Designing for Differences: Cultural Issues in the Design of WWW-Based Course-Support Sites

Culture is a critical influence on the acceptance, use of, and impact of learning resources. WWW-based course-support sites are becoming an increasingly familiar type of learning resource in higher education. How might different aspects of culture be predicted to affect the institution's, instructor's, and student's reactions to WWW-based course-support sites? How can such sites be designed to adapt to different expectations and learner preferences, especially those related to culture? This article analyses various of these cultural aspects, and argues that WWW-based course-support sites should be designed to be adaptable to different types of cultural differences through the application of a set of ten design guidelines. An example illustrating the design guidelines, the TeleTOP Method from the University of Twente, is described and evaluated relative to the design guidelines. Important considerations related to feasibility as well as to conceptual and strategic choices are included in the scope of the guidelines; the instructor's cultural ecology requires particular attention. But WWW sites and guidelines in themselves are not enough for cultural flexibility; sensitivity and appropriate responsiveness remain human activities.     

On Rewards, Punishments, and Possibilities: Teacher Compensation as an Instrument for Education Reform

This commentary is organized around three cross-cutting themes contained in the articles: assessing school based rewards, envisioning other promising possibilities, and evaluating policy as well as people. The discussion of these broad themes illustrates both the power and limits of policy initiatives, particularly in the area of monetary incentives or sanctions as vehicles for enhancing school performance.     

Visible pedagogic work: parenting,private tutoring and educational advantage in Australia

This article explores parents’ use of private tutoring services for their primary school children in Sydney, Australia's largest city. Using Bernstein's theories of invisible and visible pedagogies, we look, through the eyes of a small group of middle-class Chinese-background interviewees, at the tensions between certain pedagogic forms associated with private tutoring and schooling in contemporary contexts of educational competition. We show how some parents are openly seeking more explicit, visible forms of instruction through using private tutoring, to compensate for the perceived ‘invisible’, pedagogically progressive approach of Australian primary schooling. We argue that these parents’ enlistment of supplementary tutoring is a considered approach to their identification of a mismatch between (apparently) relaxed, child-centred classroom practices, and the demands of the more traditional examinations that regulate entry points to desired educational sites such as academically selective high schools and prestigious universities. Our findings show how paid tutoring is a contemporary pedagogic strategy for securing educational advantage, not just a ‘cultural’ practice prevalent among certain migrant communities, as it is often characterised. We suggest that an analytic focus on pedagogy can help connect issues of class, culture and competition in research on home–school relationships, offering a productive way for the field to respond to the tensions these issues engender.     

Books and Good Stuff: A Strategy for Building School to Home Literacy Connections

Engaging young children in literacy activities at home is one way for families to augment and enrich the home literacy setting and to participate in their child’s education at an early age (St. Pierre et al. in Dev Psychol 41(6): 953–970, 2005). Burgess et al. (Read Res Quart 4(4): 408–426, 2002) suggested that the resources families have at their disposal, the quality of literacy role models provided by parents, and the types of literacy and language activities in which parents and children engage, are all related to young children’s developing literacy and language abilities. Other studies demonstrated that even modest literacy-promoting interventions can significantly enhance a young child’s early literacy environment by increasing the frequency of parent–child book-sharing activities (Weitzman et al. in Pediatrics 113(5):1248–1253, 2004). Dever (J Early Educ Fam Rev 8(4):17–28, 2001) and Dever and Burtis (Early Child Dev Care 172(4):359–370, 2002) emphasize the use of family literacy bags for early childhood development. Developing and sharing take-home literacy bags is an exciting literacy-promoting activity that may be shared with children and families to provide support for emergent literacy. This article explores the development of the BAGS (Books and Good Stuff) take-home literacy kits and provides suggestions for content, construction, implementation, and evaluation. Sixteen current books are reviewed and recommended by theme.     

Networking and Distance Learning for Teachers: a classification of possibilities

ABSTRACT

Computer based communication technologies, or what could be more conveniently called networking, are bringing new possibilities into teacher education in many different ways. As with distance education more generally they can facilitate flexibility in time and place of learning, but the range of persons and resources that they can bring to the teacher's computer screen are also introducing many new scenarios into what is meant by ‘teacher education’. In this review, nine cases of such new scenarios are briefly considered. Issues common to them are also discussed and the paper concludes with a suggestion of a problem area for teacher education in contemporary Europe in which currently available networking could play a particularly important role.     

Schools as knowledge work organizations: Perspectives and implications from the new management literature

The authors argue that the knowledge work metaphor is the most powerful image of schools for understanding reform. Using themes from the new management literature, such as shared decision making, collegiality, innovation, and experimentation, as additional guides for school improvement, the authors develop a case for systemic reform based on the professionalization of teaching and the integration of theory, research, and practice, Finally, transformational leadership is presented as the key to facilitating systemic reform.     

Television Violence and Its Effects on Young Children

This article examines research on television violence and links violence to specific programs commonly watched by young children. Although there are some who try to disprove any connection between television and aggresive behavior, there is evidence to suggest that such linkages do exist.     

The Relationship Between Undergraduate Attendance and Performance Revisited: Alignment of Student and Instructor Goals

We revisit the relationship between attendance and performance in the undergraduate university setting and apply agency theory in the instructor–student context. Building on agency theory propositions in the educational setting advanced by Smith, Zsidisin, and Adams (2005) , we propose that the student and instructor must align goals to promote the student's achievement of performance learning outcomes, and attendance functions as a behavior‐based alignment mechanism to encourage the convergence of faculty and student interests. Further, we propose that attendance does not equally affect lower‐ and higher‐performing students and that absences are also negatively related to students' cumulative grade point average. We test these hypotheses with data from undergraduates enrolled in management courses at a state university in the southeast. Our results show that attendance is positively related to exam performance, there are more pronounced negative effects of an absence for lower‐performing students than for higher performers, and absences are negatively related to a student's cumulative grade point average. We discuss the implications of our findings for students, instructors, and universities as well as practice in teaching and learning.