Value added based on educational positions in Dutch secondary education

Estimating added value as an indicator of school effectiveness in the context of educational accountability often occurs using test or examination scores of students. This study investigates the possibilities for using scores of educational positions as an alternative indicator. A number of advantages of a value added indicator based on educational positions of students can be formulated, such as: (a) the societal significance of educational position as output measure; (b) the fact that a single indicator can be estimated for an entire school in a differentiated educational system, where not all schools provide education in all tracks; and (c) the expectation that value added based on educational positions leads to other incentives for schools than value added based on test scores. Empirical analysis of Dutch cohort data (VOCL'99) for secondary education showed considerable differences in effectiveness between schools in the positions of students. Furthermore, differential school effects were found for both socio‐economic status and prior achievement. The phenomena of differential school effects for socio‐economic status and prior achievement are linked to differences between schools in the kind of tracks in which the schools provide schooling.     

Unfairness in access to higher education: a 11 year comparison of grade inflation by private and public secondary schools in Portugal

Fairness in access to HE is unarguably a subject of paramount importance. Wherever a student’s secondary school scores are relevant for access to HE, grade inflation practices may jeopardize fair access. Pressures for high grading are common in the context of educational consumerism and competition between schools and students. However, they are not equally distributed across different types of schools, given that they have distinct relationships with the State and the market, and work with distinct populations. Specifically, the schools that are more subject to market pressures (namely private schools) are, in principle at least, the ones with more incentives to inflate their students’ grades. This paper presents an empirical study based on a large, 11 years database on scores in upper secondary education in Portugal, probing for systematic differences in grade inflation practices by four types of schools: public schools, government-dependent private schools, independent (fee-paying) private schools, and specially funded public schools in disadvantaged areas (TEIP schools). More than 3 million valid cases were analysed. Our results clearly show that independent private schools inflate their students’ scores when compared to the other types of schools. They also show that this discrepancy is higher where scores matter most in competition for HE access. This means that—usually wealthier—students from private independent schools benefit from an unfair advantage in the competition for the scarce places available in public higher education. We conclude discussing possible solutions to deal with such an important issue.     

The Christian Family as Mediator

The publication in 2011 of This is Our Faith (TIOF), the Catholic Church in Scotland's syllabus for religious education in Catholic schools, is a significant contribution to wider debates on the appropriate conceptual framework for religious education. Recent teaching of the Holy See has suggested that religious education in Catholic schools should adopt a scholastic shape and serve as a complement to catechesis. In TIOF, pedagogy, assessment issues and the relationship between cognitive and affective approaches to learning are merged in the context of a distinct faith tradition. TIOF's adoption of a catechetical vision of religious education shows how local churches can adapt Catholic teaching to their own circumstances.     

Do OFSTED Inspections of Secondary Schools Make a Difference to GCSE Results?

The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) aims to improve school performance through inspection. A government indicator of a secondary school's performance in England and Wales is the students' success in examinations. The examination results of over 3000 OFSTED inspected secondary schools offering students for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination during the 1992 to 1997 inspection cycle were modelled statistically. For kinds of schools where achievement was already much higher or lower than the average (e.g. selective schools), inspection was associated with slight improvements in achievement. For county, local education authority maintained, comprehensive schools (the largest single group), inspection did not improve examination achievement. Some implications for school improvement are discussed.     

Restore and Develop Agricultural Middle Schools (1979)

… Since the downfall of the Gang of Four, the cause of rural education in China has undergone profound change and great development. Yet the enterprise is still seriously inappropriate given the pressing demands of agricultural modernization and the peasantry's actual needs. The key to solving this contradiction is to restore and develop agricultural secondary schools. Agricultural secondary schools are a new type of school combining education and productive labor, created under the conditions of socialism in China by the broad masses of peasants themselves in their struggles against ignorance and backwardness. These schools implement a part-agriculture, part-study system whereby their students acquire book learning while engaging in productive labor—a system that lightens the burden on the state, on the collective, and on the students' families, and is therefore beneficial to the state, the collective, and the individual. Actual practice has demonstrated that doing a proper job of running agricultural secondary schools is an important means for the rural areas to achieve greater, faster, better, and more economical results in producing trained personnel. Our respected and beloved Premier Zhou Enlai pointed out in his "Report on the Work of the Government," delivered at the Third National People's Congress, that "these new type of schools are able to turn out universally developed, new-type people who are both capable of doing physical labor and equipped with culture and technology, and thus create the conditions for gradually eliminating the disparity between mental and manual labor." Hence, the National Work Conference on Education held last year confirmed the guiding principle of developing agricultural secondary schools in the rural areas, and Comrade Deng Xiaoping emphasized in his speech that the proportion of agricultural secondary schools should be increased.     

