A SISO mixed<Emphasis Type="Italic">H</Emphasis><Subscript>2</Subscript>/l<Subscript>1</Subscript> optimal control problem and its solution

Study of the SISO mixedH ₂/l₁ problem for discrete time systems showed that there exists a unique optimal solution which can be approximated within any prescribed missing error bound inl ₂ norm with solvable suboptimal solutions and solvable superoptimal solutions. Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60174026) and the Scientific Research Foundation for Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars of Zhejiang Province (No. J20020546)     

圆周上的范德瓦尔登数

The big upper bound of typical van der Waerden number was investigated through calculating the van der Waerden number on a circle. And the van der Waerden number Wh (3,3) = 9, Wh (3,3,3)≥25 on a circle was calculated by computer.     

Learners’ perceptions of instructional design practice in a situated learning activity

This case study investigated learners’ perceptions of value from participating in a learning activity designed to model professional instructional design practice. Learners developed instructional design products for a corporate client in the context of a classroom-based course. The findings indicate that learners perceived different kinds of value which varied according to the degree of integration of learners’ goals with client’s goals, ranging from (a) co-constituted value (in which learners perceived the value of their participation as being inextricably bound to creation of value to the client) to (b) satisficing value (in which learners engaged with the activity so as to generate value for themselves while providing sufficient or good enough value to the client) to (c) salvage value (in which learners did not participate in the activity in the manner intended, but attempted to salvage some personal value from their participation). A framework relates these learners’ perceptions of value to three main features of such learning activities: what you do, how you do it, and who you are accountable to. The relative worth of these different kinds of value is discussed, and proposals for influencing learner perceptions of value are presented.     

A Case for Coach Garfinkel: Decision Making and What We Already Know

The purpose of this article is to deconstruct the decision-making processes of sports coaches through the writings of the sociologist Harold Garfinkel. Specifically, the authors draw upon Garfinkel’s (1967) writings on jurors’ decision making to challenge current cognitivist bound conceptualization to better interpret coaches’ sense-making–why and how they make their decisions. The significance of the work lies in further deciphering the meaningful structures of daily coaching lives; within whose limits coaching decisions unfold. Following a brief review of literature related to coaches’ decision making, the principal tenets of Garfinkel’s work are outlined. This gives way to an examination of Erving Goffman’s (1974) work of “frames of reference” in terms of how coaches’ decision making can be developed and improved before a reflective conclusion summarizes the main points made and their implications for future coach education.     

‘Now I am free’—education and human resource development in Eritrea: contradictions in the lives of Eritrean women in higher education

Human resource development as an objective of education policy in developing countries is increasingly narrowed down to its human capital component. In Eritrea, the objective of a highly centralized human resource development strategy is to produce human capital for the advancement of the nation. This instrumentalist view ignores the fact that education is not only related to one's position in a given society, but equally to the development of personal identity and new forms of agency on an individual level—thus potentially encompassing contradictions between the individual and the common good. This paper—based on the personal histories of a sample of female students at Asmara University—discusses these contradictions in terms of these women's acceptance of and resistance to the government's plan for them. It further argues that an education system geared predominantly towards the creation of human capital is bound to do so at the expense of social solidarity.     

The place of religion in public education

There is a legitimate place for genuine religious education within publicly supported schools in western pluralist democracies. The idea of the single common school is dead or dying in the densely populated parts of the western, English-speaking democracies. Once choice of school is conceded, then the religious school should be a central offering.Religion has a traditional place in most western democracies, eitherde jure orde facto. Further, there is evidence that religious adolescents make at least as good, and probably better, citizens than do those without religion.Finally, the idea of a consensually acceptable secular alternative based on high moral values is no longer tenable. Anything approaching a common school must be bound by minimal values not a high-level set, because there is simply no large set that is universally acceptable and agreed upon. In practice, urban, public schools serving heterogeneous clients rely heavily on exactly such a minimal set.     

