarized male values. The placement of the androgyne at the center of our understanding of physical and cultural humanness and our acceptance of complex combinations of male and female defuse current hegemonies.

Felicity Ann Haynes







EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Education And Degree. Part 16. Alternative academic assessment.

ALTERNATIVE ACADEMIC ASSESSMENT
Alternative academic assessment (AAA) is a class of procedures that are commonly used to assess student
Types Curriculum-Based Assessment
Most AAAs fall under the umbrella of CBA. The fundamental characteristics of CBA include that it (a) derives from, or is substantially similar to, the curriculum; (b) is linked to instruction; and (c) is used primarily to guide curriculum placement and instructional procedures. CBA procedures and instrumentation can be developed to assess skills within either a broad domain or a narrow domain.
CBA is divided into two subgroups: general outcome measures (GOMs) and subskill mastery measures (SMMs). GOMs are used to assess the level and rate of student achievement within a broad range of skills. GOMs are typically used to assess the achievement within the annual curriculum and instruction. A consistent set of procedures and instrumentation are used throughout the academic year. For example, mathematics computation in second grade might be assessed with tasks that span two-digit addition without carrying through four-digit subtraction with borrowing. The stimulus set and task demands are heterogeneous and representative of the annual curriculum. In contrast, SMMs are used to assess the level and rate of student achievement within a narrow range of skills and, usually, within a narrow range of time, which might be defined by an instructional unit. Procedures and instrumentation might change for each instructional unit so as to assess a specific and distinct set of skills that are aligned with the curriculum and instruction. For example, mathematics computation assessments might be narrowed to include only two-digit by two-digit subtraction without borrowing. The stimulus set and task demands are homogeneous and representative of the short-term instructional goal.
The variety of CBA procedures is broad. The following sections review a subset of available procedures. These include curriculum-based measurement, CBA for instructional design, criterion-referenced CBA, curriculum-based evaluation, and informal reading inventories. There are many other CBA procedures, which include end-of-chapter assessments that come along with curriculum materials. The selected procedures are a representative sample of those with the most prominence.
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Curriculum-Based Measurement
Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) is a standardized assessment procedure that is used to index the level and rate of academic growth in four basic skills: reading, mathematics, written expression, and spelling. CBM is generally classified as a GOM because it is used to assess student achievement within the annual curriculum. It is defined as stan-dardized procedure and not as a standardized test. This distinction is necessary because the instrumentation is not standard across applications.
CBM was developed by Stanley Deno and col-leagues in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. More than 200 research studies of CBM are published in peer-refereed journals, and technical development continues through the present day. CBM oral reading fluency (CBM-R) is the most prominent of the available procedures. In CBM-R, the student reads aloud for one minute as the administrator (usually the teacher) follows along on another copy of the passage. The administrator notes errors made and tallies up the number of words read correctly. This yields the student's reading rate, which is reported in units of words read correctly per minute. Error rates and accuracy are also reported sometimes.
CBM was designed to serve as an "academic thermometer" to monitor students' growth in four basic skill domains. The procedures are sometimes described as "dynamic indicators of basic skills." CBM is dynamic in that assessment outcomes are useful to evaluate the effects of instruction over the short term. Outcomes are useful to guide either summative or formative decisions. Summative decisions require one-time evaluations of the level of academic achievement. Formative decisions require ongoing evaluations of the level and rate of academic achievement, which are usually evaluated to estimate the effects of instruction. CBM is an indicator in that it provides a general assessment of academic health within each domain. That is, although CBM-R yields outcomes in words read correctly per minute, that level of oral reading fluency is useful to estimate the general reading achievement and predict performance on large-scale assessments (e.g., statewide tests). CBM targets basic skills in that there are procedures in each of the four fundamental basic skill domains (reading, writing, math, and spelling).
