FREEDOM DAY II IN CHICAGO

The following article consists of extracts from a recent UNESCO report, Better Teachers, which describes a joint project of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the UNESCO Institute of Education in Beirut. The complete report is obtainable from UNIPUB, P. O. Box 433, New York, New York 10016.     

Assessment of general education at Clayton State College

This article is an excerpt from a report issued by Clayton State College and from an article by B. R. Rice and E. W. McElroy, “General Education at Clayton State College” in Outcomes: The Quarterly Journal of the Network for Outcome-Based Schools, 10 (1), Spring 1991.     

Review

This essay offers a historical commentary on Turning Points: Preparing Youth for the 21st Century, the 1989 report on middle school education by the Carnegie Council's Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents, The report's opposition to tracking and its advocacy of teacher empowerment, initiatives that have been popular with school reformers of the 1980s, does distinguish Turning Points from earlier proposals for educational change. Most of the report, however, seems to recommend policies that bear a striking similarity to the kind of changes promoted by the advocates of efficiency oriented school reform earlier in the century. The essay examines the historical antecedents for two of these policy recommendations, curriculum integration and school‐based health services. In considering these earlier attempts at reform, this essay identifies flaws that may mitigate the effectiveness of the policies recommended in Turning Points but which the authors of the report fail to mention .     

Teacher Education Objectives: A Survey of Student Views

This article is a summary of the Survey of Teacher Education Objectives: The Views of Diploma in Education Students published as a monograph in 1982. A report of the previous study was published in 1981 and a summary of the report appeared in Vol. 4 No. 1 of this Journal.     

Consistency of report card grades and external assessments in a Canadian province

The study investigated how well report card grades communicate to students and parents that state educational standards are being met, standards that are objectively measured by infrequently administered mandated assessments. Data sources were report card grades and external assessment scores for 2006–09 for Ontario Canada. The information that parents and students received about student performance from report cards and external assessments were similar (r _s  = .47) to the r = .40–.60 range previously reported. Teachers assigned higher grades than external assessments warranted, even after a major source of construct irrelevant variance in report card grades (teacher ratings on multiple scales measuring student effort and school commitment) was controlled. The relationship of grades to assessment scores was robust across genders, school district types (Public versus Catholic) and language (English and French). Agreement of assessments was higher for grade 6 than for grade 3 and for Writing than for Reading or Mathematics. Report cards provided information about students’ future achievement that was accurate and delivered up to 2 years prior to the administration of external assessments. Seventy to 80% of students who reached the provincial achievement standard on one or both prior report cards were successful on the subsequent external assessment, compared to 30–50% of students who failed to meet the report card standard at least once.     

Mothers’ Implicit and Explicit Attitudes and Attributions in Relation to Self-Reported Parenting Behavior

Objective. Parenting behavior is presumed to be related to the thoughts about child behavior that parents report in a controlled and explicit manner and to more implicit parent cognitions that occur outside of conscious awareness and are less accessible to verbal report. Design. We examined mothers’ attitudes toward their children as correlates of self-reported parenting behavior. We used a combination of a self-report questionnaire and a reaction-time method (the Implicit Association Test) to assess explicit and implicit attitudes, respectively. We also assessed mothers’ implicit and explicit attributions for child misbehavior in relation to parenting, using a questionnaire measure of attributions completed under high-cognitive load (implicit attributions) or under low-cognitive load (explicit attributions). Mothers of 124, 6- to 10-year-olds (52% male) participated. Results. Attitudes assessed by self-report questionnaire and the Implicit Association Test were uniquely associated with negative parenting. The cognitive load manipulation moderated associations between attributions and parenting, such that child-blaming attributions were inversely associated with positive parenting only under conditions of high-cognitive load. Conclusions. Compared to traditional self-report questionnaires, methods such as the Implicit Association Test or cognitive load manipulations may more effectively assess implicit parent cognitions.     

Commonality among diversity

Senior lecturer, Department of Education, University of Hong Kong; board member, Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration; founding chairman, Hong Kong Council for Educational Administration Author of China's Education on the Move (1990), Planning Basic Education in China: Two Case Studies in the Province of Liaoning (research report for UNICEF, published by IIEP).     

Gansu Province Extends Decision-Making Power in Higher Education and Steps Up the Pace of Reform

Beijing Youth Journal published on May 22 a report of an investigation conducted by its reporter Wu Peihua of some middle school students. The report shows that almost 95 percent of the students investigated say they dislike the politics course most.     