In the Wake of A Nation at Risk: New American Schools' Private Sector School Reform Initiative

Since its publication in 1983, A Nation at Risk has caused several waves and ripples of educational reform. This article puts that report in the context of earlier responses to perceived education crises. One such important response was from the private sector: the New American Schools Development Corporation (NAS). NAS attempted to create, develop, and widely disseminate "break the mold" whole-school designs to improve student achievement in the nation's schools. Despite a history of mixed results, NAS was influential in changing federal policy to support the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program (CSRD). Now embedded in the No Child Left Behind legislation, CSRD has private and public sector support for the nation's continuing attempts to create effective schools. However, the effectiveness of comprehensive school reform at scale in the nation's highest poverty schools remains an open question.     

SEN students' inclusion in Greece: factors influencing Greek teachers' stance

The present study, based on recent research in secondary education schools in Greece, aimed at recording Greek teachers' attitudes towards inclusion and determining the factors that enhance positive attitudes or negative ones. The findings of this research confirm that Greek teachers, despite obvious infrastructural and institutional hindrances, favour SEN students' inclusion, and this attitude is strengthened when specialised knowledge, further training and incentives for acquiring professional qualifications are provided to teachers.     

Raising achievement with adolescents in secondary education—the school counsellor's perspective

This qualitative study used data from semi‐structured interviews with eight school counsellors working with adolescents in secondary education and asked them how they perceived counselling interventions as helping to raise achievement. The present context in secondary education is perceived as results led. This adheres to government policy as manifested in the National Curriculum and the examination system. However at a grass roots level there is a growing acceptance of having counsellors working in schools to support the emotional and psychological needs of children and adolescents. The counsellors identified three areas in which they felt their clients' achievement was raised through a counselling intervention: developmentally, socially and less directly, academically. Further study is called for to explore what effect applying a complementary integration and understanding of counselling and educational philosophy might have on raising achievement with adolescents in secondary education.     

Secondary Schools for Norwich Girls, 1850-1910: Demanded or benevolently supplied?

This article uses archival material from the city of Norwich to trace the development of girls' secondary education from 1860 to 1900. It examines the provision of differentiated education for girls of differing social status in the context of national legislation and the local labour market for women. Also considered is the issue of causality in the supply-demand equation for girls' education, relating this to issues of gender-determined access to education that underlie the study of developing education systems both past and present. I conclude that the growth in the provision and use of education for girls in Norwich during this period mirrors that of other parts of the nation, seeming to have been little influenced by local economic and political forces, or an initial local demand. Instead, a national campaign carried on by women activists at the national level for the improvement of education for girls, together with the provision of schools offering an extended and higher quality academic education for girls by the Girls' Day School Trust, the Norwich School Board, and private individuals, appears to have overcome local disincentives to educate girls and created a demand for secondary schooling for them.     

Determinants of educational exclusion: Poor urban girls' experiences in- and out-of-school in Kenya

The educational challenges girls face are often explained by economics. However, gender norms and identities, constructed historically but subject to change, also play a crucial role. In Kenya, little attention has been paid to the negative social constructions that keep girls from attaining the education they want. This article analyses the role of social construction among girls who are in and out of two secondary schools in Nairobi province, Kenya. Data were obtained from interviews with adolescent girls attending the schools, female dropouts previously affiliated with those two schools, and teachers at the schools. All the challenges that girls faced in attempting to secure secondary education were linked to social construction; they were deeply rooted in gender roles as defined by the cultural context and reinforced by socialisation. Based on the results, the authors hold that women must lead community efforts toward changes that will enhance their daughters’ educational opportunities.     

