Why do faith secondary schools have advantaged intakes? The relative importance of neighbourhood characteristics,social background and religious identification amongst parents

This paper explores reasons why secondary schools with a religious character have pupil intakes that are of a higher social background and ability than their secular counterparts. We show that this is especially true across all regions in England once the characteristics of the pupils living in the local neighbourhoods are taken into account. Data from the National Pupil Database and the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England are combined to show that likely reasons for this are complex. Parents reporting a religious affiliation are more likely to be better educated, have a higher occupational class and a higher household income. We also show that higher‐income religious families are more likely to have a child at a faith school than lower‐income religious families. Policy implications regarding the state‐funding of faith schools are discussed.     

Theories,Concepts, and Techniques: Too Much of a Number of Good Things?

The field of information technology in education is nearly 30 years old. There have been many impressive achievements during that time. However, the field seems to have developed a number of theories, concepts, and activities that are often taken for granted and are regarded as sacrosanct. A case is made for the notion that theories should be practical and that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.     

小学音乐课器乐学习状况调查报告

小学生器乐学习状况调查问卷统计表明:课堂上学生喜欢挑选的乐器是电子琴、口风琴、口琴、竖笛和小鼓;绝大多数学生对器乐学习感兴趣、富有热情;从城乡与男女生比较看,城市学生偏爱唱歌,乡村学生及男生略偏好器乐,女生略偏好唱歌但对唱歌和器乐都表现出浓厚的兴趣;大多数学生对自己所学的乐器充满自信、感到自豪,喜欢表现与交往,但还缺乏一定的表现能力;通过演奏乐器学会识谱的人数超过了唱歌,他们认为学习乐器后音乐课的兴趣增加,更有精神,最可贵的是把表现音乐当成器乐学习的主要目的。     

School crowding,year-round schooling,and mobile classroom use: Evidence from North Carolina

This study exploits a unique policy environment and a large panel dataset to evaluate the impact of school crowding on student achievement in Wake County, NC. We also estimate the effects of two education policy initiatives that are often used to address crowding: multi-track year-round calendars and mobile classrooms. We estimate a multi-level fixed effects model to identify effects that are not confounded by other school, family, and individual characteristics. Results suggest that severely crowded schools have a negative impact on reading achievement but have no discernable impact on math achievement. Both mobile classrooms and year-round calendars are found to have a small negative impact on achievement in the absence of crowding, but a positive impact in crowded schools, though these policies are only able to partially offset the negative impact of crowding.     

Methodological Reconsiderations: The Shifting Paradigms

In the struggle to gain an understanding of ourselves, we have developed a variety of explanatory theories, models, and paradigms with methods of questing answers that have been considered appropriate to the theory, model, or paradigm. Behaviorists have sought to determine the nature of relationships by means of a basic cause-effect design. They assume that laws governing behavior exist and are discernible, that cause is fundamentally external in nature, and that empirical methodologies represent the best approach to the explanation of behavior within societies. Advocates of an alternative world view (antipositivism or interpretivism) adhere to the naturalistic conception of a human being as a rule-following agent. They assume that people are conscious social actors capable of controlling their behavior, and that human behavior originates in the individual's interpretation of reality. Their research methods are aimed at exploring the situations of the actor in order to work out how individuals arrived at the interpretations and created the actions they did. Both schools of researchers seem to be tackling the same issues, but those steeped in the behavioral sciences are questing for empirical generalizations while the interpretivists are analyzing conceptual properties and the meaning of each. Yet, it is not a blind allegiance to one specific world view and its concomitant methodologies that is important but an ability to think creatively and to have a sound conceptual base on which to build a world view. Methods are the tools of scholarship and should be adapted according to the nature of the questions, not unquestioningly applied.     

Adaptations and Continuities in the Use and Design of Visual Representations in US Middle School Science Textbooks

Visual representations are ubiquitous in modern‐day science textbooks and have in recent years become an object of criticism and scrutiny. This article examines the extent to which changes in representations in textbooks published in the USA over the past six decades have invited those critiques. Drawing from a correlational analysis of a corpus of 34 US middle school physical science textbooks, continuities are established with respect to the purposes that most textbook images serve and the numbers of schematic representations that are used. Changes are observed in the overall total number of representations in textbooks and in the proportion of representations that are photographic. Interpretive cases of individual representations over time are presented to further illustrate the continuities and changes that have taken place. Specifically, high‐fidelity images, such as photographs, are shown permeating or replacing schematic and explanatory images in the interest of promoting familiarization to students. This shifting emphasis toward familiarization is discussed as a specific cause for concern about quality and utility of representations in modern‐day US science textbooks.     

