Impact factor and education journals: a critical examination and analysis

Scientific journals are the primary mode of formal communication in science. The ISI Impact factor, a bibliometric indicator that measures the citation rate of the “average” article in a journal, has been widely used for the assessment of the quality of scientific production of individuals, research teams or institutions. The purpose of this paper was to present the impact factor, examine the main limitations in its calculation and applications and to give a general overview of the impact factor of education journals for the period 2000–2005. Several problems related to the calculation of the impact factor have raised serious concerns about its validity and usefulness. Our findings suggest that education journals included in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) represent about 11% of the active, referred, academic journals. Education journals have relative low impact factors, in absolute values and in comparison to other Social Science categories. Application of the intraclass correlation coefficient showed that journals belonging to the “Education and Educational Research” category had relative stable impact factor values for the examined 6 years. This was not the case for the journals from the “Education, Special” category. It was concluded that the use of impact factor for the evaluation of journals, articles and researchers should be done with considerable care.     

Family background, financial constraints and higher education attendance in China

Using data from the 2004 China College Student Survey, conducted by the author, this paper finds that long-term factors such as scholastic ability and parental education are significantly correlated with higher education attendance. By contrast, short-term financial constraints are also significantly associated with higher education access, but to a lesser degree. Furthermore, in recent years China's higher education expansion has provided broader access to students from lower income families. However, the tuition fees and “net prices” of elite universities are lower than those of medium quality universities, while the tuition fees and “net prices” of medium quality universities are lower than those of relatively low quality universities and colleges. This has led to a reverse relationship between family income and attendance costs, such that lower income families now shoulder a much higher burden for their childrens’ university education than higher income families.     

Science achievement, gender differences, and experimental work in classes in Slovenia as evident in TIMSS studies

Since 1999, Slovenia has been in the process of introducing nine years of compulsory education to replace the previous eight-year system of compulsory education. Under the new system, the school entry age is six years rather than the former seven years. This reform of the system necessitated a number of other changes, such as those relating to the curriculum and teaching approaches. The purpose of this study was to compare the “new” Slovenian science curriculum with the “old” to ascertain if different relationships exist between the two in terms of achievement and gender, attitudes toward science, and the amount of experimental work undertaken by students in school. Data from the IEA TIMSS 2003 study were used to analyze these relationships. The analyses employed basic statistics and log-linear modeling of the effects of gender, school system, amount of experimental work in school, and students’ science achievement. Compared to students taught under the old curriculum, students taught under the new curriculum performed slightly better on the overall science test. A large decrease in gender differences in achievement was also apparent. The relationship between experimental work and achievement strengthened. Conducting experiments at every lesson related to lower student achievement, while conducting experiments during half of the science lessons related to higher achievement. These findings have a clear message for teachers and policymakers. A moderate amount of time devoted to student experimental work seems to raise science achievement of students as well as promote more positive attitudes toward learning science.     

The Relational Power of Education: The Immeasurability of Knowledge, Value, and Meaning

Recognizing the challenge of adequate evaluation in higher education, this essay introduces some of the critical, alternative-seeking conversation about educational measurement. The thesis is that knowledge, value, and meaning emerge in the relational dynamics of education, thus requiring complex approaches to evaluation, utilizing relational criteria. The method of the essay is to analyse two educational case studies – a travel seminar and a classroom course – in dialogue with educational literature and a process-relational philosophy of education. Building from this analysis, the essay concludes with proposals for relational criteria of evaluation: relations with self, community and culture, difference, earth, and social structures.     

The British response of higher education to changing educational perspectives

The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the objectives of higher education provision in Britain. The perspective of ‘educationists’ are compared with those of ‘economists’. In particular, the paper argues that the Department of Education and Science (DES) has moved substantially in the direction of the economists' approach to educational resource allocation. The paper also argues that the partticular characteristics of higher education (HE), where it is state-provided and free at the point of consumption, imbue it with the properties of a Niskanen-type bureau. This paper suggests that the current DES policy with its considerable implications for HE resource allocation can be rationalised in terms of the human capital approach and the problems of managing a bureau.“A professor was supposed to be a venerable kind of person, with snow-white whiskers reaching to his stomach. He was expected to moon around the campus oblivious of the world around him. If you nodded to him he failed to see you. Of money he knew nothing; of business far less. He was, as his trustees were proud to say of him, ‘a child’.On the other hand, he contained within him a reservoir of learning of such depth as to be practically bottomless. None of this learning was supposed to be of any material or commercial benefit to anybody. Its use was in saving the soul and enlarging the mind” (Leacock, 1922).     

The Hermeneutics of Learner-Centered Approaches and Initiatives in the Philippine Basic Education Sector

This paper highlights how a developing country like the Philippines incarnates a learner-centered approach in its overall education framework. Specifically, key policies and strategies relative to curriculum development, pedagogical issues, educational innovation and evaluation, professional development of teachers and school-community dynamics are discussed on the basis of the platform of hermeneutics of retrieval, the hermeneutics of the actual and the hermeneutics of the potential.