Grammar Schools' Achievements and the DfEE's Measures of Value-added: An attempt at clarification

In an endeavour to compare the teaching-efficiency of individual secondary schools in England, the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) published measures of pupils' progress in learning attainments between the ages of 14 and 16, based on the results of obligatory nationwide tests in a range of school-subjects at each of those ages (SATs and GCSE). The results were subsequently used by commentators to suggest that grammar schools do not make as much progress between those ages as comprehensive schools; and that pupils who are high-attainers at age 14 do better in their subsequent two years if they attend a comprehensive school rather than a grammar school. The present paper examines the robustness of the measuring rods for these purposes; it concludes that they are hardly adequate but, insofar as they are used for these purposes, the results indicate precisely the opposite: namely, greater average progress (greater 'value-added') for grammar schools, and for high-attaining pupils in grammar schools.     

师范院校培养电教人才的探讨

现代教育技术的发展,为教育形式、教育思想、教育内容的改革,创造了良好的条件。而担当培养中小学合格教师的师范院校,其电教工作的开展,对中小学教育工作的改革尤为重要。师范院校首先要认清电化教育在中小学实施素质教育中的作用,了解当地中小学电化教育的实际情况,在此基础上去改革自身的电教工作,才能培养出具有一定电教能力的,适合中小学实施素质教育的合格人才。     

Teacher incentives in the Third World

Based on Kemmerer's earlier work on teacher incentives, this study examined the extent that teacher incentives (or the type that might be influenced by central ministries of education) were related to teachers' instructional practices and career satisfaction of junior secondary school teachers in Botswana. Results indicated that the level of incentives teachers received was meaningfully related to teachers' career satisfaction, but was not related to teachers' classroom teaching practices. Findings suggest that, while incentives to improve teachers' overall career satisfaction might stimulate teacher recruitment and encourage retention in teaching, those incentives would not necessarily lead to improved instructional practices.     

Educational choice and achievement: The case of secondary schools in the Arab Republic of Egypt

Before 1952 university education in Egypt was generally for the wealthier classes because the universities charged fees and only the richer families could pay those fees. For less wealthy families payment was more difficult, not only because of the direct cost of higher education, but also because of the high opportunity cost of sending children to study. After the 1952 revolution the Egyptian government introduced free education at all levels and encouraged those who wanted to further their education to enter universities. Thus elitism was eradicated from Egyptian higher education. This paper uses data from a sample of Egyptian university students and analyses the determinants of secondary school choice and the factors likely to affect secondary school certificate marks. In particular we are interested in the effect of family background, represented here by father's occupation.The results suggest that individuals with fathers in higher occupational categories tend to go to private schools rather than public schools. They also tend to choose general schools rather than technical or Koranic schools. In turn, high social background as well as attendance at a private school, have a positive and significant effect on examination marks. These findings are alarming because Egypt has a rate of increase in population of over 2% and the supply of university places will therefore have to be rationed. The most likely screening factor would be examination results and as a consequence Egyptian universities may in the future become elitist once more.     

Researching the competence-based curriculum: preface to a case study of four urban secondary schools

This introductory article accompanies three further articles forming a case study research project undertaken to describe the experience of four urban secondary schools implementing a competence-based curriculum for students in their first year of secondary education. The nature of such competence-based curricula is discussed in the context of secondary schools before providing an outline of the context of each of the case study schools. A democratic and emancipatory view of education provides the rationale for the development of transferable competencies, and this is considered with respect to the challenges of engaging in a cross-disciplinary approach to the curriculum. These challenges are viewed through the lens of Bernstein's concepts of strong and weak framing and horizontal and vertical discourses. Each of the accompanying articles takes up a different aspect of education, focusing on curriculum planning, teaching and learning, and leadership and management respectively. Further challenges with regard to changes in the English curriculum are briefly reflected upon. Finally an outline of the case study methodology which was employed in the study is provided.     

2005年高职院校教师发表论文情况分析

对2005年我国高职院校教师发表的论文进行统计分析,结果显示论文在人均数量、质量、发表刊物、内容方面都存在一定问题。为此,各高职院校应加强对教师科研与论文写作方法的指导,办好高职院校学报,为教师提供高科研水平和论文写作能力创造平台。同时,传播、出版行业也应大力支持高职教师论文发表工作。     

Exploring UK secondary teachers' professional values: an overview of the literature since 2000

Background:?Professional commitment from teachers requires more than contractual compliance as personal and professional values are integral to teaching practice. Secondary school teachers are expected to act as role models and demonstrate positive attributes and attitudes in an evolving educational context. Little is known about how they understand or interpret their own values, or realise the shared values that lie at the heart of a school community.

