Why discipline needs to be reclaimed as an educational concept

This paper considers different conceptualisations of school discipline within both UK education policy and wider educational and philosophical literature. Initially, it is noted that notions of “behaviour management” dominate discourses about school discipline. It is suggested that this is unhelpful as behaviour management skills are underpinned by a behaviourist understanding of learning that denies pupils an important degree of agency over their own development – pupils are rather portrayed as unruly and morally deficient. It is therefore maintained that discipline needs to be reclaimed as an educational concept as it can be a valuable personal quality whose possession indicates a capacity to set important goals for oneself and see them through even in the face of difficulty. With reference to the diverse philosophies of Dewey, P.S. Wilson, Durkheim, Oakeshott, and MacMurray, it is contended that a re-conceived notion of school discipline might enable less controlling and behaviourist and more educational discipline in at least three ways: the ethical (by guiding the ethical development of pupils), the humanising (by encouraging pupils to act for the sake of others rather than only think about themselves) and the epistemic (by supporting pupils to engage in the pursuit of valued interests and knowledge).     

Teachers' Assessment and National Testing in Primary Schools in Scotland: roles and relationships

The revised arrangements for national testing, introduced into primary schools in Scotland in January 1993, give the tests a role in confirming teachers' assessments of when pupils have achieved certain levels of attainment. The test units, in reading, writing and mathematics, are used at any time, with individual pupils or with groups, at teachers' discretion. This paper draws upon evidence gathered by questionnaire and interview with primary school teachers and headteachers during a 4‐year evaluation of the implementation of the non‐statutory guidelines of the 5‐14 development programme, the Scottish national curriculum. It explores how teachers are carrying out formative assessment and how they decide when a pupil is likely to succeed in test units at a certain level. There was evidence of considerable moves towards teachers' assessment becoming more systematic, wide‐ranging and more often recorded. However, the moderating role of the tests material has not been taken on board by the majority of teachers for reasons and with consequences which are explored in the paper.     

A Comparison of Adults’ and Children's Abilities to Distinguish between Aggressive and Playful Fighting in Middle School Pupils: implications for playground supervision and behaviour management

A sample of adults (N = 44) was shown an edited videotape of episodes of playful and aggressive fighting involving middle school pupils that had previously been shown to a sample of 8 and 11 year‐old children. Each participant was asked to say whether she/he thought each episode was playful or aggressive and then to give the reasons for her/his choice. The majority view of the adults’ perceptions of the episodes matched the majority view of the children. As individuals, all 20 of the males and 22 of the 24 females showed significant agreement with the standard view of these episodes. Overall, the adults made significantly fewer errors than the 8 year‐olds had done, but did not differ in this respect compared to the 11 year‐olds. Adult males in this study were more likely to mistakenly view aggressive episodes as playful than to mistakenly view playful episodes as aggressive, with the opposite being the case for adult females. Among the adults, the most frequently reported criteria for deciding upon the nature of the episodes were the nature of the physical actions, inferences about action/intent, facial expressions, and whether the children in the episodes remained together or separated after the interaction. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for playground supervision and behaviour management.     

Policy on ethnic segregation in a system of choice: the case of The Netherlands

This paper examines the implications of the uneven distribution of minority pupils and the Dutch system of choice for policies on ethnic segregation at both the local and school level. The analysis is based on a sample of 27 municipalities serving 23% of all Dutch primary school pupils. Segregation to a large extent can be found in The Netherlands as elsewhere, and the constitutional freedom of education is precisely the factor that places important restrictions on solving this problem adequately. At the local level more than one‐third of all municipalities, for various reasons, do not take any action. Of the others that do take action the majority saddles the schools with the responsibility since the problems are mainly seen as of an educational nature. According to the school principals a percentage of minority pupils exceeding 50‐60% causes ‘white’ parents to leave and they are given every opportunity to do so by the Dutch system of free parental choice. Therefore a radical reorientation is required in the Dutch system of choice in order to address the challenges of ethnic segregation.     

