The national survey of student engagement as a predictor of undergraduate GPA: a cross‐sectional and longitudinal examination

Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) collected across seven years were used to predict final, cumulative grade point averages (GPA). Cross‐product regression was used to explore the predictive abilities of the NSSE benchmark scores for freshmen (n = 2578) and seniors (n = 2293) collected in cross‐sectional cohorts. Hierarchical regression was also used with 127 longitudinal responses in students’ first and senior years of college. In the cross‐sectional analyses, Level of Academic Challenge emerged as a significant predictor of GPA for freshmen, whereas the Active and Collaborative Learning benchmark was a significant predictor for seniors; both effects were modest. The cross‐sectional data explained 22.6% of the variance with 18.2% of this variance accounted for by pre‐college control factors (American College Test score and high school GPA). For the analysis of longitudinal data, 31.3% of the variance was explained and 27.8% was attributed to the pre‐college indicators. No benchmark scores were significant predictors of GPA in the longitudinal data. Results suggest that cross‐sectional analyses can adequately detect modest effects on final GPA. In contrast, longitudinal models explain more variance, though they lack the power to reveal modest effects. This study suggests approaches for the responsible use of cross‐sectional and longitudinal data in educational research.     

Higher education in a changing environment: Regional,national and trans‐national issues

The significance of competing conceptions of civic engagement is increasingly apparent as efforts are made to respond to the measurement imperative that characterises contemporary higher education. The importance of devising appropriate means of recognising and incentivising civic engagement is asserted in this paper and the potential offered by emerging measurement and mapping methodologies is considered. The empirical basis for the argument derives from a multi‐site case study of the process of embedding community‐based learning within Irish higher education. Analysis of interview data from four cases, drawn from the university and extra‐university sector, yielded, inter alia, a typology of orientations to civic engagement. Findings are discussed, including those relating to orientations, ambivalence, scepticism, and legitimisation strategies. The case is made that these themes and the factors which impact on sustainability are mirrored within the wider domain of civic engagement—hence the opportunity to learn from a civically engaged pedagogy.     

Mediatizing educational policy: the journalistic field,science policy,and cross‐field effects

This paper is concerned to demonstrate the usefulness of the theory of Bourdieu, including the concepts of field, logics of practice and habitus, to understanding relationships between media and policy, what Fairclough has called the ‘mediatization’ of policy. Specifically, the paper draws upon Bourdieu’s accessible account of the journalistic field as outlined in On television and journalism. The usefulness of this work is illustrated through a case study of a recent Australian science policy, The chance to change. As this policy went through various iterations and media representations, its naming and structure became more aphoristic. This is the mediatization of contemporary policy, which often results in policy as sound bite. The case study also shows the cross‐field effects of this policy in education, illustrating how today educational policy can be spawned from developments in other public policy fields.     

The activities of a school‐based teacher educator: a theoretical and empirical exploration

Teacher education all over Europe is increasingly becoming school‐based oriented. This implies new roles for those who support student teachers learning in school. This article describes the way four school‐based teacher educators fulfill their role as educators of student teachers who learn how to teach while participating in the workplace. Based on theoretical notions derived from the literature on teacher education and workplace learning, the Cognitive Apprenticeship Model was specified and used in a case study as a framework to describe the activity of these school‐based teacher educators. They use tools (e.g., apprenticeship assignments) developed within the teacher education institute and rely on their professional knowledge as experienced schoolteachers. This results in student teachers being provided with useful tricks which, however, hardly helps them to interpret and elaborate their experiences from a more conceptual or theoretical perspective. Also the possibilities of the social context of the school as a learning environment are not systematically used.     

Knowledge through a collaborative network: a cross‐cultural partnership

A recurring issue for researchers, policy‐makers and practitioners is how new knowledge can be disseminated, critiqued, assessed and incorporated into policy development and practice. Campbell and Fulford examined strategies in a Canadian Education Ministry which was striving to incorporate research findings into policy debate. They evolved a useful framework indentifying six forms and stages of knowledge development related to research use in this context: generation of new knowledge, mobilisation, contextualisation, adaptation, application and integration. This paper uses their framework to explore links between research and practice in a collaborative cross‐cultural partnership designed to develop greater capacity in teacher education in a Pacific country, and based on action, co‐construction and reflection. It argues that there are blurred boundaries between knowledge production and its practical implementation, use and testing, that contextualisation and relationship building are crucial to knowledge mobilisation, and that knowledge is generated across all stages in the process.     

