The World Bank's policy paper on vocational and technical education and training

In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, some of his major works include The Neglected Source of Human Wealth: A Study of Formal Education and Training during the Adult Years(1982) and The Lingering Crisis of Youth Unemployment (1978).     

Examining the Links Between Psychoeducational Assessment,Instruction and Remediation

The assessment of students’ capabilities and learning outcomes has long been considered an important factor in instructional design and program planning and refinement. The information provided by clinicians, however, has not always been presented to classroom teachers in a form that will allow them to amend their classroom practices to the students’ advantage. This paper reviews the recent history of psychoeducational testing and examines several attempts to link assessment with instruction within the information processing domain. The authors present a case for the inclusion of testing procedures that inform teachers of students’ information processing capabilities and they argue that clinicians and educators must work together to translate these data into effective remediation and instruction practices.     

“You can go to college”: Employing a Developmental Perspective to Examine How Young Men of Color Construct a College-Going Identity

This article examines college-going identity construction for Black, Latino, and Asian American and Pacific Islander high school students. The authors use Marcia’s (J Personal Soc Psychol 3(5):551–558, 1966; in: Delson (ed) Handbook of adolescent research, Wiley, New York, 1980) ego identity statuses perspective to examine how students develop their college-going identities to consider their post-high school pathways. We draw on focus groups interviews with 153 Black, Latino, and Asian American Pacific Islanders students enrolled in 10 urban and suburban high schools in California. The findings show the importance of being somebody, not quitting before establishing a career or graduating from college, joining the military as a pathway to finance postsecondary education, and the internal pressure to pay for higher education. The significance of this paper challenges the dominant narrative of young men of color not invested or interested in higher education, but highlight how the young men of color negotiate their agency in constructing their ideas and making decisions based on how various tensions and aspirations shape their goals after high school.     

Meeting innumeracy at primary school

Innumeracy, as understood here, is the inability to handle numbers and numerical data decently and to evaluate statements regarding sums and situations which invite mental processing and estimating. Innumeracy is quite frequent at primary school, as experience shows, and particularly, where open problems ask for numerical data to be supplied and substituted by the pupils themselves.Innumeracy may be caused by a structuralist design of the instruction: from the beginning onwards, emphasis is on teaching the algorithms of column arithmetic, and no room is yielded to context problems.The alternative, as here presented, to the structuralist approach is the realistic one. Here arithmetic starts as an informal context-bound activity of the children, who, via model situations, gradually develop more formal methods; these, in turn, remain tied to mental arithmetic and arithmetic by estimate, both in bare sums and in context situations.     

Teaching by Design

Some teaching material which invites a group of students to design and carry out a small experiment to investigate the working of short term memory is described. No equipment of any kind is required. These ideas have been found to be very helpful in making students think about some very basic and practical issues in designing and carrying out an experiment. The simple nature of the material makes it accessible to all levels of students.     

Watching People Watching Television: what goes on in front of the TV set?

This paper reports an observational study of families watching television in their own homes. Observational data were collected via a video camera housed within a special television cabinet placed in six family households. Results show that family members were absent for substantial proportions of the time the television set was in operation, and even when present did not pay full attention to the screen for more than a minority proportion of that time. Families and family members varied significantly in respect of certain patterns of television watching, but were similar in other respects. The results have implications for understanding the nature of television viewing in the natural viewing environment. Recommendations are offered for further analysis of these data.     

Capturing the Complexity of Alternative Schools: Narratives of Latino Males in an Overlooked Educational Space

 This study discusses the needs and challenges associated with Latino males’ treatment in public schools. The primary concern is how nationally, only one in two Latino males graduate from U.S. high schools (Schott Foundation for Public Education in Black Lives Matter: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males, http://blackboysreport.org/, 2015). However, a growing body of research has emerged, heightening Latino males’ social and academic needs in traditional K-12 educational settings. In this paper, we highlight the need to focus on alternative school settings through the narratives of four Latino males enrolled in two alternative public schools. Our findings describe the nuances in alternative schooling experience for Latino males. It explores the school context's differences to (re)engage youth back into school and the various factors that shape their future aspirations. We discuss implications for research and practice to improve alternative schools' conditions to better serve Latino males in this overlooked sector in the educational pipeline.

     

Social science, social relevance and the politics of educational development

This article raises some broad questions about the relevance of the current content and teaching methods in undergraduate social science generally. First, it examines critically the general teaching patterns which often stress the teaching of concepts, theory, history and techniques in isolation from current or historical problems. It next argues that our major methods of teaching—notably the lecture—contribute little to achieving the widely advertised pedagogic objectives of independent, critical thinking by students. Thirdly, it argues that we need to inject more relevance into the content of social science courses by shifting the emphasis towards a greater use of contemporary or historical problems or incidents as the starting point for the appreciation of theory and methods. It suggests that the teaching methods best suited to this are the various versions of the ‘case’ or ‘enquiry’ or ‘problem’ approach, which involve a more active participation by students in the process of learning, rather than their current passive role as consumers of teaching. Some illustrations of how this can be done are given. The article concludes by indicating some of the problems which are likely to be encountered in educational development of this kind. These problems are considered to be ‘political’ ones in that they involve a changed use and distribution of resources (of staff, students, times and buildings), which are likely to run counter to current systems of academic and institutional power, social organization, culture and ideology.