Inferencing skills of adolescent readers who are hearing impaired

Two experiments examined the inferencing abilities of a group of adolescents who were hearing impaired compared with a group of hearing children matched approximately for chronological age. The first experiment used on‐line methods and suggests that pupils who are hearing impaired are less efficient at drawing inferences. When they do so correctly, they draw inferences automatically as the text is encountered in a similar manner to the hearing pupils. In the second experiment, the same material was presented to the hearing‐impaired adolescents in British Sign Language. However, from the results obtained, it is not possible to comment on how the information is processed when it is presented manually, and suggestions are made on ways this might be further investigated. It is suggested that the difficulties encountered by the students who are hearing impaired, when reading implicit material, reflect the relative impoverishment of their experiential backgrounds.     

>Influence of the Social Context of the School on the Teacher's Pedagogic Practice

The paper is part of a broader study which investigates the relation between differential patterns of achievement in the sciences at the secondary school level and social class, and in which a relation was found between the high level of conceptual demand of modern science courses and the underachievement of the working‐class pupils. This relation is mediated by a number of sociological factors, the teacher being one of them. This study describes the assessment we made of teachers’ pedagogic practice and its influence on pupils’ achievement. The evidence obtained shows that teachers differ greatly in the level of conceptual demand they make of their pupils and in their ability to enable pupils to attain that level. Both of these competencies of the teacher are strongly related to the social context of the school where he/she teaches.     

Parental Choice and Schooling: some factors influencing Muslim mothers’ decisions about the education of their daughters

In recent years parental choice in education has become an important focus of political debate. Muslim demands for the state funding of Islamic schools have attracted a significant amount of media attention, with opposition sometimes coming from those who argue that such schools are likely to offer limited opportunities to pupils, particularly girls. This article reports on a small‐scale research project which examined the attitudes and values of Muslim women in the UK to their daughters’ education, particularly the basis on which they had selected either a private Islamic school or state primary school. It considers whether the concept of parental choice is a valid one for these women     

Stability and Lability in Science Interest from Middle Schools to the Age of Science Choices (14 + )

Summaries

English

In parts of England and Wales, middle schools have been introduced for pupils of eight to 12 or nine to 13 years of age. From these they enter secondary schools whose general age of entry is 11. It is feared that the teaching of science in middle schools is inadequate and variable. This research has followed the science interests of pupils aged from 12 to 14 and investigated the factors that affect them by means of three questionnaires administered at yearly intervals.

The first questionnaire was administered to almost 600 boys and girls mainly to explore their recollections of the science activities they had experienced or not done in the 52 middle schools from which they came. Their liking for science was also measured and each of the activities done or not done was correlated with it. There were activities which correlated positively and negatively with liking for middle‐school science. There were also sex differences, with boys showing greater interest in ‘physical science’ activities and girls in biological ones. The most remarkable finding was that for girls the higher correlating activities were not merely biological but botanical and they were deterred by some activities with animals.

The second questionnaire after one year in the secondary schools, i.e. at 13 + , monitored the liking for chemistry, physics and biology taken by about 450 pupils. The third questionnaire was given at 14+ when these pupils had chosen to continue or abandon the further study of the three sciences. All the variables from the three questionnaires were then correlated with these science choices. Although the general influence of liking for middle‐school science had by then disappeared, certain specific middle‐school science activities still correlated significantly with science choices. The correlates of chemistry and physics choice were not exclusively physical science but included biological activities in which some measurement was involved, for example plant growth. There were sex differences. Previous activities with animals was detrimental to girls’ biology choices.

A range of other factors had, however, altered pupils’ liking for sciences over the two years in the secondary school: effects of teachers, perceptions of difficulty (especially in the case of girls’ physcial science) and liking for practical work. About a third of the pupils had not made up their minds about what subjects they wanted to study indicating that such an early age of choice is undesirable.     

Male and female teachers’ evaluative responses to gender and the implications of these for the learning environments of primary age pupils

This paper adopts a social constructionist position on assessment, specifically that it can never be free of the social conditions in which it is practiced. As such, we explore two aspects of classroom interactions which contribute to and shape the learning environments in which assessment takes place. By drawing on interviews carried out with 51 teachers and 307 Year 3 (7–8‐year‐old) pupils the paper demonstrates where and how beliefs and attitudes about gender influence what they perceived as ‘good’ or ‘appropriate’ working relationships. It also considers the ways in which teachers utilize perceptions of gender to plan the curriculum and manage their classrooms. Whilst the pupils believed their teachers treated them in a fair and just manner, three quarters of the teachers interviewed believed they did or should respond differently to pupils according to gender. We argue that the emphasis given to boys’ underachievement has contributed to this scenario.     

