Programmed Learning in Engineering Education?A Preliminary Study

A recent study of programmed learning, including experimental use in an electrical engineering department, indicated that the most fruitful application of teaching machine methods is in the presently nonprogrammed or loosely programmed hours spent by students outside classroom or laboratory periods. Programs already developed for use in this study have been concerned with analytical skills; further programs under development are concerned with concepts. Larger scale experiments are planned in which additional questions can be answered, particularly as to whether exposure to programmed instruction adversely affects the capacity of the student to learn independently.     

Private Investigation Programs as an Emerging Trend in Criminal Justice Education? A Case Study of Texas

In the post 9/11 era, the field of private security has experienced major growth. This is particularly notable for the subfield of private investigations. Indeed, private investigators, often portrayed as less professional than other participants in the investigative process, are taking on a more prominent role in traditional criminal justice functions and services. As the field of private investigations has grown in size, function, and complexity, the need for increased and specialized education is a logical consequence. Although in its infancy, the trend toward this type of education appears to be primarily directed at colleges and universities. To further explore this trend, this research surveyed a random sample of licensed private investigation agency owners (N?=?91) in Texas on their viewpoints concerning the education of private investigators at the college and university levels. Among other areas, investigative company owners were asked their opinions on the need for enhanced education to better prepare private investigators for the changing demands of the profession. Results indicate that private investigation agency owners believe that four-year colleges and universities should begin to develop and teach classes to better prepare their students for careers that reflect the changing nature of private investigations work. Implications for research and practice are explored.     

How do Early Childhood Education Teachers Perceive Their Expertise? A Qualitative Study of Child Care Providers in Lapland, Finland

Every preschool age child in Finland has the right to child care. Well-educated staff consists of all-round experts who work in versatile contexts with various children in a multi-professional collaboration. This staff is one of the strengths of the Finnish child care system. The aim of this article is to clarify the expertise of those early childhood education teachers, who have the competence of kindergarten teachers (n = 80) and discuss how the development of early childhood education teachers’ expertise could be supported in a small country like Finland, and more specifically, in its northernmost part, the province of Lapland. This was a qualitative study. The data consisted of the early educators’ stories of their growth toward expertise. The analysis method was content analysis. Four themes emerged from the analysis of the early educators’ growth toward expertise. According to the informants, education, work experience, personal life history and personal attitudes toward work had been the most influential variables in the process of growth toward their expertise. This research showed that the development of early childhood education teachers’ expertise necessitates new kinds of working methods and measures for educational planning. In addition, there is need for individual development plans as the work has become more and more collegial and it is necessary to expand a notion of individual expertise into the realm of collaborative and socially shared expertise.     

Towards an Aesthetic Education? Rorty's Conception of Education

The ‘liberal utopia’ presented by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is a unique attempt to address the ancient problem of the relationship between individual and society or, in Rorty's terms, that between the private and the public. This article examines Rorty's influential conception of education and asks: can his book be regarded as utopian? Is it possible to establish an education for democracy on his ‘postmodern’ premises? I conclude that Rorty's attempt to separate private from public and to promote a fusion between irony and solidarity is tantamount to founding human existence on an aestheticising orientation. This entangles Rorty in self-contradiction and raises educational and political problems which remain unresolved.     

Deconstructing Doctoral Students’ Socialization from an Institutional Logics Perspective: A Qualitative Study of the Socialization of Chinese Doctoral Students in Finland

While socialization has become a major lens of research in doctoral education, this paper advances the theoretical foundation of the socialization process in doctoral education by using the institutional logics theory. Specifically, it proposes an analytical framework for understanding the socialization of doctoral students, where it is seen as a process of reconciling different or even competing institutional logics that drive students’ development in doctoral education. The framework has been applied in an empirical study of ten doctoral students in Finland who were funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC). While proving the usefulness of the analytical framework, the study shows that CSC doctoral students mainly face the competing logics of profession and corporation during socialization. Influenced by a strong profession logic, the Chinese students have transformed themselves into novice professionals and knowledge producers. Corporation logic competed with profession logic in the management of doctoral students and has resulted in a lack of teaching experiences in doctoral training and a weak recognition of professional identity in the students’ host universities. The influence of family logic, inherited from CSC doctoral students’ cultural backgrounds, has been decoupled in the socialization process and has led to a strong sense of loss in handling the supervisory relationship between supervisors and students. Based on the findings of this study, the author provides several recommendations for host universities, supervisors, doctoral students, the CSC, and the Chinese Embassy in Finland to enable them to work together and help CSC doctoral students tackle the aforementioned challenges.     

