The Interface Between the Curriculum and the Code

Barry Carpenter, Director of the Centre for the Study of Special Education, Westminster College, Oxford, highlights the need for a school's curriculum to reflect the requirements of The Code of Practice.     

Preparing future educational leaders to write for Scholarly Publication

One objective of graduate-level education is the socialization of students into the professional roles they will eventually assume. The ability to engage successfully in scholarly writing and publishing are important competencies for graduate students, particularly at the doctoral level, to acquire. An experimental course, Basics of Scholarly Publishing, is described along with the results of a survey of 52 students who have completed the course. The proportion of those successfully breaking into scholarly print was 86.5% and increasing. Additional benefits of the course are discussed and an appeal is made for universities elsewhere to begin offering similar learning experiences for their students at the graduate level.     

Early-Morning Behaviour in School

Several children whom I know arrive at school in an emotionally distressed state and tend to disrupt classroom activities. Presumably something has gone wrong at home. What can be done to ease this problem?     

New medical library buildings. 3. The Library of Science & Medicine, Rutgers--the State University of New Jersey

A new free-standing library building, designed to integrate the collections serving interdisciplinary study in science and medicine, is described.     

Relationships between learning environment and mathematics anxiety

We investigated relationships between the learning environment and students’ mathematics anxiety, as well as differences between the sexes in perceptions of learning environment and anxiety. A sample of 745 high-school students in 34 different mathematics classrooms in four high schools in Southern California was used to cross-validate the What Is Happening In this Class? (WIHIC) learning environment instrument, together with an updated Revised Mathematics Anxiety Rating scale. Mathematics anxiety was found to have two factorially-distinct dimensions (namely, learning mathematics anxiety and mathematics evaluation anxiety) which yielded different patterns of results for sex differences and anxiety–environment associations. Relative to males, females perceived a more positive classroom environment and more anxiety about mathematics evaluation, but less anxiety about mathematics learning. Some statistically significant associations were found between anxiety and learning environment scales for learning mathematics anxiety but not for mathematics evaluation anxiety.