Conducting Evaluation and Research with and for 'Disaffected' Students: Practical and Methodological Issues

In the late 1990s, the Department for Education and Employment in England set out to motivate and engage teenage students who were said to be 'disaffected' with the traditional school curriculum. Jerry Wellington, Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield, and Pam Cole, research fellow in the University of Sheffield School of Education, were asked to evaluate one of the 21 projects that were set up across the country. The pupils involved were partially disapplied from the National Curriculum in order to follow a work-related scheme set up by two schools, a Chamber of Commerce and a local Learning and Skills Council.
In this article, Jerry Wellington and Pam Cole explore some of the difficulties that accompany evaluation, and particularly a review of the impact of interventions involving so-called 'disaffected' pupils. They describe some of the practical and methodological difficulties faced in such an evaluation, as well as highlighting the positive aspects of the task. They reflect on a range of unforeseen and unpredictable dilemmas that faced them in this work, and note some of the interesting significant strengths that developed from the project. At the end of their article, Jerry Wellington and Pam Cole summarise what they have learned from the evolving methodology of this evaluation and present a case for increased levels of collaboration, between practitioners and researchers and between professionals and pupils, in future projects of this kind.     

The sub‐culture of music and ICT in the classroom

In this paper the authors utilise findings from the Economic and Social Research Council‐funded InterActive Education project to present a characterisation of the sub‐culture of school music with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in England. They consider the opportunities and challenges ICT presents to the teaching of primary (ages 4–11) and secondary (ages 11–18) classroom music through an investigation of the perceptions, personal philosophies and pedagogical styles of seven teachers with whom they worked over a period of three years. Their work is underpinned by Goodson and Mangan’s definition of subject sub‐culture and they draw on Shulman’s notion of ‘knowledge bases’ in order to categorise and discuss the data. Through the identification and elaboration of key themes, the authors provide a snapshot of the emerging sub‐culture of music and ICT in schools.     

Innovative use of ICT in schools based on the findings in ELFE project

The European e-Learning Forum for Education (ELFE) is a project initiated by the ETUCE (European Trade Union Committee on Education). An important objective of the project has been to study good experiences with implementing the use of ICT in schools. This objective has been broken down in seven operational research questions. Three of these questions will be discussed in this article: (1) What difference does the use of ICT make in schools where ICT is intensively used for instructional/pedagogical purposes? (2) How are the students influenced by this different way of teaching as compared to the traditional classroom education, both individually and as a collective? 3) What factors influence the intensive pedagogical use of ICT? The ELFE study applied a case study approach. Three innovative schools in each of five European countries (Denmark, England, Germany, Norway and Portugal) were purposively selected. Data were collected via questionnaires, interviews, observations and school documents. The findings resulting from the ELFE schools case studies illustrate that the implementation of ICT for teaching and learning may influence the functioning of schools in a number of ways. One can also conclude that students like working with computers and that they have no ‘instrumental’ problems. A number of factors seem to influence the successful implementation of ICT at school level such as a good infrastructure, a clear vision, policy and strategy. A crucial factor is support from national, regional and local authorities, as well as from the school leadership and parents.     

Lifeline and Moral Education

The recent Lifeline programme on moral education developed for adolescents by the Schools Council Moral Education Project can be successfully adapted for use by children with learning difficulties, writes Peter McPhail, director of this project and also of the Health Education Council Project, Cambridge University     

The Development of a Quality System for Higher Education

This article documents the approach used and the design decisions taken during the establishment of a quality system for teaching activities in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds, It describes the motivations for performing the work, how it was organized and resourced, the approach adopted, and the impact of the Higher Education Funding Council for England teaching quality assessment exercise. The article then details each of the stages of the project in turn, from specifying the scope of the work; analyzing the activities involved; defining the quality policy of the department; analyzing various quality system models and selecting the most appropriate one; defining the structure of the documentation to be produced; writing the quality manual and procedures; and the implementation of the system itself The article concludes by giving the current status of the system. Experiences gained from introducing and using the quality system are documented elsewhere: this article concentrates on its conception and design.     