Diluting education? An ethnographic study of change in an Australian Ministry of Education

This ethnographic study captures the processes that led to change in an Australian public education system. The changes were driven by strong neo-liberal discourses which resulted in a shift from a shared understanding about leading educational change in schools by knowledge transfer to managing educational change as a process, in other words, allowing the schools to decide how to change. Inside an Australian state education bureaucracy at a time when the organisation was restructured and services decentralised, this study helps show some of the disturbing trends resulting from the further entrenchment of neo-liberal strategies. Although control was re-centralised by legitimising performance mechanisms, in the form of national testing, there are indications that the focus on national tests may have alarming consequences for the content and context of education. I argue that the complexities of learning and fundamental pedagogies are being lost in preference for an over-reliance on data systems that are based on a shallow and narrow set of standardised measures.     

Does Gender Matter? an Exploratory Study of Perspectives Across Genders, Age and Education

Using a convenience sample and survey research methods, the authors seek to better understand how perspectives on gender are shaped by individuals’ age, level of education and gender. Study participants responded in writing to scenarios and survey questions, revealing their personal views on gender as an identity category and as a marker in the social hierarchy. Analysis indicated that there were differences between male and female views on these dimensions of gender, and that age and educational levels were also influential. While younger respondents from both genders demonstrated flexibility in their definitions of gender and expressed strong support for gender equality, they were noticeably lacking in their knowledge of the historical context of gender relations and did not show the skills required to realise their ideals of gender equality, especially when compared to older respondents of both genders with higher levels of educational attainment.     

Education in the Information Age – A Preliminary Study of the Changing Roles of School Teachers in Singapore

With the global information boom, and rapid developments in electronic media and the World Wide Web (Web) within the last two decades, the Singapore government envisioned a need for Singapore to be Information Technology (IT) equipped and competent in every industry, beginning most importantly with the education sector. Taking its cue, the Ministry of Education (MOE) implemented rigorous plans for both school teachers and students to possess the necessary skills and knowledge. As a result, there ensued a transformation in existing teaching practices and new expectations of teachers are inadvertently formed. Based on preliminary interviews with practitioners and academics in the area of Education, this paper gives an insight into the changes that have been taking place in the education system in Singapore with respect to the new policies on IT; an overview of the changing roles that teachers have to assume; a brief discussion on how these changes can be expedited, and some possible future trends in the teaching practices and roles of teachers.     

A Study about Our Educational Resource Deployment of Compulsory Education

In the base of utility and marginal utility, the article put forward the concept of utility and marginal utility of educational outlay and the theory of them, and analyzed the actuality of educational resource deployment in our country, gave some advice about how to improve our educational resource deployment of compulsory education.     

Does Neoliberalist-based Internationalized Higher Education Function in Chi-nese Context? A Case Study of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China

Despite the dispute on whether the impacts of globalization and internationalization on the development of economy, society, culture and education are true, the fact we cannot deny is that neoliberalis...     

Does Neoliberalist-based Internationalized Higher Education Function in Chinese Context? A Case Study of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China

Despite the dispute on whether the impacts of globalization and internationalization on the development of economy,society,culture and education are true,the fact we cannot deny is that neoliberalism and marketization have impose a great transformation on our daily lives(Mok,2010).China,as one of the powerful countries in the world,is inevitable to be involved in this trend.While confronting the changes in higher education in mainland China brought by neoliberalism,I intend to propose a question:Does Neoliberalist-based internationalized higher education function in Chinese context?In line with my research question,this article attempts to examine the validity of neoliberalism through a case study of University of Nottingham Ningbo China.The next section is a theoretical approach,and then is a case study.In conclusion,this article indicates that the function of neoliberalism,especially in the higher education in mainland China,is still way off.     

Are Academics in Kazakhstan Capable of Self-regulation? A Study of Faculty’s Normative Structure in the Midst of Higher Education Decentralization Reforms

Tertiary Education and Management - This paper investigates the state and structure of professional norms in the context of undergraduate teaching in a university in Kazakhstan. The purpose is to...     

