Jarvis,Peter, and Colin Griffin (eds.). 2003. Adult and Continuing Education: Major Themes in Education

International Review of Education -     

Classifying the Context Clues in Children's Text

This study aimed to determine which types of context clues exist in children's texts and whether it is possible for experts to identify reliably those clues. Three experienced coders used Ames’ clue set as a foundation for a system to classify context clues in children's text. Findings showed that the adjustments to Ames’ system resulted in 15 clues that can be used to capture the majority of clues found in children narrative and expository text. This study adds to the limited empirically validated systems available for classifying different context clues. A usable classification of context clues has application to reading research that considers or controls for text factors as well as teaching reading strategies in K–12 classrooms.     

Common Core History for Young Europeans

The prospect of European integration calls urgently for educational provision which will enable Europe's school‐leavers to understand and appraise the process. Essentially, this provision is historical. What is distinctive about Europe? What made us what we are? It is suggested that modem Europe is, at bottom, the result of two related things‐‐conflict and ideas‐‐and that the conflicts have arisen because of the ideas, and have constituted their final working‐out. Three ideas, with their related conflicts, seem fundamental, and these three pairings indicate the appropriate content for a history course for Europe's senior pupils. The three ‘ideas ‘ are the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Nationalism, and the related conflicts are the 30 Years’ War, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the World Wars of this century. The coverage of the first pairing is sketched as an example of how the whole course may be mounted and to introduce a master theme of European history for the last 300 years. The paper ends with a brief discussion of why other seemingly crucial factors are not selected and discussed.     

Distributional effects of educational improvements: Are we using the wrong model?

Measuring the incidence of public spending in education requires an intergenerational framework distinguishing between what current and future generations—that is, parents and children—give and receive. In standard distributional incidence analysis, households are assumed to receive a benefit equal to what is spent on their children enrolled in the public schooling system and, implicitly, to pay a fee proportional to their income. We show that, in an intergenerational framework, this is equivalent to assuming perfectly altruistic individuals, in the sense of the dynastic model, and perfect capital markets. But in practice, credit markets are imperfect and poor households cannot borrow against the future income of their children. We show that under such circumstances, standard distributional incidence analysis may greatly over-estimate the progressivity of public spending in education: educational improvements that are progressive in the long-run steady state may actually be regressive for the current generation of poor adults. This is especially true where service delivery in education is highly inefficient—as it is in poor districts of many developing countries—so that the educational benefits received are relatively low in comparison with the cost of public spending. Our results have implications for both policy measures and analytical approaches.     

Scientific strengths and reported effectiveness: a systematic review of multiliteracies studies

This systematic review is built on the seminal work by the New London Group in 1996. Few endeavours have synthesized findings of empirical studies pertaining to the effects and challenges of multiliteracies practices in various schooling and geographical contexts. Through a five-point Likert scale and a deductive and inductive thematic analysis, we conducted a systematic review of 66 multiliteracies articles from the ProQuest® database. These studies were empirical, qualitative/mixed-method, and ranged from 2006 to 2015. Findings show a burgeoning number of multiliteracies studies occurring in 15 countries, with Canada being the most prominently involved. Our evaluation of the reviewed studies was generally favourable with strengths identified in researchers’ articulation of pertinent theoretical frameworks and connections to existent literature. Our findings refer to insufficient information of data collection and data analysis in a certain number of papers. We also elaborate on major affordances, challenges, and oversights of the multiliteracies practices as reported by the reviewed studies and discuss implications for future multiliteracies research, policies on literacy education, and teacher education in diverse contexts.     

It’s About Making Surfaces Invisible

Antireflection is an essential requirement for certain optoelectronic devices. Antireflective surfaces can be generated by different methods. One method mimics the nanofeatures on the moth eye surface. This can be done by ‘soft lithography’ (SL), where nanofeatures are created on an elastomeric stamp. This stamp is then used for imprinting the pattern on other surfaces.