Partnerships depend on power-sharing: an exploration of the relationships between Fairground and Gypsy Traveller parents and their children's teachers in England

In England opportunities for Traveller children to gain access to mainstream schools have increased substantially over the past thirty years. Parents have been increasingly willing to put their children into schools, while education outreach services have developed in parallel to facilitate regular attendance. Local authority based Traveller Education Support Service (TESS) projects have been the strategy most frequently used for this outreach work, the success of which depends largely on the quality of the parent/teacher relationships. Is it possible for conditions to exist that will enable real partnerships between parents and teachers to develop? As the coordinator of one of the oldest TESSs, the author answers this crucial question by drawing on participant observation, formal interviews and policy documents, as well as comparative projects with other partners in the European Federation for the Education of the Children of the Occupational Travellers (EFECOT).     

The Delphi method: gathering expert opinion in religious education

The ‘Does Religious Education work?’ project is part of the Religion and Society programme funded by two major research councils in the UK. It sets out to track the trajectory of Religious Education (RE) in secondary schools in the UK from the aims and intentions represented in policy through its enactment in classroom practice to the estimations of its impact by students. Using a combination of approaches, we are in the process of investigating the practices which determine and shape the teaching of RE in secondary schools through linked case studies, semi-structured interviews and a practitioner enquiry strand. In this article we focus on the first stage of the project where we used the Delphi method to elicit expert opinion on the aims and intentions of RE in secondary schools in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland. We outline the place of the Delphi process within the rationale of the project, discuss emerging themes and some of the issues arising from the use of this approach.     

Teaching standards and the promotion of quality teaching

Several countries have been developing teaching standards for the purpose of providing recognition and more attractive career pathways to teachers who attain these standards. These initiatives aim to lift the status of teaching as a profession and to provide stronger incentives for professional learning. This article describes the work of a project at the Australian Council for Educational Research, the ACER Portfolio Project, designed to develop methods whereby teachers can demonstrate how their practice meets the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers ( www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards ) at the ‘Highly Accomplished’ level and test them in schools for their validity and feasibility. The article describes how the Project developed an assessment framework that provided a representative sample of evidence about a teacher's practice covering the Standards, trialed portfolio tasks in schools with volunteer teachers and tested whether it was possible to train other teachers to assess their portfolio entries reliably and set standards for highly‐accomplished teaching.     

Promoting sustainable development through whole school approaches: an international,intercultural teacher education research and development project

This paper focuses on a British Council funded Higher Education Link project involving three institutions—Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) in the UK and two South African institutions, the University of South Africa (UNISA) and Rhodes University. The link is a research and development project that has three main research strands: contextual profiling that will establish the applicability of a European teacher education project to the South African context, evaluative materials development and piloting predicated on a respect for indigenous and contextual knowledge, and impact analysis that will examine the role of multidirectional intergenerational mentoring in disseminating messages about sustainable lifestyles. The project is strongly influenced by the South African Revised National Curriculum statements pertaining to environment and an analysis of the impact that these materials have had on promoting whole school approaches to environmental education in South Africa. The link's initial purpose is to develop advanced certificate in education (ACE) course materials that will promote whole school approaches to environmental education, based on developing concepts of collaboration, pupil participation, educational process and action in schools in South Africa. Materials from the MMU‐based, European Commission funded Sustainability Education in European Primary Schools (SEEPS) Project will be adapted for use in South Africa by UNISA and Rhodes.

