The high‐school science library

Student behavioral and emotional difficulties, often comorbid with each other and with learning difficulties and academic underachievement, have become an increasing concern to educational settings. This article first provides a conceptual framework for child assessment and highlights the role of behavior rating scales and personality inventories. This article reviews the role of behavior rating scales and personality inventories as a tool for screening students whose behavioral and emotional difficulties may affect their learning, their interpersonal relationships at school, and students who may pose significant management problems for teachers. The utility of specific uni- and multidimensional scales is reviewed relative to major behavioral and emotional difficulties shown by school students. Issues with using these tools are discussed. The Student Behavior Survey (SBS), a teacher-report scale, is described to illustrate the relative contributions of these scales.     

The high school science library for 1933–34

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is, quite possibly, the most comprehensive and systemic education reform act passed by Congress in the last 40 years. Given only 17 states ever fully complied with NCLB's predecessor, the 1994 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it is only proper that legislators, policymakers, and researchers are now asking how we, as a nation, are doing implementing the law this time around? The Education Commission of the States (ECS) attempts, in the following article, to answer the question. The article covers information ECS has harvested and some of the insights ECS has gained since first examining state policy enactments related to NCLB. It provides information on the structure of the database, the methodology used to gather and verify the information, major findings of the tracking and reporting activity, specific gains made by category, key issues that merit immediate attention, and finally specific actions for consideration should federal officials and state policymakers be inclined to make changes to the law.     

In the Field in the Library: methodological analogies for library‐based researchers

Abstract

Library‐based work is integral to all research in the social sciences, whatever its methodological biases. Yet a key area of neglect in the literature on research methodology is that relating to this form of data collection and analysis. This paper outlines the ways in which library‐based activity contains within it key elements of the wider research process. It argues that a broader conceptualization of methodology which pays enhanced attention to the collection and analysis of textual materials is vital for the development of our understanding and teaching of research methods.     

Cooking the books: what counts as literacy for young children in a public library?

At a time when government funding cuts mean that public libraries face an uncertain future and need to make sure they stay relevant to young users and their families, this paper explores what counts as literacy for young children in a public library in a town in the East Midlands, UK. It is based on a study which adopted an ethnographic approach, drawing on Lefebvre's spatial theory to understand how a library space presents literacy to young children and their carers, and how this then shapes the literacy practices and events that happen in this space. The study shows that dominant discourses are bound up in what the library staff understand to be their role in promoting and supporting young children's literacy, and that, often, they organise the space and literacy events in ways that reflect these discourses. However this paper argues that it is not only the library staff that create space in the library, as carers and their children are sometimes seen to create alternative spaces which challenge and subvert the way the librarians would like the space to be used and understood.     

Learning in and for cross‐school working

In this study we report some of the outcomes of a study of professional learning that took place in cross school partnerships as they worked towards promoting creativity in schools. The methodology developed by Engeström and his colleagues at The Centre for Developmental Work Research in Helsinki was adopted. This form of intervention involves the preparation and facilitation of workshops in which the underlying structural contradictions that are in play in emergent activities are highlighted and articulated in such a way that participants may engage with what may otherwise remain hidden and unexamined tensions. This approach is based on the writings of the early 20th‐century Russian school of social scientists—Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. A principal claim is that the development of creativity requires tools and contexts for such innovatory forms of practice. This study suggests that this claim is a partial representation of the development of creative activity.     

Towards a More Authentic Science Curriculum: The contribution of out‐of‐school learning

In many developed countries of the world, pupil attitudes to school science decline progressively across the age range of secondary schooling while fewer students are choosing to study science at higher levels and as a career. Responses to these developments have included proposals to reform the curriculum, pedagogy, and the nature of pupil discussion in science lessons. We support such changes but argue that far greater use needs to be made of out‐of‐school sites in the teaching of science. Such usage will result in a school science education that is more valid and more motivating. We present an “evolutionary model” of science teaching that looks at where learning and teaching take place, and draws together thinking about the history of science and developments in the nature of learning over the past 100 years or so. Our contention is that laboratory‐based school science teaching needs to be complemented by out‐of‐school science learning that draws on the actual world (e.g., through fieldtrips), the presented world (e.g., in science centres, botanic gardens, zoos and science museums), and the virtual worlds that are increasingly available through information technologies.     

One foot out the school door? Interpreting the risk for dropout upon the transition to post-secondary vocational education

Many students drop out in the first year after a school transition. Most commonly used indicators of an increased risk for dropout reveal little of the mechanisms that push or pull students out of school. In this study, we look at the association of a set of common risk indicators with students’ supportive resources and school experiences upon the transition to post-secondary vocational education in the Netherlands. Multilevel regression analyses on a diverse sample of 1438 students indicate that most sociodemographic risk indicators relate to less access to supportive resources for school, whereas personal circumstances outside school that are associated with an increased risk for dropout correlate with negative school experiences. Students from lower educated or poor families and students who use drugs, have debts, or are delinquent score negative in both domains, suggesting that those students make the transition with one foot out the school door.     

Pupil profiling: some policy issues from school‐based practice∗

Theoretical writings on policy analysis have often dealt with the problem of adjudicating value issues as well as the problem of complexity. Since both these problems are ultimately epistemological in character, this paper explores their structure from a less familiar non‐foundational, coherentist epistemological framework, within the context of the synoptic/anti‐synoptic debate in policy analaysis. The paper argues against a sharp distinction between fact and value in policy choice, and recommends the gradual replacement of ubiquitous folk psychological simplifying assumptions in favour of scientific ones, where predictions systematically lapse, as a step towards dealing with complexity.