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To detail the changing nature of retail and service activity in Canada's downtowns and examine the role of business improvement areas (BIAs) in promoting downtown vitality.

The research is based on a combination of retail structural analysis and case study research. The structural analysis provides data on transitioning urban demographics and tracks retail and service activity sales change in Canada's major metropolitan downtowns. The case study reports an overview of findings from in‐depth research with the Downtown Yonge BIA. A small number of retail metrics are presented.

The paper highlights the significant suburb shift in retail activity across Canada's metropolitan areas and the associated challenges that this has resulted in for the downtown. The role of BIAs are outlined, and examined with reference to operation of the BIA concept within the downtown core of Canada's largest metropolitan market, Toronto.

The research has been selective in focusing on the Downtown Yonge BIA, the experiences of BIAs across Toronto (and other Canada metropolitan areas) are likely to vary widely. Highlights the need to develop metrics to measure performance and compare BIAs.

The paper provides an interesting perspective on BIA strategies, with the selected metrics providing BIA managers and urban planners with a set of additional measures to assess BIA performance

The paper relates BIA planning to the development of performance metrics.

With the emerging global culture of education as multicultural, multilingual, and plurilingual, higher education is becoming a more contested and complex space for both teachers and students at different localities and contexts. Such complexities create possibilities as well as challenges for educators who should address these diversities yet maintain the quality of teaching and learning. Both local scholars/educators and transnationally mobile academics/teachers face these challenges in different ways. This chapter focusses on the affordances of the latter: academics who have been engaged in diverse teaching/research contexts and developed certain perceptions of ‘Being’ in ‘intercultural’ spaces within and without boundaries and across time. In particular, the experiences of a female academic, from the Middle East, involved in teaching and researching English Literacy pedagogy transnationally, as a former academic at an Iranian university and then in a Western university, will be examined through autoethnography and in reflection upon her positioning, both as a student and a teacher in these local and global contexts. Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of insided-ness, outsided-ness, and in-between-ness, and Hermans and Hermans-Konopka’s (2010) Dialogical Self Theory (DST) will inform this chapter philosophically. Recent work in higher education on ‘complexity thinking’ and ‘relationality’ (Beckett & Hager, 2018) will ground this chapter too. These conceptual frameworks enable the author to scrutinise diverse perspectives on ‘Being’ and ideologies (ontologies), and diverse formation of knowledge (epistemologies) which result in diverse teaching and learning practices. The author links these diversities to the notion of ‘literacy’ in global times and shows, through her narratives, how her particular cultural, social, historical, and embodied literacies position her pedagogically as a non-Anglo academic in English education within a Western university. This affords her to construct her in-between position by not fully assimilating the target culture, nor fading her Middle Eastern identities. Instead, she brings affordances of her intercultural Being in creation of the ‘third space’ for her own teaching and learning practices. In turn, this has led to how her students across subjects are encouraged not to dissolve into the dominant frame of thinking; but to search for their own ‘Being’ through reviving individual, local stories and to express themselves globally, yet act as ‘glocally’ literate people who are able to make particular changes in their own life and in the lives of others.

This chapter concludes with challenging the implicit ideological position in global higher education which promotes a unified and homogenised epistemology (often Western/Anglo) within the multicultural, multilingual, and even plurilingual context of education. The author, echoing Yun and Standish (2018) specifically questions how internationalisation of education has led to a reductive dichotomisation of local students versus international students (through a deficit lens) rather than of establishing a rich platform for bringing to the fore heterogenous voices, diverse narratives, and plural/multiple knowledge platforms to argue, create, reflect, narrate, and collaborate more fruitfully. Instead she claims for expanding, extending, and extrapolating ways in which knowledge can be (de/re) constructed by people (both learners and teachers) as active agents of change, inter/trans-culturally.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how test‐based accountability has influenced school and district practices and explore how states and districts might consider creating expanded systems of measures to address the shortcomings of traditional accountability. It provides research‐based guidance for entities that are developing or adopting new measures of school performance.

The study relies on literature review, consultation with expert advisers, review of state and district documentation, and semi‐structured interviews with staff at state and local education agencies and research institutions.

The research shows mixed effects of test‐based accountability on student achievement and demonstrates that teachers and administrators change their practices in ways that respond to the incentives provided by the system. The review of state and district measurement systems shows widespread use of additional measures of constructs, such as school climate and college readiness.

There is a clear need for additional research on the short‐ and long‐term effects of expanded systems of measures. In particular, currently little is known about how the inclusion of input and process measures influences educators’ practices or student outcomes.

The research suggests several practical steps that can be taken to promote effective systems of measurement, including providing supports for high‐quality teaching to accompany new measures, offering flexibility to respond to local needs, and conducting validity studies that address the various purposes of the measures.

