Interactive fiction: An experience of the ‘Writers in education’ scheme

The idea of bringing children, students, and teachers into contact with living writers was initially implemented by the Literature Panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1969, but since 1980 the scheme had devolved upon the Regional Arts Associations, embracing single visits, workshop sessions, talks, readings, and short-term and long-term residences and attachments of various kinds, with the Regional Arts Association generally bearing half the cost of fees, plus travel. The scheme now operates in a wide range of venues in addition to schools and colleges, incorporates in-service and residential courses, and includes illustrators, storytellers, dramatists, and performance poets alongside novelists, poets, and short-story writers.Fay Sampson is the author of 16 books for young people. For many years she has combined teaching and writing in England, winning awards from the South West Arts regional council for her work. She is currently a full-time writer and an adult education tutor in writing.     

Focusing Improvement and Quality Assurance: Work Samples as Authentic Performance Measures of Prospective Teachers’ Effectiveness

The authors suggest that the gap between common evaluation practice in teacher preparation and the consensus reform goal of high levels of student learning for all students is an impediment to reinventing teacher preparation, professional development, and the professionalization of teaching. In the context of Oregons six-year-old educational transition to a standards-based design for schools and schooling, prospective teachers in Oregon have, since 1989, been required to design, develop, and implement teacher work samples as credible evidence of their effectiveness in fostering student learning as a condition for recommendation for an initial teaching license. This article describes teacher work sample methodology and evidence for its reliability and validity in evaluating the performance of prospective teachers. In short, this article describes a methodology that responds to one critical part of the National Commission on Teaching and Americas Futures challenge to reinvent teacher education and improve student learning.     

“Hispanic” children: Theoretical,empirical, and related policy issues

Not only are school-age ethnic and racial minority children one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population, they are also one of the most vulnerable. Hispanic children in particular are representative of the at-risk status of minority populations, displaying a portrait of unrealized social, educational, and employment success. This paper addresses the background and history of U.S. social and educational policies as they relate to the Hispanic student. Recent empirical findings are presented which support the following: (a) the bilingual character of Hispanic children is not a linguistic, cognitive, or educational liability and, in fact, should be employed to promote academic achievement; (b) the culture of the Hispanic family and child are better understood with regard to socialization variables and the potential differences they produce when directly compared to Anglo culture; and (c) educational strategies for Hispanic students that respect and integrate students' social, psychological, and linguistic attributes serve students effectively.     

The Curious Incidence of Novels About Asperger's Syndrome

Since Asperger's Syndrome was formally recognised in 1994, several novels featuring characters with the syndrome have appeared. Bill Greenwell's article discusses these books in providing a context for a closer consideration of the British publishing sensation of 2003, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The reasons for the success of this suburban comedy, Greenwell argues, include the consequences for the reader of Haddon's choice of the sufferer from Asperger's as narrator, especially the generation of unconscious humour and the range of literary forms he uses to tell his story. Nicholas Tucker adds an Afterword from his perspective as an educational psychologist as well as a literary critic, finding in the novel a rich mixture of heroism, mystery and love mediated through narrrative ingenuity.     

Decentralisation In Education,Institutional Culture And Teacher Autonomy In Indonesia

Indonesia has seen several recent attempts to devolve control over the curriculum to the local level. Rather than catalogue all of the problems encountered in the course of their implementation, the present contribution focuses on a single reform, the Local Content Curriculum (LCC). Analysis of local responses to this reform provides insights into the states influence on the actions and attitudes of Indonesian educators not previously detailed in research on educational decentralisation. These insights into the implementation of the LCC expand the understanding of the tangible effects of educational reform on actual learning institutions and pupils as well as inform about the central governments real ability to effect change in schools. The study also shows how the lethargy of local actors is bound to deeply engrained views about the role of Indonesian teachers in school, in the society and in the state.     