Purpose:?The purpose of this review is to summarise the literature relating to values that teachers hold. The review is concerned with theoretical and empirical studies in which such values are considered, and also any tensions identified between the personal values of teachers and organisational values of the schools reflected in professional practice. This scoping exercise is part of two-year funded empirical research carried out by the authors in five secondary schools in England, using data from individuals, groups and schools on the personal values of teachers and head teachers. This research explored whether these values are congruent with the organisational values schools seek to establish.

Design and methods:?An extensive literature review was undertaken relating to the values held by secondary school professionals. The search was restricted to more recent works (i.e. the year 2000 onwards), and was mainly UK and secondary education focused. The search was conducted using the educational database, Education Indexes on Dialog, and the Electronic Journal Service which is a database covering wider disciplines. To reach harder-to-find research reports, additional strategies were adopted including hand searching of key journals and reference to existing publication lists. The review generated over 1000 published references that were then screened to determine whether publications were based on empirical research conducted in schools, and/or helped a deeper theoretical understanding about the meaning of values.

Conclusion:?The review highlights the integral part values continue to play in education. This article presents a framework of understanding derived from the literary contexts in which values are discussed. There is little empirical data to support current understanding about the values that secondary teachers hold, and how these fit with the organisational values of the schools in which they work. Studies in the context of values and professionalism stress the need for dialogue and reflection so that ‘implicit’ values that teachers hold become explicit, and refined through practice.     

The Influence of School Health Education Programmes on the Knowledge and Behaviour of School Children towards Nutrition and Health

A comparative investigation was conducted involving two school situations; one identified as being health promoting and having a comprehensive policy and a defined programme of health education, and the other not health promoting, having no policy and an unstructured programme of health education. A total of 367 students from two secondary and four primary schools participated in the study. The factors used to categorise schools are highlighted. A self-completion questionnaire was employed to assess students' knowledge and behaviour with regard to nutrition and health. Students' dietary intake was monitored by employing a frequency of consumption tick sheet. The results revealed that students from the more health promoting secondary school (School 1(H)) were more knowledgeable of what constitutes a healthy diet and the benefits and risks to health. The implications of these results are considered within the context of the many factors that could influence students' knowledge and behaviour.     

Teachers’ perceptions of a voluntary LEA scheme for school self‐evaluation

In 1979, a booklet, Evaluating the School: A Guide for Secondary Schools in the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull, was published and a limited number were distributed to Solihull schools free of charge. The purpose of the booklet is to provide an agenda for school self‐improvement through systematic school review: its use by Solihull schools is entirely voluntary. This is the report of a survey of the perceptions of Solihull secondary school teachers of the booklet and of school self‐evaluation generally.

Four years after its publication, less than half of Solihull secondary school teachers claimed to have actually seen the booklet, less than a quarter to have read all of it and only about ten per cent to recall its contents at all well.

Attitudes amongst Solihull secondary teachers towards school self‐evaluation as a general notion and (amongst those who claimed to have seen it) towards the booklet are generally positive. Attitudes are particularly positive amongst those in the lower status positions in schools and amongst the less experienced. Despite these favourable attitudes, the evidence from the survey is that little change in schools has resulted from the use of the booklet.     

Students' experiences with popular music: the case of Beijing,China

Since the 1980s, the establishment of a socialist market economy has quickened the pace of China's economic development; at the same time, increased modernization and globalization have influenced, to varying degrees, the development of music and music education. With reference to 12 secondary schools in Beijing, this empirical study examines Chinese students' preferences for popular music in their daily lives, and in what ways and to what extent they prefer to learn popular music in school. Data were drawn from survey questionnaires completed by 2,423 secondary students in the 12 schools, together with follow-up interviews with 55 of these students, between March and May 2012. This study provides empirical data that both supplements and challenges existing literature on popular music and music education in a Chinese context. It also highlights a discussion on the complex relationships between students and teachers and between Chinese authorities and teachers regarding the introduction of popular music into school music education.