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Disney’s cable channel has global reach and the highest audience share among 9–14 year olds, demonstrating its powerful influence in constructing narratives for young citizens. It has produced several films and television shows aimed at tween girls, which embody the paradoxes and ‘double entanglements’ of postfeminism discussed by Angela McRobbie. These representations demonstrate many postfeminist characteristics, such as a focus on girls’ empowerment and neoliberal agency; temporal anxiety and time travel; commodification of racial difference; affluence and consumerism; the assumption of gender equality, even as its achievement makes it politically irrelevant; and femininity/romance as girls’ free and natural choice. This paper examines current Disney Channel hits such as Liv and Maddie, Girl Meets World, K.C. Undercover, Teen Beach Movie and Teen Beach 2. The doubling of female identity – following the Hannah Montana pattern of a double life, and replicated in K.C. Undercover and the Teen Beach movies by creating past/present dyads of characters from the 1960s/1970s and the present day – creates the opportunity to represent contrasting ideas of femininity and feminist history, engaging a politics of nostalgia that erases feminism as a political movement, while reaffirming a neoliberal notion of postfeminist girlhood.

Assessment, by definition, is a means of estimating the quality or value of something. In this case assessment may be geared toward students directly in the form of enhancing learning, faculty in terms of better teaching, departments for improved curriculum development, and institutions for the purpose of public relations, resource allocation, and accreditation. This panel examined assessment in all of these cases, with a particular focus on assessment of learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are at the very essence of what we as teachers are trying to achieve and assessment provides us with ways to determine whether we are actually meeting these goals. The purpose of this track was to examine both assessment and learning outcomes and to develop ways to improve both. This article synthesizes the main findings of papers presented in the track together with the ensuing discussion. The article is split into five major topics: the role of assessment, the uses of assessment, the inevitability of assessment, approaches of assessment, and how we do assessment.

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