School attendance in Hertfordshire

In November 1994, the Hertfordshire School Attendance Project, an initiative set up by the local authority's Education Welfare Service with the purpose of promoting regular school attendance, conducted a survey on school attendance in which 12 secondary schools participated. The survey was intended to establish how pupils responded to coming to school; to identify levels of truancy, including post‐registration truancy; to determine the reasons for such truancy; and to assist schools in developing appropriate and effective responses. The survey found that the overwhelming majority of pupils mostly liked school, attended regularly and were mostly happy with the curriculum which they were offered. The truancy that was located was confined mainly to Years 9, 10 and 11; it was neither widespread nor habitual in character, and appeared to be caused primarily by what might be termed ‘lesson difficulty’. That is, the pupil involved either did not like or could not do a particular lesson and/or had a poor relationship with a particular teacher. Post‐registration truancy (PRT) ‐ when the pupil comes to school, registers and then proceeds to miss certain or all lessons ‐ was found to be slightly more prevalent than blanket truancy (BT) ‐ when the child fails to attend school altogether and lacks authorization for failing to do so (these categories of truancy are based on the work of Stoll and O'Keeffe, 1989 and O'Keeffe, 1994). The survey strongly suggested the need for schools to engage in a debate on the nature of some aspects of the curriculum and to develop coherent and consistent whole‐school attendance policies.     

School assessment policy and practice in Belgian secondary education with specific reference to vocational education and training

Based on a survey among 1274 secondary school teachers in Flanders (Belgium), this paper describes the relationship between the assessment practices and forms of assessment policy (testing culture or assessment culture) and between forms of general school policy (student‐oriented or achievement‐oriented) and forms of assessment policy that teachers experience. Reviewing teachers’ attitudes towards assessment policy, it is clear that teachers are not convinced that most schools have a clear concept of an assessment policy. This is the case even though about 82% of the teachers claim to know what the vision of the school on assessment is. The main characteristics of the assessment process lead us to conclude that teachers still live in the testing culture. Although the testing culture exerts a very strong influence over schools, the school policy shows an opening towards an assessment culture. Indeed, a student‐oriented policy is more present than an achievement‐oriented policy. This distinction is important because a student‐oriented policy might bring teachers closer to an assessment culture. Our data show that teachers have a different opinion about this depending on the education sector in which they work and the subject they teach.     

Dutch children and their ‘God’: the development of the ‘God’ concept among indigenous and immigrant children in the Netherlands

In the 1980s and 1990s in the Netherlands, as a reaction to the growing number of non‐Christian pupils at Christian schools, religious education and religious development became issues for debate. At some schools, it was the exclusiveness of the Christian tradition that dominated, and at others it was the inclusiveness. Another group specialised in inter‐religious dialogue. Our research studied the religious development of pupils from two primary schools. One is the first and only inter‐religious primary school in the Netherlands, the Juliana van Stolberg primary school. The other is a Christian school, the Prinses Margriet primary school that educates pupils exclusively in the Christian tradition. The research questions focussed on the development of the ‘God’ concept of children confronted with stories from different religious traditions. The ‘God’ concept is seen in our research as a concept that develops in an inductive way from the data. This way of conceptualising ‘development’ is coined as the prospective perspective on development. The results of this comparative research led to the tentative conclusion that pupils in our research population who were involved in inter‐religious learning, demonstrate explorative behaviour concerning their own religion and that of others. Their ‘God’ concept shows hybrid characteristics. These pupils are rooted in their own tradition, and at the same time they are ‘on the move’. This offers points of departure for the development of citizens articulating their commitments and turning imminent conflicts into inter‐religious encounters.     

Gendered Career Choice: is sex‐stereotyping the cause or the consequence?

The interaction between school pupils’ schematic representations of ‘social’ and ‘technical’ roles and the impact that the ‘sex‐typing’ of careers has on occupational choice were investigated using stimulus vignettes. Questionnaire data pertaining to occupational choice were collected from first‐year university students enrolled on courses designated as either ‘social’ or ‘technical’. The prototypical in‐group positions for the two occupational areas were calculated and used as the basis of vignettes depicting either a male or female school pupil experiencing difficulty in deciding whether to pursue a technical or socially oriented career. The vignettes were presented to 107 school pupils aged 16‐18 who were asked which career area they thought the target pupil was likely to choose. Results indicate that subjects were able to identify correctly the prototypical characteristics utilised in the vignettes and that these were of greater importance in their expectation of course choice than the ‘sex’ of the target pupil.     

