School reading volunteers: results of a postal survey of primary school head teachers in England

This article reports the results of a postal survey of primary school head teachers in England carried out in order to take a broad ‘sounding’ of mainstream practice with respect to volunteer help with reading within schools. The objective was to build up a general picture of the scale of the practice in schools and of its significance to teachers. From an initial random sample of 500 schools, an overall response rate of 76 per cent was achieved. Issues raised by the results include: (i) the special status of reading in the relationship between home and school; (ii) the issues of professionalism raised by head teachers with respect to the use of volunteer reading helpers; (iii) the question of whether parents' help with school reading can in all cases legitimately be called ‘parental’; and (iv) the relationship between volunteer help with reading and teachers' working conditions in a contracting education service.     

Breaking the cycle of office referrals and suspensions: defensive management

This paper focuses on a strategy—Defensive Management—designed to assist teachers to better manage non‐compliance and defiance in the classroom, with the ultimate goal of reducing disciplinary referrals and flow‐on suspensions and exclusions from school. Non‐compliance and defiance are behaviours that teachers find particularly challenging and, traditionally, teachers have responded provocatively and often unsuccessfully when faced with instances of such behaviour. Drawing on an analogy with Defensive Driving, two groups of teachers (pre‐service and primary) were introduced to a strategy developed to help them avoid unproductive conflict (collisions) with students and the harm that such encounters typically result in. The findings of an exploratory study on the use of Defensive Management are reported.     

The ‘Everyday World’ of Teachers? Deracialised discourses in the sociology of teachers and the teaching profession

This article explores the way in which the ‘everyday world’ of teachers and the teaching profession has been discoursively formulated in sociological research. In particular, it is critical of the way certain sociologists have ‘deracialised’ that world. In part, then, the argument complements Sandra Acker's (1983) feminist critique of the sociological literature on teachers. In the first part of the paper I look critically at the discourses of Schoolteacher (Lortie), Teachers’ Work (Connell) and Teachers’ Careers (Sikes, Measor and Woods) and argue that deracialisation is achieved and confirmed in these seminal studies through the processes of ‘globalisation’ and ‘commatization’. Following on from this, I look at the emergence of ‘Images of studies of ethnic minority teachers. I question the efficacy of their challenge to deracialised studies because of their tendency to articulate with the discourse of multiculturalism and, as a consequence, their implicit legitimation of ethnocentric conceptions of ‘the norm’. I conclude by discussing how concepts within the analytical frame of ‘micropolitics’ have the potential to illuminate more clearly and authentically the matrix of power relations within the ‘everyday world’ of teachers.     

Design,validation, and use of an evaluation instrument for monitoring systemic reform

Over the past decade, state and national policymakers have promoted systemic reform as a way to achieve high‐quality science education for all students. However, few instruments are available to measure changes in key dimensions relevant to systemic reform such as teaching practices, student attitudes, or home and peer support. Furthermore, Rasch methods of analysis are needed to permit valid comparison of different cohorts of students during different years of a reform effort. This article describes the design, development, validation, and use of an instrument that measures student attitudes and several environment dimensions (standards‐based teaching, home support, and peer support) using a three‐step process that incorporated expert opinion, factor analysis, and item response theory. The instrument was validated with over 8,000 science and mathematics students, taught by more than 1,000 teachers in over 200 schools as part of a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of Ohio's systemic reform initiative. When the new four‐factor, 20‐item questionnaire was used to explore the relative influence of the class, home, and peer environment on student achievement and attitudes, findings were remarkably consistent across 3 years and different units and methods of analysis. All three environments accounted for unique variance in student attitudes, but only the environment of the class accounted for unique variance in student achievement. However, the class environment (standards‐based teaching practices) was the strongest independent predictor of both achievement and attitude, and appreciable amounts of the total variance in attitudes were common to the three environments. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 646–662, 2001     

Big girls don't cry: the effect of child witness demeanor on juror decisions in a child sexual abuse trial

OBJECTIVE: This study investigated the effect of child witness demeanor (defined as crying) on mock jurors' decisions in a simulated First-Degree rape trial. METHOD: One hundred and thirty-three undergraduates serving in the role of mock jurors read a trial summary in which the primary independent variable was the demeanor of the alleged child victim (i.e., calm, teary, hysterical crying). In addition to reading the summary, participants viewed pencil drawings of the witnesses that were presented as "courtroom drawings." RESULTS: The results showed that the teary condition led to more guilty verdicts and a greater belief in the alleged victim than the other demeanor conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Findings from this study indicate that demeanor can impact the perception of a child who is an alleged sexual assault victim in court. However, it is not simply the case that any display of demeanor will lead to a positive outcome for the alleged victim. Instead, it appears that too little or too much emotion from the alleged child victim negatively affected credibility in the eyes of the mock jurors.     

Classroom Environment Instruments: Development,Validity and Applications

Few fields of educational research have such a rich diversity of valid, economical and widely-applicable assessment instruments as does the field of learning environments. This article describes nine major questionnaires for assessing student perceptions of classroom psychosocial environment (the Learning Environment Inventory, Classroom Environment Scale, Individualised Classroom Environment Questionnaire, My Class Inventory, College and University Classroom Environment Inventory, Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction, Science Laboratory Environment Inventory, Constructivist Learning Environment Survey and What Is Happening In This Class) and reviews the application of these instruments in 12 lines of past research (focusing on associations between outcomes and environment, evaluating educational innovation, differences between student and teacher perceptions, whether students achieve better in their preferred environment, teachers' use of learning environment perceptions in guiding improvements in classrooms, combining quantitative and qualitative methods, links between different educational environments, cross-national studies, the transition from primary to high school, and incorporating educational environment ideas into school psychology, teacher education and teacher assessment).     

Measuring Effectiveness of Health Education in a Web‐based Learning Environment: a preliminary report

Driven by claims of efficacy, flexibility and resource effectiveness, higher education is increasingly utilising the Web as an instructional tool. The claims for pedagogical effectiveness are often just that – claims — and appear not to have been proven in the reality of subject presentation and evaluation. Thus, it is necessary to examine assumptions regarding the benefits of Web‐based instruction in terms of effectiveness. This article discusses aspects of an investigation which examined and compared the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS related collaborative tutorial activities carried out in both a Web‐based learning environment and a face‐to‐face class situation within an undergraduate health education subject. Effectiveness of the pedagogical strategy and the different learning environments were measured in terms of observed learning outcomes and reported perceptions of the learners regarding their learning experience. Preliminary results based on measured learning outcomes related to the subject matter, HIV/AIDS, demonstrated that collaborative learning activities were significantly more effective in the Web‐based than in the class environment. Additionally, the vast majority of learners perceived the Web‐based environment to be as effective or more effective than the face‐to‐face, class environment in terms of facilitating their understanding of the issues explored in the subject.     

The Macro- and Micropolitics of Personnel Evaluation: A Framework

In this article, the authors explicate a conceptual framework for analyzing the politics of personnel evaluation in an educational context. Using several elements of their framework, they discuss the politics of teacher evaluation in California in relation to the types of personnel evaluation decisions, the actors, their access to these decisions, their sources and level of power, and the outcomes related to their decisions. The authors further portray how politics enters into personnel evaluation at the district level by describing an actual case.