University Studies and Concept of Reality—A Study of Effects of Education

The project's background

Research about the effects of education at an individual level are to a great extent concentrated to the higher levels of the educational system. Ever since the 1930's extensive research has been conducted, not least in the United States, about what effects on knowledge and values originate from university training. As this project has as its main purpose—with examples from a number of different fields of study—to describe and try to understand enduring effects of a cognitive nature which higher education can contribute to, there is reason to pay attention to those features in previous research that have concerned growth of knowledge and/or cognitive development. According to a survey that was made in a different context (Dahlgren, 1982), it is possible to classify the cognitive effects of education into three levels. The first level might be the one that is most evidently associated with formal education, i.e., the level where specific knowledge and skills within different subjects appear. It is of course not surprising to find that students that are about to leave an education where they have taken extensive courses in, for instance, biology and chemistry perform better at tests with problems of a scientific nature than a group of students that have recently started the same kind of education.     

Does Empathy Predict Instructional Assignment-Related Stress? A Study in Special and General Education Teachers

The role of empathy in the teaching profession has been vastly investigated in relation to its effect on students, but research on how teachers’ empathy affects their own well-being at work is limited. This study investigated empathy and instructional assignment-related stress factors of primary school teachers serving in general or special education; moreover, it investigated if empathy predicted instructional assignment-related stress. Data were collected from 190 primary school teachers using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index and the Inventory of Job-related Stress Factors. Teachers reported moderately high levels of perspective-taking and empathic concern and lower levels of fantasising and personal distress. Also, they reported moderate to low levels of stress regarding instructional assignment-related factors. General and special education teachers did not differ in their reported scores on empathy or stress-related factors. Finally, it was found that instructional assignment-related stress factors can be predicted by personal distress and fantasising; however, the core empathy skills (empathic concern and perspective taking) were not found to be strong predictors of the stress factors tested.     

Going Charter? A Study of School District Competition in Wisconsin

The question that drives this article is why some school districts decide to open up charter schools and others do not. Several answers are plausible: (a) entrepreneurial initiative, (b) structural explanations, and (c) spatial competition. We use data for the state of Wisconsin derived from extensive case studies of 19 charter schools and quantitative data on Wisconsin school district from state files and the U.S. Department of Education common core databases. We find evidence to support all three explanations for why districts “go charter.” First, in almost every school and district we visited for case studies, at the heart of either the district or the charter school, and often both, there were entrepreneurial administrators, school board members, teachers, or parents. Our evidence was anecdotal but very consistent across 19 case studies. Second, there are two general sets of structural characteristics that were shown to be quantitatively correlated with becoming a charter district. The first set comprised resource characteristics (size, federal revenue, and available seats); the second set comprised indicators of unmet students needs (the percentage of students eligible for free lunch). Finally, we argue and believe we provide significant evidence that competition is also a motivation for going charter. We posit that open enrollment and charter schools are working together to enhance the flows of students from homeschooling, private schools, dropouts, and other public school districts into charter school districts. Thus using several different indicators and models, estimating both which districts become charter districts and the flow and net gain directly from open enrollment, there is no question that charter schools are increasing competition for students in Wisconsin.     

Freethinkers’ Proposal for a Teaching Plan in Moral Education in Finland

Abstract

The paper which follows gives the historical and contemporary background to the present on‐going attempt of the Union of Freethinkers in Finland to gain acceptance for a new syllabus in moral education in the curriculum of Finnish schools. An outline is given of their linguistic approach to moral education which draws on many insights from thinkers and practitioners world‐wide and attempts to promote a positive identity among non‐believers. The proposal is offered as a possible model for other non‐doctrinaire teaching plans and the author would welcome any observations on its relevance and potential use in other countries of the world.     

A Pilot Study in the Field of Professional Further Education — Cooperative Learning in a Multimedia Learning Environment

ABSTRACT

Based on cooperative learning models, the present study investigated the specific effects of performance, interpersonal relations and affective variables in a computer‐based cooperative learning environment. Subjects were male and female adults who studied a multimedia learning program as a professional training task. After randomization 50 subjects worked in cooperative settings, while 25 subjects worked individually as a control group. In keeping with our assumptions, the subjects benefited from being paired. Further advantages for cooperative learning seem likely if instructions are modified and cooperative strategies used.     

Would you Bribe your Lecturer? A Quasi-experimental Study on Burnout and Bribery in Higher Education

Research in Higher Education - Bribery is a complex and critical issue in higher education (HE), causing severe economic and societal harm. Traditionally, most scholarship on HE corruption has...