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Public spending on higher education in developing countries: Too much or too little?

This paper discusses problems with the prevalent view that public resources for education in developing countries should be reallocated from higher to lower levels of education. There may be a case for maintaining and even increasing spending on higher education, as long as public funds can be directed to research and other “public good” functions of institutions of higher education. Current measures of social returns to primary, secondary and higher education do not reflect unmeasured social benefits at each level; since we do not know the relative size of these benefits across levels, we do not know the true ranking of social returns across primary, secondary and higher education. The true social rate of return to certain components of higher education, such as research and postgraduate training in science and technology, and creation of other skills where social returns probably exceed private returns (such as public administration) is probably high, and in some settings, may now be as high or higher than the social rate of return to primary and secondary education. Moreover, achieving and sustaining adequate levels of quality to capture these social returns requires minimal stability in public financing, arguing against major reallocations away from higher education. But this does not argue for more public spending on all higher education programs. On the contrary; within the envelope of total public spending on higher education, reallocation away from public spending on undergraduate training makes sense, since such training probably has low social compared to private returns, and can be accomplished by greater reliance on private universities and by increasing tuition and other fees in public universities, while ensuring equitable access through loan and scholarship programs.     

Educational goals and the assessment of what everybody should know: Where to stop?

Recently, the term “basic education” was given legal status in The Netherlands; it substituted the previously used term “primary education.” In speaking about primary or lower education, we as educators indicate a sequence in time; the term “basic education” is preferable because it refers to the content of education. Consequently, we cannot escape defining the content of the term “basic.” It is especially important to ask what criteria have to be applied in the process.     

Disentangling the effect of education on emergency department utilization

Since Grossman’s seminal paper in 1972, there have been a number of studies concerning the effect of education on health and health care demand. Though several studies have distinguished between preventive and curative care, no study has investigated the effects of general education on the utilization of unnecessary emergency department use. We test whether general education reduces “potentially unnecessary” emergency department utilization and provide a measure of the resulting private benefits associated with increased education. Our results partially confirm our hypothesis regarding “potentially unnecessary” emergency department use. We find that moving from a high school to greater than high school education appears to reduce “potentially unnecessary” emergency department use, with the impact being greater among the insured. However, though reducing the education level from high school to less than high school increases “potentially unnecessary” emergency department use among the insured as predicted, it has the opposite impact on the uninsured.     

A systems view of learning in education

As the sophistication of technology has increased, so has public demand for quality. This expectation of quality has occurred across a broad range of products and systems, including education. To meet the demand for quality, many products and systems (including educational ones) have become increasingly complex. Within education there are also other factors which have driven up levels of complexity. These factors include increased diversity in the student body, a greater emphasis on collaboration and the drive to replace simple “delivery models” of teaching. It is well known from other fields, though, that as systems become more complex, they become more vulnerable to failure. For this reason, a formalised methodology known as “systems engineering” is often applied in industry to the management of large systems. The author argues that the use of systems engineering concepts in education would be likely to reduce failure rates and improve quality. This is particularly so in large-scale complex learning systems. The paper also discusses some implications of trying to use systems engineering methodology in modern educational systems.     

British and French Evaluation of International Higher Education Issues: an identical political reality?1

In both Britain and France, evaluation has been seen as one element of national strategies to internationalise higher education (HE), with the spread of evaluation indicating policy convergence. However, there are dangers in describing the cross‐national adoption of evaluation as an instance of policy transfer in higher education. This article compares two evaluation agencies, the French Comité National de l’Évaluation des Établissements Publics à caractère scientifique, culturel et professionnel (CNE) and the British Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), which have both been seen as guarantors of the quality of domestic HE, and concomitantly as elements in international HE promotion. It indicates considerable differences in the evaluation reports produced by each agency, and links these to the context in which they were produced: the institutional relationships between each agency, higher education institutions, and the state; and the general context of ‘evaluation’ in each country's public sphere. The article thus challenges analyses which have seen the proliferation of evaluation across national contexts as evidence of ‘policy transfer’ or of ‘homogenisation’. Instead, it shows how differences in an ostensibly similar ‘product’, the ‘quality reports’ produced by each agency, reflect the institutional context of evaluation and its role in public policy writ large.     

A Process Approach to Community-Based Education: The People’s Free University of Saskatchewan

On the basis of insights provided by Whitehead and John Cobb, I show how the People’s Free University of Saskatchewan (PFU) is a working model of free, open, community-based education that embodies several characteristics of Whitehead’s philosophy of education. Formed in opposition to the growing commercialization at the original “people’s university,” (the University of Saskatchewan) the PFU has spawned distinctive ideals of its own. The PFU reflects Whitehead’s belief in the importance of shared knowledge fostered by community-based education, the value of abstract and practical knowledge, and the power of the imagination to establish a community of learners capable of acting freely together.     