Intended college enrollment and educational inequality: Do students lack information?

Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented in universities. In this regard, the economics literature has focused on the role of financial constraints as a cause of these observed differences in educational choices. Our knowledge of potential effects of other constraints regarding university education is more limited. We investigate the causal relationship between information and educational expectations using data from a German randomized controlled trial in which students in high schools were given information on the benefits of as well as on different funding possibilities for university education. We find that the provision of information increases intended college enrollment for students from a non-academic family background, both two to three months and one year after the intervention. In contrast, it leads students from academic backgrounds to lower their enrollment intentions in the short run. However, this effect does not persist. Our results suggest that educational inequality can be reduced by providing students from non-academic families with relevant information.     

How preschool children learn in Hong Kong and Canada: a cross‐cultural study

This paper reviews literacy learning conducted in two laboratory preschools in Hong Kong and Canada, and examines the link between cultural values and educational practices. Both preschools maintain that a constructivist view of child learning underpins their practice. However, the author's experience in these two settings illustrates how similarities and differences are identified in the scope, focus, implementation strategies and learning outcomes of the activities observed. Reasons for these findings are explored from the perspectives of cultural values and societal beliefs in education of the East and the West, and how the constructivist ideology is espoused in these settings. Implications of this cross‐cultural comparison on the issue of ‘best practice’ in early childhood education are discussed.     

Student persistence in distance education: a cross‐cultural multi‐institutional perspective

Following the 12th World Conference of ICDE (Vancouver, 1982) the author was invited to coordinate a project aimed at opcrationalizing a research methodology that was discussed during the conference. The essence of the proposed methodology (Taylor and White, 1983) was to conduct essentially the same empirical study in a variety of distance education settings. It was thought that such an approach could engender an objective synthesis of research results that might lead to a significant contribution being made to the empirical basis for distance education.

It was agreed that the study should focus on something of practical importance to distance educators. It was further agreed that the study could not be of too specialised a theoretical nature because of the need to involve a number of institutions across a wide range of cultural settings. It was finally agreed that the study should take a lead from Rekkedal's (1973) study on turn‐around time.

Major contributions to this first ICDE International Research Project were made by L.J. Barker and V.J. White (Darling Downs IAE, Australia), G. Gillard (University of the South Pacific, Fiji), D. Kaufman (Open Learning Institute, Canada), A.N. Khan (Allama Iqbal Open University, Pakistan), R. Mezger(Tasmanian State Institute of Technology, Australia) and the ICDE Research Committee regional coordinators.     

Universality of Socio‐moral Development: a cross‐sectional study in Poland

The concept of friendship has had a great deal of attention within recent years from philosophers. However, this attention restricts itself to friendship between adults and rarely considers the issue of friendship between children. The issue of friendship and how we socialise with others ought to be an important concept for education, yet schools rarely take the forming, nurturing and nourishing of friendship beyond helping to deal with disputes between friends when they disrupt school life. I wish to argue that whilst friendship is critical to the development of character and can properly be seen as part of ‘an invitation to the moral life’, it also has value in and of itself as part of the flourishing life.     

Illness as a rhetorical act: A cross‐cultural perspective

The central contention of this essay is that physical illness and its resolution have increasingly become a function of the symbolic reality which humans select, respond to, and employ. The essay is divided into two parts. In part one, it is argued that physical illnesses and morbidity have increasingly been linked to societal variables, not infectious diseases or tissue trauma. Particularly, it is maintained that psychophysiologic, psychogenic, psychosocial, and psychosomatic factors such as stress are central contributive variables in the development of disorders which strain the physiological and psychological integrative capacities of the modern human being. In the second part of this essay, emergency room disabilities in Puerto Rico and on the mainland of the United States are compared. These two geographic regions constitute distinct symbolic systems. The different sex role patterns, childrearing practices, and family structures of these two cultures affect the nature, duration, and severity of illnesses in these two sociocultural systems. The analysis concludes by offering twelve summative propositions.     

Capabilities‐based educational equivalency units: Beginning a professional dialogue

Abstract

This article proposes a basic model for the transformation of academic equivalency in distance education, shifting from a unit of measurement that relies on time in the classroom (the Carnegie unit) to one that focuses on learner achievement. The Capabilities‐Based Educational Equivalency (CBEE) model puts forward a framework of academic equivalency that is founded on valid and useful instructional design objectives. While allowing time to be variable (rather than constant) and holding academic achievement relatively constant, the CBEE model permits the comparison of student achievement in face‐to‐face and distance education, as well as between programs delivering instruction via a wide variety of media.     