Lord Kelvin and the Age-of-the-Earth Debate: A Dramatization

This is a dramatization of a fictitious debate about the age of the earth that takes place in the Royal Institution, London, England, in the year 1872. The debate is among Sir William Thomson (later Kelvin), T.H. Huxley (Darwin's Bulldog), Sir Charles Lyell, and Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1862 Thomson published his celebrated and widely studied The Secular Cooling of the Earth that raised the post-Darwinian debate of the age of the earth above the level of popular controversy. He entered the debate with all the arrogance of a newly established science of the century, namely the recently drafted laws of thermodynamics. The debate is partly based on a lively exchange of comments and arguments that occurred between T.H. Huxley and William Thomson, starting in 1868, when Thomson addressed the Glasgow Geological Society. This long public discussion also involved the ideas and the work of geologist Charles Lyell and those of the celebrated German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. The confrontation is between the unyielding physicists and the insecure biologists and geologists who required a much longer time for the age of the earth than the physicists were prepared to give them. However, the debate ends on a conciliatory note, suggesting that perhaps Sir William's storehouse of creation may contain a hereto undiscovered source of energy that is more bountiful than gravitational energy.     

Interactions of study orientation and students' appreciation of structure in their educational environment

Instructional systems differ in the amount of structure they impose on the educational environment in which learning activities take place, e.g., mastery learning implies highly structured learning, whereas problem-based learning (PBL) claims its effectiveness just because of its freedom in learning. Yet there seems to be a lot of structure in the educational system in which PBL is embedded. In this study dimensions of structure were explored in a curriculum based on PBL. Factor analysis on student judgments unfolded three forms of structure concerning different aspects of the educational environment: content, organization, and social setting.When looking for interactions between structure and student characteristics, e.g., in research on the effectiveness of PBL, it could be important to take this distinction in structure dimensions into account. In general, ATI-research suggests interaction effects for structure. The study that is presented here explored interactions between study orientation and students' appreciation of the three structure dimensions, revealing a rather consistent pattern of differences in appreciation tendencies influenced by the orientation of the student: meaning, dependence, minimalistic, or strategic.     

Fairy-tale Retellings between Art and Pedagogy

In this article, it is shown how authors of fairy-tale retellings have incorporated ideas of feminist literary criticism into a fictional form. As such, these retellings display the tension between the pedagogic and aesthetic aspects of all childrens literature. Jane Yolens Sleeping Ugly is chosen as a case study: although it can be argued that the book serves as a mouthpiece for the ideology of the emancipation movement formulated in Marcia Liebermans key text Some Day My Prince Will Come, it is suggested that Sleeping Ugly teaches children to read against a texts authority and as such undermines its own didactic potential.Vanessa Joosen (1977) has a Masters degree in English and German Literature from the University of Antwerp, and an MA in Childrens Literature from the University of Surrey Roehampton. In 2003, she received an FWO scholarship to fund her PhD at the University of Antwerp. She researches the interaction between fairy-tale retellings and criticism on fairy tales in the period from 1970 to 2000. Recent publications include Translating Dutch into Dutch in Signal 100, and an article on Belgian childrens books in Peter Hunts International Companion to Childrens Literature.     

The use of examples in expository texts: Outline of an interpretation theory for text analysis

Much has been made about the difficulties students have in transferring their learning from one context to another. We suggest that students learning from examples use imitation, a subtype of analogical problem solving (APS). Whereas APS involves manipulating a mental representation, imitation involves mapping the surface features of a source example to a target problem and no assumptions are made about what a student knows. Often imitating a close variant of a source problem is likely to be relatively successful; however, trying to solve a distant variant by imitating an example creates difficulties in mapping values and adapting the source example to the target. In this paper we argue that some students' inability to transfer their learning is very often due to the teaching material rather than any failure on the part of the student. To this end, we have developed an interpretation theory based on the proportional analogy framework (a:b::c:d) which can be applied to text analysis. The theory is demonstrated using examples taken mainly from computer programming textbooks.     