The paper provides new information about how states and districts are expanding their systems of measures for various purposes, and informs accountability policy by highlighting the benefits and limitations of current outcomes‐based approaches to accountability and by clarifying the trade‐offs and decisions that should be considered.

Internal control evaluation is a critical component of the overall audit process, mandated by auditing standards worldwide. These standards divide internal control structures into a number of elements, summarised as the control environment, information systems, and control procedures. Significant research exists as to auditors’ evaluations of internal controls. However, little work appears to consider the elements’ inter‐actions and relative significance. This study attempts to gauge the relative importance external auditors assign to the three elements. 94 practicing auditors evaluated internal control structures in two fictitious companies, one with strong internal control elements throughout, the other with one of the three set at a lower reliability level. The results indicate auditors consider control environment the most important element of internal control. The effect of weakening this element was that auditors assessed all three elements and overall evaluation as less reliable. Varying the other two elements did not have such significant effects. The findings carry ramifications for the auditing profession, particularly in drafting auditing standards on risk assessment.

Digital technologies have transformed what it means to be literate and to experience literacy. Various literacies have been coined to capture this transformation including established literacies like computer literacy, information literacy, digital literacy, media literacy and internet literacy, to newer conceptions like transliteracy, metaliteracy and multimodal literacy. The purpose of this paper is to assimilate the various conceptions of literacy and literacy types is becoming increasingly more complex. There is a need for a taxonomy of literacies that reflects more recent developments, one that more comprehensively captures the current literacy landscape and one that might have affordances in the future.

“Library and Information Science Abstracts” (LISA), “Education Resources Information Center” (ERIC) and “British Education Index” were searched for documents relating to digital technologies and literacy. Relevant documents were retrieved and reviewed. This was followed by selective backward and forward citation searching and a further review of relevant documents.

Based on a review of the literature, two significant dimensions of literacy were identified. These dimensions were used to create a literacy framework to enable the classification of literacies and literacy types, i.e. a taxonomy of literacies. This taxonomy was successfully applied to various prominent literacies and literacy types.

The literacy framework was only applied to those literacies and literacy types that are directly or indirectly related to digital technologies.

There have been a few attempts to classify some literacy types. When conceived, these classifications comprehensively captured some aspect of the literacy landscape. However, they are now dated and there is a need for a taxonomy of literacies that meets the needs identified above. This paper proposes a taxonomy that meets these criteria.

THERE were (at the beginning of 1964) 138 daily and Sunday newspapers in the United Kingdom. Some of these, perhaps 20, are nationals with mass circulations ranging from the Financial Times (140,000) to the News of the World (six million). The rest, together with a large number of weeklies, constitutes the provincial press which at its best is one of the main strengths of British journalism.

This paper discusses how educational policies have shaped the development of large-scale educational data and reviews current practices on the educational data use in selected states. Our purposes are to: (1) analyze the common practice and use of educational data in postsecondary education institutions and identify challenges as the educational crossroads; (2) propose the concept of Data Literacy (DL) for teaching (Mandinach & Gummer, 2013a) and its relevance to researchers and stakeholders in postsecondary education; and (3) provide future implications for practices and research to increase educational DL among administrators, practitioners, and faculty in postsecondary education.

We used two guiding conceptual frameworks to analyze the common practice and use of educational data in postsecondary education institutions and identify challenges as the educational crossroads. First, we used the 4Vs of Big Data by Rajan (2012) to examine the misalignment between the policy mandate and the practices. The elements of the 4Vs of Big Data – volume, velocity, variety, and veracity – help us to depict how Big Data enables educators to organize, store, manage, and manipulate vast amounts of educational data at the right moment and at the right time. Second, we used the conceptual framework for DL proposed by Gummer and Mandinach (in press). They interpret DL “as the collection, examination, analysis, and interpretation of data to inform some sort of decision in an educational setting” (p. 1, in press).

Using the guiding frameworks, we identified four educational data crossroads as follows:

Crossroad 1: Unintended Increase in Workload Volume;

Crossroad 2: Unrealistic Expectations of Data Velocity;

Crossroad 3: Data Variety in Silos; and

Crossroad 4: Data Veracity and Policy Agenda Mismatch.

In this paper, we explain each of these crossroads in more detail with some examples.

Much of the existing body of literature, exemplary practices, as well as federal and state funding has been focused on K-12 education contexts. In this paper, we identify current practices and challenges of educational data in the institutions of higher education. Additionally, this paper presents the application of the exemplary practices of data literacy development in postsecondary education and implications for future practices of data literacy development in postsecondary education.