What are we trying to understand and improve? Educational research as Leerlaufreaktion. 1

The problems that educational research are supposed to solve have been poorly analyzed and the basic phenomena that we are trying to understand have not been clearly described. Educational experimenters often resemble Leerlaufreaktionen in lower animals, i.e., complex, highly integrated activities that take place despite the absence of an appropriate environmental occasion.

We have tended to forget the practical origins of science and have allowed ourselves to be dominated by overly abstract ideas that betray our goals. Experimenters require tangible events to think and wonder about in order to improve their intuitions and in order to generate and test ideas that will deepen our understanding of nature and make a real difference in the practical world. Better observations of what actually goes on in instructional situations are therefore needed and more detailed records of teaching and learning must be kept. An instructional record‐keeping system called a course memory is described.     

Private schooling and labour market outcomes

Though a relative small part of the school sector, private schools have an important role in British society, and there are policy concerns about their negative effect on social mobility. Other studies show that individuals who have attended a private school go on to have higher levels of educational achievement, are more likely to secure a high‐status occupation and also have higher wages. In this article we contribute new evidence on the magnitude of the wage premium, and address a puzzle found in previous studies: how to explain the direct pay premium whereby privately educated male workers have higher wages even than their similarly educated peers. It is commonly conjectured that the broader curriculum that private schools are able to deliver, coupled with the peer pressures of a partially segregated section of society, help to inculcate cultural capital, including some key ‘non‐cognitive’ attributes. We focus here on leadership, organisational participation and an acceptance of hard work. We find that privately educated workers are in jobs that require significantly greater leadership skills, offer greater organisational participation and require greater work intensity. These associations are partially mediated by educational achievement. Collectively these factors contribute little, however, to explaining the direct pay premium. Rather, a more promising account arises from the finding that inclusion of a variable for industry reduces the private school premium to an insignificant amount, which is consistent with selective sorting of privately educated workers into high‐paying industries.     

Pain without gain?: Impact of school rationalisation in India

Alarmed by declining enrolment in government schools and potentially adverse academic, administrative and fiscal consequences associated with it, policy makers in India have initiated experimenting with closure of government schools with low enrolments (‘small’ schools), an exercise commonly referred to as ‘school rationalisation’. However, the impact of this policy on access to schooling and learning remains empirically unexplored. Utilising ASER 2014 data, this paper asks three key questions: (a) what are the characteristics of villages in which ‘small’ schools are located?, (b) what options would students have if ‘small schools’ were to be closed, and finally (c) what are the differences in characteristics of ‘small’ and non-‘small’ schools? Results indicate that the villages which have ‘small’ schools are more disadvantaged in terms of essential public services such as all-weather roads leading to village, availability of government health facilities or banks and post offices. Additionally, these villages are less likely to have an alternative to the ‘small’ school, either government or private. Results also show that ‘small schools’ are much more likely to have multi-grade teaching. They are less likely to have basic infrastructural facilities. Interestingly, learning levels are unlikely to be different in ‘small’ schools than non- ‘small’ schools even after controlling for child, household and village attributes. Thus, the analysis suggests that school rationalisation can potentially have severe consequences on children’s access to schools without any meaningful impact on learning levels in a ‘business as usual’ scenario.     

Communication apprehension,social preference,and social behavior in a college environment

An investigation of high and low communication apprehensives in a college environment indicated that high communication apprehensives interact less with peer strangers, are less likely to accept a blind date, have fewer dates, are more likely to engage in exclusive dating, have close relationships with fewer faculty, are less satisfied with a university's advising system, and are less satisfied with the college environment. These results are examined within the context of the Berger‐Calabrese developmental theory of interpersonal communication and an extension of that theory is tentatively advanced.     

Web accessibility policies at land-grant universities

The Web has become an integral part of postsecondary education within the United States. There are specific laws that legally mandate postsecondary institutions to have Web sites that are accessible for students with disabilities (e.g., the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)). Web accessibility policies are a way for universities to provide a general guide to action for faculty and staff that serve as Website developers for the organization. The purpose of this study is to examine the extent and effectiveness of Web accessibility policies at land-grant universities in the United States. To that end, this paper presents a conceptual foundation for the study, ranging from an overview of Web accessibility studies, to legal mandates, to literature on organizational policies. Data collection consists of a content analysis of the Web accessibility policies of land-grant universities. Results show that while most universities have a Web accessibility policy, most policies have serious deficiencies. The deficiencies are of sufficient magnitude that many schools are likely in violation of the ADA and at risk for a law suit from a disabled person unless these policies are strengthened.     