Attitudes to the Use of Alternative Assessment Methods in Mathematics: A Study with Secondary Mathematics Teachers in Sydney,Australia

Given issues related to differences in learner characteristics, effective sampling across the content domain, and recent emphases on assessing meaningfully contextualised abilities and higher-order cognitive processes, the traditional mathematics test arguably does not provide a valid measure of student ability. Consequently, there is a need to incorporate alternative methods of assessment that are able to effectively assess the range of students mathematical abilities. The present study investigated methods of assessment used by 60 mathematics teachers from 11 secondary schools in metropolitan Sydney, as well as their attitudes to a range of alternative assessment methods, together with reasons why they would or would not implement these. Results showed that teachers were satisfied with traditional tests as valid measures of student ability, particularly for senior school years. Teachers generally did not favour implementing alternative assessment methods, although those with the least years teaching experience reported more positive attitudes. A major concern raised by teachers about the use of alternative assessment methods related to their perceived subjectivity. Explanations for these findings are advanced for teachers who have varying lengths of teaching experience.     

Infusing humanistic activities into cognitively oriented curriculum

In our current quest for excellence, we often miss the essential nature of it. It is trendy to use such terms as back-to-basics, gifted education, and excellence to describe a new teaching strategy or innovative educational program. It is also true that many of these programs designed for children are really intended to benefit others.Harry Morgan is Chairman of Early Childhood Education at West Georgia College in Carrollton. He is author ofThe Learning Community (Charles Merrill).     

Nine years in the journal

An analysis of the contents of nine volumes of the International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling has been attempted in this article. The publications have been organized under fifteen headings. Two topics were analyzed more thoroughly: Theories and models of counselling and Country studies, presented by scholars of the countries studied.     

Daddy,or serendipity

Philip Pullman grew up in what was then Southern Rhodesia, in Australia and in North Wales. He took an English degree at Oxford, and taught in middle schools in that city for thirteen years. He now divides his time between writing and lecturing at Westminster College, Oxford. His novelThe Ruby In The Smoke, the first part of a trilogy, won the International Reading Association Children's Book Award in 1988, and the other parts both made the ALA Best Book for Young Adults list. He has also written two illustrated novels for younger readers, books for teenagers and an adult novel.     

Self-teaching in normal and disabled readers

This study set out to investigate the self-teaching of good and poor readers in pointed Hebrew – a highly regular orthography. Four groups of children (three groups in Grades 4 to 6, and one group in Grade 2) were included in this study; poor readers with large discrepancies between IQ and reading (dyslexics), IQ-nondiscrepant poor readers (non-dyslexic or garden-variety poor readers), chronological-age matched normal readers, and a group of younger normal readers matched to the older garden-variety group on both reading and mental age. It was hypothesized that primary deficits in phonological recoding (decoding) would impair the identification of novel target words (fictitious names of fruits/towns/stars/coins, etc.) appearing in text, which, in turn, would lead to deficient orthographic memory for target spellings. Alternative predictions were derived with regard to the degree of orthographic deficiency. According to the compensatory processing hypothesis, orthographic learning was expected to be relatively less impaired among disabled readers compared to normal readers. The alternative dissociation hypothesis, on the other hand, predicts that disabled readers orthographic learning would be significantly more impaired than that of normal readers. Neither hypothesis was supported. Impaired orthographic learning, commensurate with levels of target decoding success, was evident in the post-test spelling and orthographic choices of both groups of poor readers. Indeed, a close link was observed between levels of target word decoding and the acquisition of orthographic information among all three older groups of children. No qualitative differences between dyslexics and garden-variety poor readers emerged in patterns of self-teaching. While the data from the three older groups supported a model of developmental delay rather than deviance, findings from the younger reading-age/mental-age controls revealed startling qualitative divergence in orthographic learning. No statistically reliable evidence was obtained for orthographic learning in these younger beginning readers who displayed an essentially surface pattern of non-lexical reading. A hybrid orthographic sensitivity hypothesis was proposed to account for these data, according to which an initially surface-style of word reading engendered by a highly regular orthography gives way to a highly specialized print-specific (orthographic) processing advantage that develops in the course of the second school year as an outgrowth of a critical volume of print experience.     