The Teacher's Characteristics and Reactions to Him by Students and Experts

Abstract:Sandven, Johs. 1981. The Teacher's Characteristics and Reactions to Him by Students and Experts. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 25,171‐187. It is assumed that the characteristics of the teacher are bound to have implications for his behavior as a teacher and that this in turn will influence the way in which he is perceived and evaluated by students and experts. The aim of the investigations reported was to establish this relationship and to bring to light which characteristic or characteristics that in particular may be influential. Four characteristics were included: problem solving ability, social sensitivity, feeling of security, and educational attitude. Tasks of microteaching were carried out, videotaped and later presented for evaluation. The different comparisons between teacher characteristics and reactions by students and experts made it evident that the teacher's characteristics have a bearing on his standing as a teacher. In particular the social sensitivity of the teacher proved to be important.     

The students' experience of reading

Many studies have focused on student learning through text and have investigated relationshipsbetween approach, conception, outcomes, taskdefinitions and context. However, little research has beenundertaken on trying to understand the meaningthat reading in the academic context has for theindividual student. The aim of the study reportedhere was to reveal this meaning and to show how theway a student approaches reading is bound upwith this. Extracts from four case studies of studentreaders are presented, describing how each studentapproaches the reading of the same text, and how thisapproach seems to be related to the student's generalapproach to academic reading, what reading in generalmeans to them, and the significance that being astudent has for each of them. It is argued that thenormally neutral or pleasurable private activity ofreading is disturbed in the academic context bythe potential for this activity to be made public through the various assessment activitieswhich bound the student's daily reading life. Whenengaging in reading for academic purposes, studentsare no longer engaging in a private activityundertaken for its own sake, but in an activity whoseevaluated outcomes will – crucially – tell themsomething about their worth in the eyes of others. Reading in the academic context cannot thus be viewedas a purely neutral cognitive process undertaken in asocial vacuum, but has to be understood within boththe personal and biographical context of theindividual reader, and within the socio-cultural andpolitical context of the particular reading activity.     

Is ethical sensitivity in teaching culturally bound? Comparing Finnish and Iranian teachers’ ethical sensitivity

In this study, we investigated the culture-invariant and culture-dependent nature of teachers’ ethical sensitivity in two countries. Our case study involves teachers from Finland (n = 864) representing Western culture, and from Iran (n = 556) representing Eastern culture. Culturally bound elements of ethical sensitivity were studied with the Ethical Sensitivity Scale Questionnaire. The analyses revealed that ‘Caring by connecting to others’ is a central, culturally invariant dimension of ethical sensitivity in both cultures. In the dimensions of ethical sensitivity, the dimension of ‘Taking the perspective of others’ is particularly dependent on culture, given the differences in the cultural dimensions of power distance and the collectivity of the countries studied.     

Research,Teaching and Scholarship in an Expanding Higher Education System 1

It is argued that, basically, academics engage in three activities: teaching, research and scholarship, and that the activity of scholarship must be recognised and separately funded. The concept of scholarship is derived from its historical roots, according to which it supports both teaching and research, but is extended to support all activities in which academics engage. This makes it possible to develop an expanding system of higher education in which all academic activities are appropriately recognised and rewarded and which can operate with significantly lower unit costs than has been the case in the past. However, the need to provide funding for scholarship puts a lower bound to acceptable unit costs.     

Habitus and intraclass differentiation: nonuniversity‐bound students in Japan

This paper explores the mechanisms guiding differentiation among nonuniversity‐bound high schoolers from disadvantaged families in their job decision making and acquisition. Examining microlevel schooling processes over one year, it is argued that one differentiation mechanism is the individual's varying perceptions and consequent uses of school‐based resources that, in principle, are available to all within the school but, in reality, are not fully utilized by all. The paper then seeks to explain the mechanisms whereby these variations emerge and draw upon habitus as an analytical tool. It suggests that variations result from an interaction of individual habitus (within the “collective” habitus of nonuniversity‐bound students) and available resources (family‐based and school‐based) and that the ways in which these resources are presented to individual students are influential. School and family can in fact “intervene” in the student's perception and activation of the resources. The highly structured practice of job referral in Japan, where each school provides students with job opportunities, illuminates variability in students’ uses of school‐based resources.     