This paper reports on the development of the project and explores some of its activities and results to date. It documents how the project team approached the integrating redevelopment of SEEPS ideas and materials to use these resources in the design of continuing professional development (CPD) activities for ACE courses in environmental education at UNISA and Rhodes. The second section is written in semi‐dialogue form to try to reflect the nature of the discussions that occurred between the partners in the link during meetings in the UK. This dialogue outlines the conceptual and philosophical background to the SEEPS Project before examining continuities and tensions that arose in clarifying and situating guiding perspectives for CPD and whole school approaches in and for South African school contexts through the medium of teacher education. The paper also reviews how the South African team are interacting with ideas and materials from SEEPS to clarify whole school approaches to environmental education in South Africa and discusses the contexts within which the outcomes of the link will unfold.     

远程合作学习项目对学校教育的影响效果分析

本研究采用调查研究的方法,以东西部79所参与中国和联合国儿童基金会“姊妹学校项目”的学校为对象,就项目对学校教育和教学以及师生的影响开展问卷调查。通过实证分析得知,远程合作学习“姊妹学校项目”在引入学校、融入课程与教学后,它影响着师生,为东西部学校带来了学习内容的变革、教与学形式的变革、学校文化的变革,这项为期三年的干预改变了学生,也改变了教师,改变了学校。     

Finding the ‘Enunciative Space’ for Teacher Leadership and Teacher Learning in Schools

Drawing on a collaborative Australian Research Council funded project entitled the ‘Teachers’ Learning Project’, the author takes issue with the rhetoric of the ‘learning society’ and, in particular, he interrogates the notion of the learning teacher in a number of schools. He provides a critical examination of the direction of teachers’ work under current technicist reconstruals of it. He draws on case studies to show how some schools have been able to position themselves as moral learning communities which have created vibrant indigenous cultures of learning about themselves, their community and their work in a context of a commitment to democratic and participatory citizenship.     

河南省高师公共体育课程改革现状与对策研究

通过文献资料法、问卷调查法、数理统计法对河南省师范类高校公共体育课程改革现状进行调研,从教育理念、教学项目、内容、教学模式、教学方法和考核评价各个方面着手进行分析和探讨,得出结论。建议从课程内容设置和教学方法等方面进行改革,为更好地指导师范类高校体育教学提供理论上的依据。     

工学一体化下的现代学徒制实施方案的探索实践

为建立校企互聘互用的师资队伍,提高职业教育人才培养的质量和水平,特制订石家庄工程技术学校学前教育专业现代学徒制工作实施方案并加以实践。     

A state-wide change initiative: The primary science teacher-leader project

The Primary Science Teacher-Leader Project was conducted during 1995 and 1996 as part of the Education Department of Western Australia's Science Project. This paper focuses on the implications of this project for primary science education reform. It is shown that the project inducted a cadre of skilled and enthusiastic teacher-leaders who impacted on science teaching in classrooms throughout the state. Quality professional development, networking, time and the provision of modest resources for teacher-leaders were the major structural factors contributing to the success of the model. Contextual factors included the readiness for change in primary science among schools and teachers, the collaborative approach to the project by the science education community in Western Australia and the concurrent publication and implementation of quality teaching materials in the form ofPrimary Investigations.     

Toward a gender-sensitive model of science teacher education for women primary and early childhood teachers

Female teachers predominate in primary schools, and tend both to have more negative perceptions of their teaching skills in the physical sciences than males, and to expect girls to perform less well in these areas than boys, with likely serious consequences for girls. In this context the WASTE (Women and Science Teacher Education) Project sought to identify characteristics for teacher education programs which, in the opinion of their conveners, were productive in changing the attitude toward the teaching of science, or in changing the actual mode of teaching science, of women preservice and practising teachers. This paper reports the findings of the WASTE Project which surveyed the conveners of pre- and inservice programs and outlined the three models of exemplary practice used to classify responses:subject-centred, learner-centred andknowledge and person-centred. These models were based largely on differing explanations given for attitude change and on implicit concepts of knowledge, persons, and teaching and learning, and on the importance attributed to gender as a variable. Secondly, it shows how the Primary and Early Childhood Science and Technology Education Project, a gender-sensitive action-research project, was built on these findings. Finally, using these models, it offers a critique of the gender perspective of the Discipline Review of Teacher Education (DEET, 1989). Specializations: gender and science/science teacher education, feminist theory, curriculum theory.     