XHOSA INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE: STAKEHOLDER AWARENESS, VALUE, AND CHOICE

This study investigated a sample of isiXhosa mother tongue-speaking science teachers’, their pupils’, and adult local community members’ awareness of Xhosa indigenous knowledge. It also investigated what aspects of this knowledge they value and think should and could be integrated into the school science curriculum and their reasons for suggesting that it should (or should not) be incorporated. The participating teachers voluntarily completed an open-ended questionnaire. On completion, they were given the task of administering the questionnaire to at least 1 of their pupils and 1 community member who they believed could contribute ideas about indigenous knowledge that might relate to science education. Interviews were held with a small sample of teachers and community members. The data generated suggest that there is a shared awareness of indigenous knowledge across the respondents (teachers, pupils, and community members). The reasons given for including indigenous knowledge in the school curriculum related mainly to the realm of recognition (social justice and cultural sensitivity), and there was also little evidence that the respondents were aware of current understandings underpinning the demarcation of science and indigenous knowledge as disciplines.     

Ability Grouping: year group differences in self‐concept and attitudes of secondary school pupils

The vast international literature on the effects of different types of ability grouping on self‐concept and pupils' attitudes towards school has focused on pupils from single year groups. This article aimed to explore year group differences in pupils' self‐concept and attitudes towards school as influenced by ability grouping. The study was cross‐sectional in design and measured attitudes towards school and mathematics, general and school self‐concept and preferences for different kinds of grouping in 234 pupils from years 7 through 10 attending a mixed comprehensive school. The findings indicated that mathematics self‐concept was consistently lower than school and general self‐concept; all aspects of self‐concept increased up to Year 9 and then declined in Year 10, pupils in the higher sets tended to have higher self‐concepts; pupil preferences for setting were greater in the higher year groups, as was the extent to which the top set was perceived to be the best. A substantial proportion of pupils wanted to move set, usually to a higher set. Set placement itself did not appear to have a consistent effect on attitudes towards mathematics. This seemed to be mediated by the quality of teaching.     

Schools as dangerous places

When students set off for school each day how many of them or their caregivers consider for a moment that they will spend the day at a potentially dangerous place? On the contrary, students and caregivers probably view schools as safe havens, and official research suggests that this is the case for the majority of teachers and pupils. However, underlying this official view, schools are more and more seen as much less benign and safe. The popular press, for one thing, is certainly keen to report instances of schools as dangerous places. This article examines schools as dangerous places because of dangers from pupils to pupils, teachers to pupils, teachers to teachers, pupils to teachers and dangers from the physical and natural environment. The discussion is framed in terms of the culture of the school and the increasingly legal nature of the schooling and educational environment.     

Questions asked by primary student teachers about observations of a science demonstration

Teacher questioning has a central role in guiding pupils to learn to make scientific observations and inferences. We asked 110 primary student teachers to write down what kind of questions they would ask their pupils about a demonstration. Almost half of the student teachers posed questions that were either inappropriate or presupposed that the pupils would know the answer. For example, they directly asked for an explanation of the phenomenon instead of asking what inferences the pupils could make on the basis of their observations. There was a lack of questions that would draw the pupils’ attention to the variables that may cause the phenomenon to happen. Only about 15% of the student teachers formed questions such as ‘What is happening?’ or ‘How is it happening?’. All in all, primary student teachers seem to need extra practice in forming questions based on scientific observation.     

Concept formation in environmental education: 14‐year olds’ work on the intensified greenhouse effect and the depletion of the ozone layer

A case study is presented describing the work of three pupils in the upper level of compulsory school. The pupils were learning about the intensified greenhouse effect and the depletion of the ozone layer. In their work, the need for certain domain‐specific knowledge becomes apparent; for example, understanding such concepts as photosynthesis, radiation and catalyst. The results show that the pupils experienced difficulty in distinguishing between the different meanings attached to individual concepts in their theoretical and practical contexts. They are often unable to identify the meaning relevant to the specific environmental problem that they are working on. The pupils’ difficulties are seen here as a problem of differentiation between concepts denoted by the same term as well as between different aspects of the same concept, a view that is then related to the question of appropriate conditions for conceptual change.