Judicial discourse can grant or deprive liberty to litigants. It is, therefore, important to ensure fair hearing during trials and even more as courtrooms have become multilingual settings. In the Court of First Instance of Bafoussam, French (one of the official languages of Cameroon) often come into contact with more than 250 national languages.…

In November 2018, the Australian Government commissioned Robert French, a former Chief Justice of the High Court, an active scholar and Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, to report on the state of academic freedom in Australian universities. In particular, French was also asked to assess the effectiveness of university policies and…

Albeit well-intentioned, the practice of selectively changing the strike zone to promote young players' welfare is critically flawed. After discussing the central purpose of competitive sport, the duty of officials, and the significance of impartiality in officiating, this article demonstrates that this practice presents numerous practical…

In education, standards have to be interpreted, for planning of teaching, for development of assessments and for alignment analysis. In most cases, it is important that there is an agreement between individuals and organizations about how to interpret standards. However, there is a lack of studies of how consistent different group of judges are…

The Federal District Court decision in "Kitzmiller v. Dover" halted a school board's attempts to introduce an "intelligent design" account of human origins into science classrooms as an alternative to evolution. The judge's opinion judged the Board members' actions by implicit standards of deliberative democratic discourse, which this article…

This is a ready-to-use simulation that has high school students portraying all of the key players that decide how water from the Colorado River will be allocated. Students act as judges, lobbyists, news analysts, and even protesters during a mock water conference. Water supply is promised beyond nature's delivery, so the problem is real and will…

Review of the literature on transfer of learning or training since 1990 reveals a vast number of articles. However, when it comes to the ways professionals transfer learning to their practice, the research is limited. This led us to study a professional group, state court judges, to see how they integrate learning into their practice. Our study…

The term "turnaround" has taken a permanent place among the intercollegiate debate jargon. All too often, the first affirmative rebuttalists charge "turnaround" for every plan or response they do not know how to label properly. After so many "false alarms," judges are too weary or aggravated to notice the real thing,…

One way to improve topicality debates in CEDA (Cross Examination Debate Association) debate would be to thoroughly study the field contextual meanings of propositional phrases prior to submitting them to a vote. Judges need to reward exemplary arguments and "punish" poor arguments by substantially lowering a team's speaker points for…

Two major problem areas exist in current high school forensics. The first is the decline in the number of debate participants in some parts of the country. Contributing to this decline are demands on extracurricular time and money, a lack of strong leadership as coaches leave academia, barriers to participation such as increased difficulty in…

Offers a critique of the narrative perspective as it relates to the National Debate Tournament (NDT) and suggests that an alternative "expert" model would better satisfy the goals of the activity while simultaneously remedying the primary shortcomings of NDT debate. (MS)

A new approach for examining the quality of judgments from standard-setting judges using a Binomial Trials Model (BTM) is presented and illustrated with 26 judges from the Georgia High School Graduation Test. Results suggest that the BTM provides information not available from other methods. (SLD)

This publication is a compilation of articles directed toward providing a better understanding of the various aspects of gymnastics and to promote a greater proficiency among educators, coaches, judges, leaders, and participants of sport programs for girls and women. Articles in the first section cover the technical aspects of gymnastics: (1)…

Judgmental standard setting approaches rely on the perceptions of experts about examinee performance on a test. Traditional standard setting methods ask panelists to estimate how well a randomly selected hypothetical examinee who is representative of a well-defined target group, usually a minimally competent candidate (MCC), will perform on each…

Two studies of variations of the Angoff method (W. Angoff, 1971) involving nine elementary school teachers in each case compared a yes/no estimation with a proportion correct estimation for setting cut scores. Both methods yielded essentially equal cut scores, but judges found the yes/no method easier to implement. (SLD)