Reframing teacher education and teaching: From personalism to post-personalism

The literature on research into teaching provides different accounts of what is involved in becoming a teacher. Questions about “good practice” are generated for teachers in teacher education. This paper examines three paradigms of teacher education and teaching which are described as developmental, reflective and de/reconstructive to show that there are viable alternatives in deciding how to view the world of teaching. I argue that the three paradigms constitute two frames through which teaching can be practised and critiqued: personalism and post-personalism. The paper explicates the personalist and post-personalist constitution of the two frames. The first (personal) frame of teaching is discussed as being generated from developmental and reflective paradigms. The familiar journey from novice to expert is shown to work within developmental and reflective paradigms. A second (post-personal) frame is explained in terms of its deconstructive and reconstructive possibilities. The second frame is the lesser known alternative for teacher educators and teachers insofar as it questions and reframes the personal nature of much of the teacher development and reflection research. I offer a post-personal frame to the field as a viable means of teaching and research. Post-personalism builds on personalism by taking into account post-structural approaches to teacher education and post-structural literary theory. Parallels between the two frames of understanding teacher education and English teaching, based on literary theory, are drawn where appropriate throughout the paper.     

Balancing varied assessment functions to attain systemic validity: Three is the magic number

Accountability-oriented reforms demand immediate and continual gains on achievement test, for all students, and without diminishing other outcomes or undermining instruction. This paper describes a framework for aligning classroom assessment and external testing with the aim of negotiating these seemingly contradictory goals. The framework varies the sensitivity to instruction and the representations of knowledge across approaches to assessment. Cycles of design- based studies successively refine relationships between a curriculum and the frame that each assessment provides. Doing so, we argue, leverages the unique formative and summative balance across assessments in order to scaffold learning and demonstrate the “consequential” validity of our strategy without compromising curricula, instruction, or the “evidential” validity that warrants their continued use.     

Home-start: A voluntary home-visiting scheme for young families

Very often statutory intervention in child abuse cases can prove to be costly, inappropriate or even unwelcome. “Home-Start” began as a voluntary home-visiting scheme in Leicester, England, 8 years ago with the objectives of offering support, friendship and a practical approach to any young families experiencing difficulties. A recent evaluation by Willem van der Eyken, suggests that Home-Start enjoys a high success rate, particularly with the 25% of families referred to the scheme, who have children on the nonaccidental injury “At Risk” register. This paper outlines details of the objectives. the volunteers, the families visited and the Home-Start approach with child abuse cases. It highlights some elements of the scheme which have proved vital to its success, such as close liaison with the related statutory agencies, the intensive support to families in their own homes, and the meticulous preparation and support of the volunteers themselves. The Home-Start approach is now being used effectively in many other areas of Great Britain and consequently Home-Start Consultancy has been established at 22 Princess Road West, Leicester. England, to provide the opportunity for consultation, liaison and development with existing and new Home-Start schemes.     

On spirituality and education

It is a mistake to ignore the scientific study of spirituality. Research examining the structure and function of concepts such as “spirit” and “spirituality” is likely to reveal new insights into the relationship between a functional spirituality and other thinking skills, including creativity. The study of spirituality should not stand alone as a discrete, somewhat eccentric, focus of enquiry. There should, instead, be an effort at synthesis with mainstream psychological science and basic and applied research in the field of education. There should be some effort made to examine the functional significance of a functional spirituality. Educational researchers should feel free to consider spirituality as a focus for dialogue and exchange with colleagues and students alike. The students in my class, and some of my colleagues, may have at first recoiled slightly when I began asking them for their thoughts on spirituality, but the dialogue has been truly stimulating, interesting, and enlightening.     

The governance of the South African higher education system: balancing state control and state supervision in co-operative governance?

The publication of the National Commission for Higher Education (NCHE) in 1996 was hailed as the first systematic attempt to map out a policy terrain for higher education in South Africa since the elections of April 1994. Its recommendations, particularly on the governance of higher education, elicited much discussion and debate. The debate continued (and continues) with the publication of the Green and White Papers, the Bill on Higher Education, and the Higher Education Act (HEA) in late 1997.This paper explores and seeks to clarify the emerging model of educational governance that has been accepted by the Ministry of Education in South Africa as the basis for managing and transforming the inherited system of higher education. Specifically, the paper considers the philosophy of “co-operative governance” and the governance recommendations of the NCHE Report and the HEA. These documents are examined in relation to state control and state supervision models of higher education governance. The paper concludes by considering the politics of policy development in the transformation of the South African higher education governance system.     

Education and earnings: A review of the evidence

An optimistic review of the relation between education and earnings is provided, even after nonschooling influences (family background and environmental and personal characteristics) are considered. The article reviews issues such as the distinction between quality and quantity of education, the effect of “ability” on the education-earnings relationship, and the “screening” hypothesis.