Formative assessment can inform intervention and determine the effectiveness of an intervention. Here is an example: Nick, a second-grade student was referred to the school psychologist for low CBM scores in reading. Nick reads 30 words correctly per minute, compared to the expected 60 words per minute by second grade. The school psychologist or teacher implements an intervention of paired reading for half an hour a day. The following week, Nick completes another CBM at 35 words per minute. Now the discrepancy between Nick's score and the expected score has decreased, signifying that Nick is responding to the intervention. If the discrepancy continues to decrease, Nick will continue with paired reading until he reads at the expected second-grade level. Should the discrepancy remain the same or increase, the intervention will be modified until the desired level of growth is achieved.
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CBA for Instructional Design
CBA for instructional design (CBA-ID) was developed to match the student to the appropriate instructional and curriculum level and focuses on individualizing instruction to ensure mastery learning of all students. A good instructional match maximizes student learning and engagement by fitting the student's needs. Research has found that students are most successful when they are able to respond correctly to material 93% to 97% of the time. This is called the instructional level. CBA-ID starts by finding the student's instructional level and then tests for areas of skill deficits.
CBA-ID has four steps. The first is to choose an appropriate passage for the student to read and test for the student's instructional level by asking them to read 20 to 30 randomly chosen words from the passage. If the student gets five or fewer words wrong, then he or she moves on to the next step. If more than five errors are made, then the student is retested in a passage at a lower level. The second step requires the student to read the passage. As the student reads, the examiner records the student's errors. Afterward, the student is asked questions about the passage to assess how well the student comprehends what he or she read. The last two steps of CBA-ID are to use the assessment information to match the student to appropriate reading instruction and curriculum. Progress monitoring continues as the student is instructed and necessary changes are made.
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Criterion-Referenced CBA
Criterion-referenced CBA (CR-CBA) is similar to CBA-ID in that it was developed to determine appropriate instructional materials and strategies. The methods differ, however, in that CBA-CR determines an acceptable level of performance by comparing student scores to a locally normed sample of average peers. Students are tested on items from the curriculum in order of easy to difficult within a reading series. The teacher or examiner constructs reading tests by using 100-word passages from the beginning, middle, and end of the reading series. Students are tested across 3 days on nine passages; three from the beginning, middle, and end each. As the student reads, the examiner records student errors and then calculates the student's accuracy level (percentage of words read correctly across the entire 100-word passage) and rate of reading (the product of accuracy and 60 divided by total seconds it took the student to read the passage). Next, the student is asked six comprehension questions. Finally, the median scores for the 3 days of assessment are summarized. Assessment decisions are made based on the student's performance compared to the mastery criteria.
Curriculum-Based Evaluation
Curriculum-based evaluation (CBE) is used to determine the student's general whereabouts in the curriculum to identify specific areas of skill deficit. Administration begins with survey level assessment to identify if the student's performance meets expected goals. The initial survey level assessment is developed by sampling a broad domain from the curriculum. In the case of reading, for example, broad skills such as decoding and comprehension are tested. If the results show that the student has a deficit, a skill-specific criterion-referenced test is administered. This second test focuses on specific skills such as segmenting words, rhyming, intonation, and other reading-related sub-skills. Results are used to adapt instruction to the student's needs.
Informal Reading Inventories
Informal reading inventories (IRIs) are similar to CBE in that they identify specific subskill deficits. There is much variance among the increasing number of published IRIs; however, most follow a typical assessment method. First, the student is asked to read from a graded word list. Depending on the student's accuracy, he or she moves up or down a grade level in word lists until the student's instructional level is found. The definition of this level varies among IRIs but usually falls around 90% words read correctly. Second, the student reads a passage from his or her instructional level. As the student reads, the examiner records the student's errors, or miscues. This yields the student's accuracy and reading rate. Next, the miscues are grouped into categories like omissions, substitutions, low fluency words, and repetitions. Attention is also paid to the types of words that are miscued. This allows the examiner to identify specific areas of weakness. For example, a student may struggle with words with a silent e. IRIs determine not only which level of curriculum to place students in but also specific areas of weakness.


EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.