Student Teachers in Primary Schools: the views of mentors and headteachers

Four year initial teacher education courses have recently undergone radical reform, in particular in relation to the time that students spend in schools. Through the introduction of mentorship programmes, teachers have become very much more involved in training the students whilst they are in school. How do teachers view the changes that have been introduced? Do they agree with the principles and models that guided the developments? Headteachers and class teachers who acted as mentors for students from the University of Reading have supplied some answers. They are very committed to the model of student learning upon which the mentorship programme is built, the belief that schools and the university must work in partnership to implement and further develop the mentorship programme and the view that schools need to adopt a whole school approach to their involvement in initial teacher education. These findings indicate that the teachers agree with the underlying principles that guided the development of the mentorship programme in which they are involved and they are supportive of the resulting changes to school experience.     

Mathematics assessment scenarios for at-risk students

In this paper, we describe the work by a team of university and public school mathematics educators to design mathematics assessment tasks that are effective for students who have been identified at risk in mathematics, through their failure on a state mathematics assessment. We have developed assessment tasks that have the very best chance to elicit the most mathematical knowledge possible, but are closely tied to the school curriculum and practical enough to be administered by classroom teachers. We offer some perspectives on the need for alternative mathematics assessment for at-risk students, along with the dangers inherent in this undertaking. Some practical design considerations are discussed and examples of student responses to a mathematics assessment scenario are given. Finally, policy issues related to authentic assessment are discussed.     

I ulu no ka lālā i ke kumu,the branches grow because of the trunk: ancestral knowledge as refusal

Abstract

This paper will discuss the ways that Native Hawaiian scholars are engaging in innovative strategies that incorporate ancestral knowledges into the academy. Ancestral knowledges are highly valued as Indigenous communities strive to pass on such wisdom and lessons from generation to generation. Ancestral knowledges are all around us no matter where we are, they are evident and valued in every setting, whether out on the ocean and land or in a four-walled classroom. However, contrary to Indigenous beliefs, ancestral knowledges are continually threatened by formal education systems – institutions that would have us believe that they have no place in the university setting; whereby Indigenous ways of learning are replaced with Western forms. Ancestral knowledges are devalued due to the fact that most institutions of higher education are not multi-generational, reflecting a bias against elders and elder knowledge and an overemphasis on ‘new’ knowledge. Furthermore, these institutions are dependent on Western epistemologies and ways of thinking. Building upon my own experiences. This paper aims to unveil the ways in which Native Hawaiians have combated alienation and isolation of ancestral knowledges in higher education and to re-imagine what Native Hawaiian higher education could be. More specifically, I analyze exemplary practices at the level of individuals, community, and institutions to illustrate the ways that scholars have refused such exclusion of ancestral knowledges within the academy.     

三十年改革开放的成功之基与路径选择

改革开放新时期是中国由传统社会向现代社会转型的重要历史阶段。改革开放之所以取得成功,从宏观层面上主要是因为主要领导人对世界大势、历史发展趋势的正确认识和把握以及对待改革的积极态度;有足够的中央权威保证政令畅通;改革中对各阶级、阶层特别是改革中新出现的阶层利益进行有效调整、整合。从微观层面上讲在于正确的路径选择,即改革目标的确定性与改革突破口、改革步骤和方法选择的灵活性相结合;改革方式选择实行体制内变革与体制外生成相结合;把社会稳定放在第一位,正确处理发展的速度、改革的力度和社会的承受程度的关系。     

Design and Evaluation of Digital Assignments on Research Experiments within Food Chemistry

Laboratory classes are regarded as an important learning activity, but they also have shortcomings: laboratory classes are often an inefficient learning activity for students and often do not sufficiently support students in developing research specific cognitive skills. It is hypothesized that some of such skills can be achieved more effectively with digital assignments than with laboratory classes. Therefore, three digital assignments have been designed, developed and evaluated. The assignments have three goals: (1) providing a situation in which students can practice research specific cognitive skills and (2) offering a research method which students can also use in a real laboratory situation and (3) providing the possibility to come across a number of common pitfalls. The assignments are described in detail. Results of a first evaluation of the use of the assignments indicate that the students consider the assignments challenging and valuable. The examination results demonstrate that students are quite capable of making a research design. Although students indicate to have learned a useful research method, students do not apply the method in the laboratory classes.     

Using the Digital Transmedia Magazine Project to Support Students With 21st-Century Literacies

Digital technologies have had a significant impact on how educators have come to understand and define literacy, and on the types of literacies and literacy practices that are required in the 21st century. In response, organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) have designed frameworks that attempt to articulate practices required to be literate in the 21st century. Although educators often turn to the NCTE framework to define the characteristics of a 21st-century literacies curriculum, missing from the professional literature are examples of student projects that have the potential to embody these characteristics. This article describes 1 such project, a digital transmedia magazine, in which groups of students transmediated a story or novel into a magazine using digital technologies. The article illustrates ways in which this project can be used to support students with the 6 elements of the NCTE framework.