Sensing the Impact of Elementary School Science Reform: A Study of Stakeholder Perceptions of Implementation,Constructivist Strategies,and School–Home Collaboration

This case study of a midwestern school districts reform effort explored the treatment fidelity of the Science: Parents, Activities, and Literature (Science PALs) project. Data were collected from the perspectives of three stakeholders: students, school district, and parents. Students and school district supervisors perceptions indicated that teachers were implementing predicted curricular and instructional features promoted by the Science PALs project. Students perceptions of their current teachers classroom performance did not parallel the supervisors perceptions of the teachers implementation. Parents perceptions and comments indicated a high level of satisfaction with the implemented features. Collectively, the three perspectives suggest that the Science PALs project was successful in changing the classroom practices of K–6 teachers involved in the professional development. The results of this study appear to support the findings of other recent studies that indicate the need for extended professional development and support to fully implement changes in elementary school science instruction.     

Quality assurance and women in higher education

This paper examines a range of positive and negative consequences for women of Quality Assurance (QA) initiatives in one Australian university. Drawing on Foucaults concepts of governmentality and power/knowledge, it is argued that the popular repressive hypothesis of power via governmentality hides a positive and potentially productive dimension of power. Following recent work by feminist political theorists, my claim here is that a corporatist managerial discourse such as QA can be used strategically for a politics of transformation in the interests of women. The paper begins with an outline of the parameters of debate about and critiques of the QA agenda in the Australian higher education sector, and highlights some potentially negative consequences for women in terms of their structural location in the university. An overview of QA audit processes then leads into a closer examination of one universitys response to QA initiatives. The culture and management style of this regional university was significantly transformed from an informal and pastoral model to one with open systems of accountability and performance targets built around equity issues. In that regard, it is argued, equity target groups including women, became the visible focus of the development and implementation of new systems designed to bring equity into the mainstream. In closing, I argue that in this particular university, the new managerialism of QA was indeed a panoptic mechanism of making visible: productivity, equity groups, procedures and outcomes. But in an institutional context where open systems were lacking and womens contributions invisible and undervalued, the QA agenda brought new opportunities not only for women but for other groups previously marginalised and silenced.     

Alternatives to the behavioural technicist conception of study skills

The what and how of study skills programmes are critiqued and alternatives suggested. Due to the absence of information about higher level learning, study skills courses have traditionally focused on study behaviours, rather than upon the cognitive processes involved in mastering complex material. By providing knowledge about the cognitive skills and strategies involved in the acquisition and organization of high level learning, information-processing could form the basis of future learning-skills programmes. Infusing learning skills into the curriculum from a phenomenological-critical theory perspective, means that the study skills counsellor becomes a social change agent aiming for the enlightenment and emancipation of students and lecturers. This is a radical departure from the behavioural-technician remedying a deficit group in a special programme or study laboratory.     

Physics Student Teachers' Ideas about the Objectives of Practical Work

The aim of this study was to discover physics student teachers' objectives forpractical work in teaching physics. The subjects of the study were physics studentteachers participating in a course titled Experimental school physics. The theoreticalbackground of the course was based on a quite unique perceptional approach, and theresults indicate that after attending the course student teachers found that the practicalwork which they had done was very useful. In particular, they felt that practical workcan foster both an understanding of the content of physics and also the actual processof learning it.     

The application of cultural and social capital: a study of the 25th year reunion entries of prep school and public school graduates of Yale College

This article compares the post-college experiences of graduates of elite prep schools, non-elite prep schools and public schools who attended Yale College in the early 1960s. Drawing on previous research, and on Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction, it was hypothesized that Yale graduates who had attended public secondary schools would be more likely than Yale graduates who had attended prep schools to accumulate what Bourdieu calls cultural capital, but that Yale graduates who had attended prep schools would be more likely than their public school counterparts to accumulate what Bourdieu calls social capital. A study of the life experiences of the Yale College class of 1963 during the 25 years after their college graduation supported this general expectation. There was also support for a series of more specific expectations about post-graduate educational achievement, occupational choices, and behavioral indices of loyalty to Yale.     