Older Women and Lower Self-Rated Health

Several studies have found that older women report lower self-rated health than men. However, it is not clear why older women are more likely to report poor self-rated health than older men. Data for this study came from a national cross-sectional survey, Mental Health and Quality of Life of Older Malaysians (MHQoLOM). Included in the survey were 2980 respondents consisting of Malaysians aged 60 years and over, with both men (n = 1428) and women (n = 1552) represented. Results of t-tests showed older men expressed significantly higher levels of self-rated health and self-esteem than women (p < .01). Separate multivariate regression by gender revealed that age, life-threatening problems, and self-esteem were highly significant predictors of self-rated health among older men and women and explained 18.4% of variance in self-rated health for men and 18.2% for women. In the last step we examined the main effects of gender on self-rated health using General Linear Models (GLM) Univariate by adjusting for age, life-threatening problems, and self-esteem. Results showed an insignificant difference in self-rated health between older men and women (F _(1,2715) = 2.26, P = 0.13) only after adjusting for self-esteem. It can be concluded that self-esteem affects responses to self-rated health of older men and women.     

This way please! Improving school leadership: the OECD way

In August 2008, the OECD published Improving School Leadership Volume 1: Policy and Practice and Improving School Leadership Volume 2: Case Studies on System Leadership. The main objectives of these reports were to compare school leadership policy between participating countries and to identify innovative practices and options for policy development. As part of the preparation for the final report, a background report on school leadership in the Republic of Ireland was prepared by the Department of Education and Science in 2007. This report will be analysed in this paper in order to identify the degree to which the background report achieved the objective of capturing the current and emerging issues facing school leaders in Ireland. A critique of the ‘one size fits all’ approach to policy in the area of school leadership detailed in Volume 1 of the OECD report follows. This critique contests that some of the policy recommendations contained in the report are based on a narrow and selective range of supporting evidence. A number of these are a cause of some concern particularly when considered in the context of specific features of the schools in the Republic of Ireland.     

Evidence of reflective thinking across the curriculum: college experience versus individual courses

This study investigated how individual and course-level variables across the curriculum at a four-year college (college here refers to a higher education institution that offers undergraduate education but not graduate degrees) in the southeastern US impacted student reflective thinking as measured by Kember and colleagues' [2000. Development of a questionnaire to measure the level of reflective thinking. Assessment &; Evaluation in Higher Education, 25(4): 381–395] scale. The measure includes four constructs: (1) non-thinking (i.e., habitual action), (2) understanding, (3) reflection, and the deepest level (4) critical reflection. The construct of understanding – students' assessment of their thoughtful use of knowledge – was the only measure that increased with credit hours completed. Students (n?=?802) reported more thinking to comprehend in science courses compared to business and humanities courses. An interaction of subject areas and gender showed that males reported more reflection in business courses than the humanities or science courses, and females reported the opposite (i.e., more reflection in humanities and science courses and less in business courses). All students, and especially older ones, were more likely to report thinking habits as the result of an overall college experience than from an individual course. A small set (6.23%), however, who did not report reflecting critically as the result of college did indicate that the current course prompted them to do so. Deeper habits of thinking were reported in students who were awarded course credit for participation and for those enrolled in courses taught by more experienced faculty.     

Student teachers in school practice: an analysis of learning opportunities

Abstract

Over the past decade, educational policy in Britain, as in other industrial nations, has been increasingly driven by the concern that higher education should serve the needs of the economy more effectively. The report Highly Qualified People: supply and demand reflects this concern and attempts to establish from employers Britain's likely requirement, in the 1990s, for such expensively educated labour. Though the report concluded that Britain needed more graduates over the next few years, closer scrutiny of its data suggests a very different conclusion ‐ not that Britain needs more graduates to prosper, but rather that Britain needs first to prosper before it is likely to want the graduates it already produces.