Education for Work: A Review Essay of Historical,Cross‐Cultural,and Disciplinary Perspectives on Vocational Education

In this review essay, K. Peter Kuchinke uses three recent publications to consider the question of how to educate young people for work and career. Historically, this question has been central to vocational education, and it is receiving renewed attention in the context of concerns over the ability of schools to provide adequate preparation for occupational roles and career success in a rapidly changing economic landscape. Philip Gonon's Quest for Modern Vocational Education provides a historical account of Georg Kerschensteiner's vision of the role of work as a central subject matter for all students. His approach served as the foundation for the dual system in present‐day Germany. Nancy Hoffman's Schooling in the Workplace contrasts the U.S. system of career preparation for non‐college‐bound students with that of five other OECD nations where workforce and academic preparation are more strongly connected to learning in the workplace. Christopher Winch's Dimensions of Expertise, finally, offers a conceptual analysis of central ideas of vocational knowledge and underscores the important role of learning in the context of practice. The three texts offer historical, comparative, and philosophical analyses of the complex task of preparation for work and challenge education scholars to move the subject matter into the center of contemporary educational theory.     

Voice in the agentic assemblage

Abstract

In this article, we explore how a posthumanist stance has enabled us to work a different consideration of the way in which voice is constituted and constituting in educational inquiry; that is, we position voice in a posthuman ontology that is understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceed the traditional understanding of an individual. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, and Bennett, we present a research artifact that illustrates how this posthuman voice is productively bound to an agentic assemblage. The reconfiguration of a posthuman voice with/in an educational research artifact further enables us to explore various analytic questions: What happens when voice exceeds language and is more than (un)vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject? If the materiality of voice is not limited to sound (i.e. self-present language emitted from a human mouth), how do we account for it? That is, how might the materiality of voice be located in the space of intra-action among human and non-human objects? We conclude with implications for thinking qualitative methodology in education differently.     

Access and assessment? Incentives for independent study

This paper explores incentives for students to engage with continuous learning outside the classroom, i.e. independent study. Two questionnaires were completed with undergraduate students, asking them quantitative and qualitative questions regarding their engagement (or lack thereof) with weekly readings which are non‐assessed and non‐monitored. The questionnaires identified that the majority of students do not complete the readings despite a consensus that they are crucial for understanding the course material. The two primary reasons expressed for not undertaking independent study are lack of assessment or time‐bound deadlines and poor access to reading material. Students were also asked to imagine potential incentives to encourage the completion of weekly readings, and then ranked these ideas in the second questionnaire. The two proposals with a majority of student support are the introduction of assessment measures to incentivise weekly readings (albeit with some student opposition to such an interventionalist approach) and the introduction of mechanisms that provide greater access to learning materials. These findings introduce the role of ‘access’ as a key mechanism to stimulate independent study, thus challenging the literature’s emphasis on assessment as the primary means to facilitate learning.     

Polaronic effect on a bound polaron

Feynman variational path-integral theory was used to obtain the ground-state energy of a polaron in a quantum well in the presence of a Coulomb potential for arbitrary values of the electron-phonon coupling constant α. Numerical and analytical results showed that the energy shift was more sensitive to α than to the Coulomb binding parameter (β) and increased with the decrease of effective quantum well widthl _Z. It was interesting that due to the electronic confinement in the quasi-2D (quantum well) structures, the lower bound of the strong coupling regime was shifted to smaller values of α. Comparison of the polaron in the quantum well with that in the quantum wire or dot showed that the polaronic effect strengthened with decrease of the confinement dimension. Project (No. 19804009) supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China     