Equity issues in local resourcing of education: Community financing of primary schools in Bhutan

Community financing is an important source of supplementary funds for education, particularly where governments are unable to meet all the needs of their peoples. While this is widely recognised, little empirical research has been conducted on the topic. This paper analyses patterns in Bhutan. It observes that until the 1990s few resources for education were provided by communities, but that the scale of financing has increased during the present decade. The paper notes that although communities have in general responded positively to government calls for local inputs, local resourcing has some problematic aspects. The paper focuses particularly on issues of regional, rural/urban and socio-economic equity, and shows how discussion of Bhutanese experiences contributes to the international literature.

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Zusammenfassung Finanzierungen über die Gemeinde sind eine wichtige Quelle der Bezuschussung von Bildung, besonders dort, wo Regierungen nicht in der Lage sind, den Bedürfnissen der Bevölkerung gerecht zu werden. Obwohl dies weitreichend bekannt ist, gibt es kaum empirische Studien zu diesem Thema. Dieser Artikel befaßt sich mit der Situation in Bhutan. Es wird festgestellt, daß die Gemeinden bis zu den 90ern kaum Gelder für die Bildung zur Verfügung stellten, daß aber der Rahmen der Finanzierung in diesem Jahrzehnt gestiegen ist. Der Autor beschreibt, daß trotz einer allgemein positiven Antwort seitens der Gemeinden auf Forderungen der Regierung nach lokalen Finanzbeiträgen, Probleme hinsichtlich lokaler Finanzierungen bestehen. Insbesondere befaßt sich der Artikel mit Themen über regionale, ländliche und städtische und sozialökonomische Gleichheit und zeigt, wie die Diskussion über die Erfahrungen in Bhutan zur internationalen Literatur beiträgt.

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Resumen La financiación a través de la comunidad es una fuente importante de recursos adicionales para la educación, particularmente allí donde los gobiernos son incapaces de satisfacer todas las necesidades de sus habitantes. Si bien este es un hecho ampliamente conocido, existen muy pocos estudios empíricos sobre este tema. El trabajo analiza los modelos existentes en Bhután y observa que hasta los años noventa, eran pocos los recursos financieros provistos por las comunidades, mientras que durante la década actual han aumentado estos niveles de financiación. El estudio observa que, a pesar de que las comunidades, en general, han respondido de forma positiva a las llamadas del gobierno a realizar inversiones locales, la creación de recursos locales tiene algunos aspectos problemáticos. El trabajo se concentra particularmente en problemas de equidad regional, rural/urbana y socioeconómica, demostrando cómo la discusión sobre experiencias bhutanesas presta su aporte a la literatura internacional.

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Résumé Le financement communautaire représente une source importante de fonds supplémentaires pour l'éducation, en particulier quand le gouvernement ne peut répondre à tous les besoins de la population. Bien que ce fait soit largement reconnu, il n'existe que peu de recherche empirique sur le sujet. Cet article analyse différents modèles existant au Bhoutan. Il constate tout d'abord que jusque dans les années 90, les communautés ne fournissaient qu'une faible partie des ressources de l'éducation, mais que cette forme de financement a augmenté au cours de la dernière décennie. Il relève également qu'en dépit de la réaction généralement positive de la part des communautés envers l'incitation du gouvernement à un financement local, ce modèle présente néanmoins des difficultés. L'article se concentre d'autre part sur les questions d'équitabilité entre régions, entre villes et provinces et entre niveaux socioéconomiques, et révèle que la discussion sur les expériences du Bhoutan contribue à enrichir la littérature internationale.

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