     

SCHOOL SEGREGATION IN GARY

This article contains the major findings and recommendations of a study of ability grouping. The writers are associated with College of Education, University of Georgia. A more detailed report of the study is available from the Center for Educational Improvement, College of Education, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30601     

Guidelines for Interpreting and Reporting Subscores

Recent research has proposed a criterion to evaluate the reportability of subscores. This criterion is a value‐added ratio (VAR), where values greater than 1 suggest that the true subscore is better approximated by the observed subscore than by the total score. This research extends the existing literature by quantifying statistical significance and effect size for using VAR to provide practical guidelines for subscore interpretation and reporting. Findings indicate that subscores with VAR ≥ 1.1 are a minimum requirement for a meaningful contribution to a user's score interpretation; subscores with .9 < VAR < 1.1 are redundant with the total score and subscores with VAR ≤ .9 would be misleading to report. Additionally, we discuss what to do when subscores do not add value, yet must be reported, as well as when VAR ≥ 1.1 may be undesirable.     

Judging the quality of case study reports

In this paper, the authors outline how quality can be judged in “the typical product of alternative paradigm inquiry,” the case report. Their earlier work has focused on judging the quality of the inquiry process; this paper focuses on the product. They propose and discuss four criteria: resonance, rhetoric, empowerment, and applicability.     

Book reviews

This is a somewhat unusual paper. It is a report of a review of the literature in a very important field for teacher education. The original paper by Fuller & Manning so impressed the editorial board that they wished to bring it to the attention of readers as soon as possible, Douglas Finlayson has prepared this report in an attempt to bring the salient features of the paper to a wider readership than they might otherwise have reached. The original is much longer and is highly compressed. It is recommended to readers who find Finlayson's report interesting. [Ed.]     

Equating of Augmented Subscores

Recently, there has been an increasing level of interest in subscores for their potential diagnostic value. Haberman (2008b) suggested reporting an augmented subscore that is a linear combination of a subscore and the total score. Sinharay and Haberman (2008) and Sinharay (2010) showed that augmented subscores often lead to more accurate diagnostic information than subscores. In order to report augmented subscores operationally, they should be comparable across the different forms of a test. One way to achieve comparability is to equate them. We suggest several methods for equating augmented subscores. Results from several operational and simulated data sets show that the error in the equating of augmented subscores appears to be small in most practical situations.     

Report on multicultural education in pesantren

This article aims to report a single case study of how an Islamic boarding school (pesantren) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, prepared students for a multicultural Indonesia. Despite negative portrayal by the Western media about increasing Islamic radicalism in some pesantren, many pesantren are in fact transforming into modern Islamic institutions, incorporating the teaching of democratic values and practices, endorsing civil society and community development, and inculcating cultural/religious diversity and tolerance in students. Using schoolyard and classroom ethnographies, along with in-depth interviews and focus group discussions (FGD) with teachers and students, the study found that classroom and non-classroom practices of the pesantren promote the development of multicultural education. Several subjects within both curriculum developed by the government and curriculum developed by pesantrens discuss a considerable number of issues that relate to cultural and religious diversity, tolerance, citizenship and democracy. The non-classroom practices of pesantren offer invaluable and intensive experiences for students to socialise with peers from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. However, challenges remain for the kyai (the pesantren’s great leader) and other leaders, such as teachers’ lack of competency, unclear multicultural objectives in both the pesantren’s curricula and the pesantren’s traditions, and unequal relations among students and among teachers. These challenges must be overcome to further develop education for cultural diversity.     

Pre-service teachers’ perceptions of middle school students

This report shares a study that explored the perceptions pre-service teachers have of middle school students. Participants were asked to complete the Adjective Checklist (ACL) by endorsing the words they considered most characteristic of a typical middle school student. Items most frequently endorsed indicated a predominantly negative perception (e.g. “awkward”, “confused” and “emotional”). Implications for pre-service teacher training are discussed.     

An exploration of the viability of partnership between dar al-ulum and higher education institutions in North West England focusing upon pedagogy and relevance

The article explores possibilities of collaboration between Muslim providers of traditional education (dar al-ulums) and HE/FE institutions in close geographical proximity in the North West England. It reports the outcomes of a project carried out in 2011/2012 influenced by the findings of the Makadam/Scott-Baumann report in 2010, in which it was stated that cross fertilisation of pedagogical methodologies in the dar al-ulums is already achieving a unique synthesis drawing upon skills of memory and cognition. The project had a dual intention to (1) see through to completion a partnership in which a BA in Islamic Education would be created for advanced dar al-ulum students and (2) to focus on the relevance and pedagogical styles of the dars-i nizami curriculum taught in the dar al-ulums and therefore add to scholarly and political debates on the madrasa/dar al-ulum education which has already generated a body of literature. The paper will focus on the latter.