/library/oar/handle/123456789/18523 2025-11-09T20:51:29Z 2025-11-09T20:51:29Z Baldacchino, Godfrey /library/oar/handle/123456789/137853 2025-08-01T05:58:14Z 2025-06-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Stretching boundaries of critical education : past, present and future possibilities [Book review] Authors: Baldacchino, Godfrey Abstract: What do I profess? I was once thus questioned at Heathrow Airport by an immigration officer, having jotted down ‘professor’ as my employment on an immigration form. It is not an easy question to answer, especially on the fly. As one of so many educators, I often worry and think about how best to engage with my classroom, and its human subjects, shaping this amalgam into an exciting and energising experience, with productive consequences beyond the lecture itself. But: what if my students are just interested in securing a grade and getting on with their lives? What does ‘education’ really mean to these persons? And do I bother to publish for my own self-aggrandisement, especially when so many students don’t read, even if they had time to do so? These hard questions keep piling up. We never successfully address them; and they never go away. But we can try and get to better grips with them by venturing in either of two directions: upstream, to better understand the contexts and dynamics that have led to the contemporary classroom; and downstream, to scrutinise how to foster specific educational settings that build respectful, dialectical, peer-to-peer conversations; that liberate and empower those involved. (Calling those involved ‘students’ here is quite unsavoury.) [excerpt] Description: Full bibliographic record: Carmel Borg and Peter Mayo (Eds.) (2025). Stretching boundaries of critical education: Past, present and future possibilities. Faculty of Education, University of Malta. ISBN: 978-9918-20-334-5.

2025-06-01T00:00:00Z Attard, Ritienne Chetcuti, Deborah /library/oar/handle/123456789/135098 2025-05-07T09:48:47Z 2024-12-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Policy to practice : assessment reform in Maltese science classrooms Authors: Attard, Ritienne; Chetcuti, Deborah Abstract: New ideas about learning and assessment have led to assessment reforms in many countries, with governments and educators introducing new assessment policies that focus more on assessment for learning rather than measuring achievement. What is problematic about assessment reform is that new policies are written by one group of individuals, usually administrators, and passed down to teachers who need to implement them within the classroom context. The shift from policy to practice is not without its challenges and there is no guarantee that new assessment policies are successfully implemented by teachers. This study explores how teachers in Maltese science classrooms implement assessment reform. More specifically it focuses on the introduction of School Based Assessment (SBA) to replace summative half-yearly examinations. Using a qualitative methodology, the study looks at the experiences of two Maltese Science Education Officers (EOs) and five Integrated Science teachers in two Maltese state schools as they navigated the shift from using assessment practices that involved traditional testing to school-based assessment practices that were more focused on student learning. The findings suggest that for the participants of the study the implementation of assessment reform was not a linear journey. The participants went through a process that involved: (i) an initial resistance to change, especially the removal of the half-yearly examinations; (ii) using coping mechanisms; and (iii) becoming empowered within a teacher community to embrace and implement new assessment practices. The study suggests that to implement reform science teachers need to develop an ‘assessment literacy’ within professional learning communities that give them voice, provide them with support and empower them with the knowledge, skills, and resources that lead to successful assessment reform.

2024-12-01T00:00:00Z Saliba, Brian Zarb, Ayrton /library/oar/handle/123456789/135092 2025-05-07T09:15:09Z 2024-12-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The impact of sport participation on academic performance among Maltese secondary school students Authors: Saliba, Brian; Zarb, Ayrton Abstract: Existing research suggests that smaller class sizes, diverse teaching methods, and engagement in sports yield positive returns on students’ educational outcomes. This paper investigates whether students participating in sports when preparing for their Secondary Educational Certificate, a pivotal milestone in their life, exhibit higher academic performances in English language and Mathematics than their non-participating counterparts. Utilising online self-completion questionnaires from students who underwent exams in the past two years, these findings reveal a statistically significant positive correlation between the frequency of sports participation and academic performance regarding improved grades. Furthermore, the study highlights that this positive influence of sports is more evident in Mathematics than in English. Additional insights from this study indicate that students in private schools generally achieve higher grades than state school students, and academic marks vary according to the students’ residential district due to diverse cultural backgrounds.

2024-12-01T00:00:00Z Bezzina Busuttil, Anne-Marie Bajada Sultana, Jessica /library/oar/handle/123456789/134977 2025-05-05T10:21:01Z 2024-12-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Attitudes towards foreign language learning at post-secondary education level in Malta Authors: Bezzina Busuttil, Anne-Marie; Bajada Sultana, Jessica Abstract: In recent decades, numbers of students taking up modern foreign languages (MFL) in post-compulsory education in Malta have shrunk to an alarming low, and the Maltese population’s past multilingual skills have undergone a significant decline. This study aims to understand the reasons for post-secondary (PS) students’ avoidance of MFL in their choice of subjects for Advanced level studies by analysing their attitudes to MFL and investigating which external and internal factors of influence impact on their level of interest in foreign language learning (FLL). A questionnaire was distributed to PS students in four of the six pre-university institutions in Malta. Results from the representative sample of respondents confirm the existence of negative attitudes to FLL among PS students. External factors of influence such as discontinuity between secondary and PS language curricula, and unsatisfactory FLL experiences at secondary level appear to be among the factors dissuading some PS learners from pursuing MFL studies. Internal factors such as causal attributions of success or failure in language studies compound the feelings of low learner agency. A case study is conducted concerning French, a foreign language (FL) in sharp decline, revealing perceptions of difficulty with regard to the language, as well as stereotypical associations that cling to the language, making it to some extent subject to lingering prejudice. Understanding actual PS learners’ beliefs about FLL is an important step towards effectively addressing the unpopularity of MFL.

2024-12-01T00:00:00Z