Next Generation Assessment examines performance assessment as an alternative to the current high-stakes standardized testing system. This important resource provides a thorough analysis of the prospects and challenges of sustaining performance assessments on a large scale. Linda Darling-Hammond, with a team of leading scholars, describes the history and current uses of performance assessments in the United States and abroad and summarizes the latest findings in the field.

The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic philosophy and historical-comparative phonology (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)

This book, the first in its field in a Western language, examines China’s native phonological tool with regard to reconstruction, theory, and linguistic philosophy.

The papers in this volume show the range and direction of current work in historical semantics and word-studies. There is a strong focus throughout on semantic change and lexical innovation, interpreted within a sociolinguistic, cultural or textual context. Many of the papers draw on the remarkable range of electronic resources now available to historical linguists, notably corpora, dictionaries, bibliographies and thesauruses, and show the effects that these have had in stimulating new lines of research or the re-interpretation of previous conclusions. Cognitive semantics, and especially prototype theory, emerges as a challenging theoretical framework for much current research.

A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis

Only once we understand the long history of human efforts to draw sustenance from the land can we grasp the nature of the crisis that faces humankind today, as hundreds of millions of people are faced with famine or flight from the land. From Neolithic times through the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East, in savannahs, river valleys and the terraces created by the Incas in the Andean mountains, an increasing range of agricultural techniques have developed in response to very different conditions. These developments are recounted in this book, with detailed attention to the ways in which plants, animals, soil, climate, and society have interacted.

Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems (now available in journal format), is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloquium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice.