Tracking the Truth or Selling One's Soul? Reflections on the Ethics of a Piece of Commissioned Research

This paper takes as its starting point a decision to accept a particular commission for a piece of educational research which is subject to contractual restrictions. In the light of recent debate on the contentious politics and ethics of contractual research, it then addresses the problem of what might constitute an ethical defence, or critique, of such research and such contracts.     

Rural Location and Academic Success—Remarks on Research,Contextualisation and Methodology

In this article the focus is on the relationship between rural location and education outcomes, a field that has not received enough attention either by educational authorities or by educational researchers. Main goals are to argue for an increased focus on rural education and for the need for contextualisation of educational research in general. Research on issues such as school size, local adaption, population composition, parental involvement and rural approaches to learning are presented in order to map significant areas in rural education research. Perspectives focusing on compositional and contextual effects explaining spatial variations in academic success are highlighted. In addition, an outline of some methodological consequences following from the latter goal is provided.     

Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family?

This paper investigates the amount of academic service performed by female versus male faculty. We use 2014 data from a large national survey of faculty at more than 140 institutions as well as 2012 data from an online annual performance reporting system for tenured and tenure–track faculty at two campuses of a large public, Midwestern University. We find evidence in both data sources that, on average, women faculty perform significantly more service than men, controlling for rank, race/ethnicity, and field or department. Our analyses suggest that the male–female differential is driven more by internal service—i.e., service to the university, campus, or department—than external service—i.e., service to the local, national, and international communities—although significant heterogeneity exists across field and discipline in the way gender differentials play out.     

Family Background,Students’ Academic Self-Efficacy,and Students’ Career and Life Success Expectations

This study examined the relationship of family background on students’ academic self-efficacy and the impact of students’ self-efficacy on their career and life success expectations. The study used the national dataset of the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002), funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Based on a path model, results demonstrated that family background predicted academic self-efficacy positively and students’ career and life success expectations negatively. However, with the mediating influence of academic self-efficacy, family background positively influenced students’ career and life success expectations. School counselors should consider interventions to enhance interactions between parents and students and seek to develop positive perceptions about students’ capabilities and futures. In addition, school counselors need to be knowledgeable about curricula, enrichment classes, summer opportunities, various educational options, and students’ academic and career aspirations for providing better guidance.     

Academic drift in Danish professional engineering education. Myth or reality? Opportunity or threat?

This article examines whether and, if so, to what extent academic drift can be said to have taken place in Danish professional engineering education. If the answer is affirmative, what were the driving forces behind it and what are the consequences – if any? First, a theoretical and conceptual framework for the discussion is introduced. This is followed by a case study of institutional change in higher education in Denmark, with a particular emphasis on two institutional examples, the two previously independent engineering colleges that recently merged with universities. The two examples are based on data gathered in interviews with teachers and management in these two engineering colleges (now both part of a university). In conclusion, based on the findings the questions posed in the title of this article are addressed and possible benefits and drawbacks of increased academisation of professional engineering education are discussed.     

How Do Academic Achievement and Gender Affect the Earnings of STEM Majors? A Propensity Score Matching Approach

The United States government recently enacted a number of policies designed to increase the number of American born students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), especially among women and racial and ethnic minorities. This study examines how the earnings benefits of choosing a STEM major vary both by gender and across the distribution of academic achievement. I account for the selection into college major using propensity score matching. Measures of individual educational preferences based on Holland’s theory of career and educational choice provide a unique way to control for college major selection. Findings indicate that the earnings benefit to STEM major choice ranges from 5 to 28 % depending both on academic achievement and on gender and that high-achieving students benefit more from STEM major choice. Further, high achieving men benefit more from STEM majors than high-achieving women. Earnings differences in major choice may play an important role in explaining the underrepresentation of women in STEM major fields, especially among high achieving students.     

“They make you invisible”: Negotiating Power at the Academic Intersections of Ethnicity,Gender, and Class

This Foucauldian case study examines the academic conflicts of Mexican American women and girls, how they negotiate those conflicts, and the identity effects of their negotiations. It extends Gloria Anzaldúa's (1999) work and builds upon those who have studied the schooling experiences of Mexican American women and girls. Similar conflicts for these women are found at all academic levels. The negotiation of these conflicts affected the identity of academia (transformation and reproduction) and the women (hybridization and colonization).     

Economic Rationality or Social Justice? Gender,the National Qualifications Framework and educational reform in South Africa, 1989‐1996

This article examines the ways in which gender redress has been conceptualised in different phases of the policy development work on the National Qualifications Framework, a key initiative of education reform in South Africa. It identifies two discursive framings for the NQF‐‐the discourse of economic rationalisation, utilised by business and COSATU, and that of social justice, utilised by the ANC and COSATU. It concludes that neither, for different reasons, have grappled with gendered social relations or the gendered, but dispersed, power of the state. The paper points out that the existence of a widespread women's organisation in South Africa during the transition period had little impact on policy formulation in education and training, thus raising questions about ways in which women's demands can have an impact on education policy change.     

The Relationship Between Academic Major and Environmentalism Among College Students: Is it Mediated by the Effects of Gender,Political Ideology and Financial Security?

Several studies have found a relationship between college students’ academic majors and their environmental attitudes and behaviors. Results from this study of incoming first-year students at a medium-sized public university suggest that students majoring in different programs of study were likely to have different environmental attitudes and behaviors. There were also differences in the proportions of women, political liberals, and financially secure students in each of the different majors. When controlling for the effects of gender, political ideology, and financial security, incoming business majors scored lower on two of the four measures of environmentalism than incoming students in the other majors. The findings in this study suggest that incoming students choose majors that are consistent with their worldviews.     

Challenging Sexism? Gender and Ethnicity in the Secondary School

This article discusses understandings of girls confronting sexism in a Swedish multiethnic urban school. The empirical study includes school observations, conversations and formal group interviews with 15–16‐year‐old pupils from seven classes in four schools. The article provides an analysis of one of the schools, where the fieldwork showed gender to be frequently on the agenda. In particular, girls confronted what they deemed to be sexist and derogatory remarks from male classmates. Teachers were also seen to comment on gender during lessons and to act on what they agreed to be sexism among pupils. However, gender was largely understood as important to cultural differences and dealt with as related to pupils’ family and ethnic background. This is explored in the article as well as the various, partly conflicting ideas on gender expressed by different groups of pupils.     

Unfortunate or scrounger? Ambivalence,stereotype and the adult unemployed

This paper uses Bhabha's concept of colonial discourse to explore how the subject of the educational discourse concerned with the education of the adult unemployed is constituted by a variety of stereotypical representations. The paper examines in some detail a key policy text which appeared at a critical moment in the establishment of REPLAN, a UK policy initiative for the education of unemployed adults, in 1984. It explores how the problem of education for the unemployed adult was made visible, the first arena for analysis in Scheurich's ‘policy archaeology’. A number of ‘regularities’—race, gender, sexuality, pro‐fessionalization, class and governmentality—serve to constitute that problem and, to a lesser extent, its solution. Educational policy is seen as a highly problematic play of fantasy and materiality, where policy texts produce and perpetuate inequalities. This critical reading attempts to subvert official discourse on education and unemployment.

there is no reason at all why people should wander about in a loafing and idle manner; if they are not earning their living they ought to be put under some control. (Winston Churchill, 1909).     

Empirical Evidence of Social and Emotional Learning's Influence on School Success: A Commentary on “Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning: What Does the Research Say?,” a book edited by Joseph E. Zins,Roger P. Weissberg,Margaret C. Wang,and Herbert J. Walberg

In Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning: What does the Research Say? Zins and his colleagues presented a new way to conceptualize the impact of social and emotional learning programs on students' school success by broadening the concept to include students' attitudes, behaviors, and performance. To build on Zins' ideas, we (a) briefly review research examining the impact of 262 social and emotional learning (SEL) programs on a number of outcomes that assessed school attitudes, behaviors, and performance; and (b) suggest additional avenues for research of SEL interventions.     

The Czech Republic Between Studentocracy,Academic Oligarchy and Managerialism: Are students powerful or powerless?

Tertiary Education and Management - In this article, we will argue that students played an important role at several crucial junctures of modern Czech history, which secured them a central position...     

Success or Failure in a Core University Unit: What makes the difference?

Factors which have been identified as contributing to student academic success at the degree and program level in tertiary study include mode of study, student age, previous tertiary qualifications and past academic performance. Limited published Australian research is available, however, on student academic success in individual subjects. This study investigated identifiable patterns related to the academic success of three separate cohorts of students in an Early Childhood second-year Language, Literature and Literacy unit (N = 601). The data support previous research findings with regard to the effect of mode of study, previous university qualifications and past academic performance on academic success in this subject. In contrast with most previous studies, this study found a significant relationship between previous study at TAFE (college study at a Technical and Further Education institute) and failure in an academic unit, perhaps due to the timing of this unit in the students' overall program. Further implications for Early Childhood teacher education are discussed.     

Voices of disaffection: disengaged and disruptive youths or agents of change and self‐empowerment?

This article presents findings from research conducted into school disaffection in the north of England. Bourdieu's concept of capital is utilised to explore the perspectives of 14‐ to 16‐year‐old girls undertaking vocational learning as a strategy for re‐engagement. Data emanate from semi‐structured interviews in which social and linguistic capital in school is identified as a privileged feature of a select few. Thus, within the field of education, capital facilitates student empowerment, whereupon the lack of such can lead to marginalisation, disaffection and, subsequently, disengagement. However, voice is presented as a powerful mechanism for challenging the existing inequities of compulsory schooling in England by validating unacknowledged capital, recognising agency, and thus facilitating the self‐empowerment of disaffected young people. Schools are encouraged to rethink their political stance to consider the potentially detrimental impact of a discourse that validates the dominant sociocultural capital and empowers only those students whose individual dispositions align with institutional practices.     

Did the Recession Impact Student Success? Relationships of Finances,Staffing and Institutional Type on Retention

Economic recessions impact higher education institutions in complex ways. Several analyses have examined the influence of the 2007–2009 recession on tuition, enrollments, revenues, and expenditures, but the connection of these resource allocation patterns to a student success outcome—namely, retention—is limited. This study examined relationships among institutional expenditures, tuition, and staffing patterns on first-year retention rates at private and public institutions in 2007, 2009 and 2011: before, during, and after the economic recession. Private and public institutions increased tuition during this time period and increased expenditures. Expenditures most directly educating students (i.e. instruction) and institutional selectivity were positively associated with retention. However, public and private institutions differed in how they allocated their expenditures. That the findings correspond with past research investigating relationships between resource allocation and retention illustrate principles of the resource dependency theory (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978): institutions impacted by external economic changes, adjust revenues, staffing, and expenditures during economic changes.     

Weak or Wily? Girls’ Voices in Tellings and Retellings of African Folktales for Children

Children's Literature in Education - Female characters in many African folktales are often perceived as voiceless and peripheral, playing the role of passive advisors and nurturers in contrast...     

International elite,or global citizens? Equity,distinction and power: the International Baccalaureate and the rise of the South

The 2013 UN Human Development report predicts the middle classes of ‘The South’ a five-fold increase by 2030. Globalisation has resulted in national conceptions of business: education and identity being in flux. Emerging middle classes of the South are already embracing international forms of education for instrumental reasons of advantage and distinction. The International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum continues to experience a strong growth in this area and appears to offer a globalised and international form of education, which may offer the chance of educating a global citizen, despite the fact that it is much valued for the relative advantage it may offer. This article reviews the data surrounding the rise of the South and explores the identity of the IB, as it exists in international schools, particularly the dilemma between its internationalist and the globalist outlook. The theory of Pierre Bourdieu facilitates a critical examination of the role of global citizenship education in this paradigm, and the instrumental role it may play in conferring symbolic capital and distinction on this form of social reproduction. Finally, Global Citizenship Education in IB curricula represents a pastoral (religious) component as is common in elite school systems, yet in its globalised form: secular and inclusive whilst equitable and distinct.