Stress,Adaptive Coping,and Life Satisfaction

The authors examined the relationship between stress, adaptive coping, and life satisfaction among college students who reported having a friend or family member with eating disorder symptomatology. A hierarchical regression confirmed the study's hypotheses. Higher stress was linked with less life satisfaction. After stress was controlled, plan coping had a beneficial influence on life satisfaction. College counselors can use these findings when choosing interventions for clients who are close to someone with an eating disorder.     

Icarus Falling: Re‐Imagining Educational Theory

This article offers a critique of the notion of ‘capacity building’ in educational theory. Are the intentions behind the latter enterprise as benign and altruistic as they first appear? How is the term ‘capacity building’ to be understood? The article presents a radical and daring alternative for re‐invigorating educational research that foregrounds the ethical engagement of the researcher by exploring the expressive, cognitive and imaginative possibilities of language. Drawing on the Calvino's idea of the ‘lightness of thoughtfulness’, I suggest that the emphasis accorded to the notion of ‘capacity building’ may detract attention from the equally significant role of incapacity in helping us to move the discussion forward in a responsive and ethical way.     

Assessing the special education professional development needs of northern Malawian schoolteachers

This research examines special needs education professional development needs among both general and special education schoolteachers in northern Malawi. A semi‐structured questionnaire with open and close‐ended questions was used for the research. Quantitative and thematic analyses were conducted to determine the extent to which teachers believe that students with disabilities should be educated together with students without disabilities, the importance of professional development for teaching students with disabilities, prioritised professional development needs regarding special education knowledge, and self‐identified needs for successful special education classrooms. Results indicate that teachers are generally in favour of inclusive practices and identify a high need for special education professional development. Participants identified training and resources to teach students with visual impairments or auditory impairments as a high priority. Participants noted a need for improved infrastructure, more educational materials, and recognition by the government for work in special education.     

Methodological Choices in the Content Analysis of Textbooks for Measuring Alignment With Standards

With the recent adoption of the Common Core standards in many states, there is a need for quality information about textbook alignment to standards. While there are many existing content analysis procedures, these generally have little, if any, validity or reliability evidence. One exception is the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC), which has been widely used to analyze the alignment among standards, assessments, and teachers’ instruction. However, the SEC can be time‐consuming and expensive when used for this purpose. This study extends the SEC to the analysis of entire mathematics textbooks and investigates whether the results of SEC alignment analyses are affected if the content analysis procedure is simplified. The results indicate that analyzing only every fifth item produces nearly identical alignment results with no effect on the reliability of content analyses.     

Higher Education and Problems of Citizenship Formation

The purpose of the university should be grounded in the concept of citizenship rather than the promise of increased future earnings and research consultancy work. However, this conception of citizenship should be republican rather than liberal. British higher education institutions have suffered at the hands of mechanisms intended to promote accountability. The concept of accountability has undermined the legitimate authority of the university. As pressures from student fee increases, fiscal austerity and accountability mechanisms further undermine the ethic of scholarship, the idea of the university needs to recover its central purpose to ward off civic privatism.     

Dissolving boundaries: cross-national co-operation through technology in education

This article reports research on cross-national co-operation through Information and Communications Technology (ICT) within the statutory curricula of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, the views and experiences of teachers in partner schools in the north and south of Ireland were sought on the capacity and potential of asynchronous computer conferencing and videoconferencing to generate collaborative work in a cross-border setting, to promote cultural awareness among primary and post-primary pupils, and to improve teacher and pupil competence in ICT. The results showed a significant improvement in ICT competence, and also revealed that technical training, enthusiasm and commitment were the key factors for success, and that not only did the pupils develop an awareness of the cultural identity of distant peers, but their sense of responsibility, self-esteem and motivation grew. This particularly helped less able and quieter pupils. There was unexpected rôle reversal when children helped their teachers within an ICT context, a situation not found elsewhere in the curriculum. Additionally, there were beneficial effects on literacy, group work and independent learning, and the skills acquired were transferable. The commitment of the teachers to continue this cross-national work with limited support is a measure of its potential sustainability.