Practice in planning and planning in practice: re‐assessing and clarifying action research in a multi‐national context

This paper responds to a call seeking presenters for an action‐research event for elementary‐school science teachers in Venezuela. The authors planned on the assumption that the participants would wish to leave with plans for introducing action‐research approaches into their practice. In previous writing on action research, the various protocols for action‐research planning and practice emphasize norms and regularities rather more than their opposites. This paper shows, however, that planning is transformed by multiple views of teaching and learning to create a multi‐level, multi‐faceted event within a particular context. The activity of planning parallels the pedagogy enacted in the event. The interactions of presenters and participants, of their purposes and actions, create the complex reality that is action research, where the learning and the events are often asynchronous.     

Do educational vouchers reduce inequality and inefficiency in education?

Policy debates around the topic of educational vouchers as an approach to improve the public educational system are still ongoing and a consensus on the potential benefits or drawbacks has not been reached yet. This paper models the distributional processes entailed by two alternative educational voucher systems, universal and target vouchers, by using an agent-based model of a highly heterogeneous school district. Using this approach allows to track which students actually switch schools and thereby evaluate peer effects. At the same it is possible to model an endogenous reaction of public schools in order to assess their reaction to increased competition. The results indicate an ambiguous effect of universal vouchers on low-income students. The introduction has a negative peer effect on students in low-performing schools due to “cream skimming”, i.e. highly motivated students leaving the schools. In contrast, students who switch to better schools observe a positive effect. The negative effects are partly alleviated by low- performing schools improving their educational services as a response to a decline in enrollment. When examining target vouchers which are a function of student ability, the paper shows that they allow the school district to benefit from the increased competition while avoiding the deterioration of the peer group.     

Devising inequality: a Bernsteinian analysis of high‐stakes testing and social reproduction in education

High‐stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, and it has been implemented with particular intensity in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on research on high‐stakes testing and its effect on classroom practice and pedagogic discourse in the United States, the present paper applies Bernstein’s concept of the pedagogic device to explain how high‐stakes tests operate as a relay in the reproduction of dominant social relations in education. This analysis finds that high‐stakes tests, through the structuring of knowledge, actively select and regulate student identities, and thus contribute to the selection and regulation of students’ educational success.     

Creativity across Time and Place: life span and cross‐cultural perspectives

Creativity varies across time and place. With regard to variations across time, age‐related changes in the quantity, quality, and form of creative performance are examined. These changes are traced to a combination of cognitive, conative, and environmental variables. With regard to variations across place, the effect of cultural environment on creativity is examined. Culture is shown to influence the definition and expression of creativity, channeling creativity into certain task domains or social groups. The quantity of creative activity can be further affected by cultural features such as the value placed on conformity. Life span and cross‐cultural perspectives on creativity, it is argued, are integral to a comprehensive understanding of creativity.     

Learning in and for cross‐school working

In this study we report some of the outcomes of a study of professional learning that took place in cross school partnerships as they worked towards promoting creativity in schools. The methodology developed by Engeström and his colleagues at The Centre for Developmental Work Research in Helsinki was adopted. This form of intervention involves the preparation and facilitation of workshops in which the underlying structural contradictions that are in play in emergent activities are highlighted and articulated in such a way that participants may engage with what may otherwise remain hidden and unexamined tensions. This approach is based on the writings of the early 20th‐century Russian school of social scientists—Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. A principal claim is that the development of creativity requires tools and contexts for such innovatory forms of practice. This study suggests that this claim is a partial representation of the development of creative activity.     

Accountability: a key‐word in the discourse of educational reform

This paper examines the relationship between language and power in education policy. It takes the example of accountability as the specific focus for an analysis of discursive power in the shaping of education in the 1990s. In doing so, it examines the ways in which language contributes to the construction and maintenance of norms and consensual positions in education. Drawing on work in critical linguistics and cultural theory, the paper considers how recent changes in education might be analysed in a way which relates specific examples of social and linguistic practice to larger scale theoretical concerns. The examples which provide the specific focus for discussion in this paper relate to the concept of accountability and are drawn from an empirical study of the enactment of the statutory curriculum for English in secondary schools in 1992‐93.