Higher education,languages, and the persistence of inequitable structures for working-class women in Pakistan

This paper is based on the findings of a 3-year, qualitative study funded by the Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes for Poverty. It uses Sen's [1985. Well-being agency and freedom. Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 4: 169–221] capability approach and Bourdieu's [1991. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] critical theory to argue that access participation and the empowering outcomes of higher education are contingent on learners' familiarity with the languages used. If there is a discrepancy between the languages used in higher education and the linguistic capital that learners have acquired during schooling without any appropriate measures to fill the gap, participation is bound to be limited. Findings of this qualitative multiple case study involving eight participants entering higher education from government and private schools in Pakistan reveal that working-class women remain the most marginalised and fail to achieve valued goals within higher education in terms of knowledge construction, participation, and a more empowered sense of identity. This eventually culminates in their delayed elimination from higher education.     

The estimation of the IRT reliability coefficient and its lower and upper bounds, with comparisons to CTT reliability statistics

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the mathematical characteristics of the test reliability coefficient ρ _XX′ as a function of item response theory (IRT) parameters and present the lower and upper bounds of the coefficient. Another purpose is to examine relative performances of the IRT reliability statistics and two classical test theory (CTT) reliability statistics (Cronbach’s alpha and Feldt–Gilmer congeneric coefficients) under various testing conditions that result from manipulating large-scale real data. For the first purpose, two alternative ways of exactly quantifying ρ _XX′ are compared in terms of computational efficiency and statistical usefulness. In addition, the lower and upper bounds for ρ _XX′ are presented in line with the assumptions of essential tau-equivalence and congeneric similarity, respectively. Empirical studies conducted for the second purpose showed across all testing conditions that (1) the IRT reliability coefficient was higher than the CTT reliability statistics; (2) the IRT reliability coefficient was closer to the Feldt–Gilmer coefficient than to the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient; and (3) the alpha coefficient was close to the lower bound of IRT reliability. Some advantages of the IRT approach to estimating test-score reliability over the CTT approaches are discussed in the end.     

Education for Sustainability in the Parks: A Project Inspired by Chet Bowers

Since its inception, the education for sustainable development (ESD) movement in higher education has been doomed. Its standards of sustainability, bound to measures of development which suggest human flourishing is equated with the western ideals, is precisely the double-bind Chet Bowers so passionately stood against. His critical perspective on education itself and the ecopedagogy shared in Educating for Eco-Justice and Community (2001) as well as the critical analysis he demonstrates in How Language Limits our Understanding of Environmental Education (2001) are exactly what is needed to reorient a movement which in most cases is now focused on efficiency. I will share the story of my own discovery of Chet Bowers’ work and its subsequent manifestation in my work both within the greater community and within the context of higher education therein. With this as a backdrop, I critique the ESD movement as fundamentally flawed due to its double-binds and metaphorical missteps, and I reconceptualize sustainability as a guiding vision rather than a target. I call for a shift from ESD to Victor Nolet’s (2010) Education for Sustainability (EfS) and recontextualize the movement within the framework of community. Finally, I share a piloted normative approach founded on Bowers’ eco-justice principles.     

Masculinity and respect in flux: Olli's story

This study examines change and the conditions of change in the masculinity of Olli, a working-class Finnish school boy. It explores respect as a status bound to masculine reputation, resources for obtaining respect in gendered identity work, and the negotiation of power in peer relations. I discuss how a ‘banal balancer’ discourse – a local, normalised, culturally idealised discourse and the most common discourse of school boy masculinity – has the power to induce school boys to balance their acquisition of the respect and peer likeability dimensions of status. Olli's story illustrates why locating oneself or being located in a ‘toughie’ discourse, in which the pursuit of respect through fear and violence is present, has limits in terms of peer relations and why it is crucial to make room for aspirational hegemony in schools instead of a dominant, regressive form of hegemony.