Improving Literacy at Key Stage 3: Policy,Practice and Evaluation

This paper reports on and explores some of the assumptions underpinning an invitation issued to local education authorities in England in January 1998 from the Department for Education and Employment to bid for funds to develop literacy in the first years of secondary schooling. It goes on to describe one authority’s successful bid, and explores how the project is being implemented in schools within the authority, in terms of action plans, staff development and classroom practice. Finally, these perspectives are compared with research findings on literacy development, particularly in low-achieving schools. The problems of evaluating literacy interventions are discussed.     

Children's writing goes 3D: a case study of one primary school's journey into multimodal authoring

This paper draws from research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project ‘Teaching effective 3D authoring in the middle years: multimedia grammatical design and multimedia authoring pedagogy’, which is a collaboration between the University of New England, the University of Tasmania and the Australian Children's Television Foundation. This project is being conducted in over 20 schools around Australia. The data presented in this paper focuses on one such school, located in Tasmania. It explores one school's endeavour in the teaching and learning of multimodal narrative. Data includes interviews from students and multimodal analysis of student narratives. The paper showcases the kinds of semiotic choices the children are making for their stories, and includes excerpts from the interviews to illustrate how they are able to articulate justifications for their choices. In particular, it focuses on how children are establishing literary concepts such as genre, characterisation and point of view using all semiotic resources. In doing so, it considers the pedagogy behind the creations to explore how effectively it works as children create new kinds of texts which are innovative, critical, creative and ‘of quality’.     

Management teams and the promotion of staff well‐being

For several years small primary schools have been threatened with closure and their viability is frequently a subject of much discussion. One of the major issues in this debate, particularly in light of the 1988 Education Reform Act, is whether they can provide an effective education for their pupils due to their size and their mixed age range classes. This article discusses the major arguments related to this issue and draws several important conclusions to guide practice and decision making not only in small schools, but also in all other primary schools where differentiation in teaching and learning methods is now of crucial significance. Supporting evidence is taken mainly from a Teacher Fellowship project funded by West Glamorgan County Council.     

Is the Effective Compromising the Affective?

This article draws on the evidence from two Economic and Social Research Council funded projects which examined the impact of policy on the lives of classroom teachers and the experience of their pupils. The PACE Project concentrated on English primary teachers, reviewing practice in the light of the successive waves of legislative change following the 1988 Education Reform Act. The ENCOMPASS Project was a cross‐cultural study which investigated the attitudes of pupils to schooling and the impact of policy on the work of secondary teachers in England, France and Denmark. Evidence from both projects suggested that teachers in England were concerned that externally imposed educational change had not only increased their workload but also created a growing tension between the requirements of government and the needs of their pupils. A perceived demand for a delivery of ‘performance’, for both themselves and their pupils, had created a policy focus that emphasised the managerially ‘effective’, in the interests of accountability, while ignoring teachers' deeply rooted commitment to the affective aspects of teaching and learning. This article reviews the main findings from both projects in relation to the current thrust of education policy‐making in England and its possible impact on teachers' work and job satisfaction. It also draws attention to the possible long‐term effects that such a focus could have on the quality of learning and the ability of pupils to engage with the necessary skills for lifelong learning.     

《国家英语课程标准》与继续教育的实施

《国家英语课程标准》的颁发与实施对广大的中学英语教师提出了相当高的素质要求。为了尽快地实施素质教育,教育部启动了“园丁工程”,对在职教师进行继续教育,目的在于提高教师的教学意识和自主的教育反思能力。继续教育的实施将培养出一大批高素质的教师,并由此而培养更多的对社会有用的人才。