The fictional con man as a teaching tool

The con man has long been a powerful figure in American history and fiction. This study examines that figure in three popular novels: Jim Thompson's The Grifters (1963), Stephen Robinett's Unfinished Business (1990), and Lawrence Sanders's Sullivan's Sting (1990). These novels trace the con man from the street hustler to the swindler, using worldwide modern technology. The authors' insights into the character, motivation, jargon, and methods of the con man will illuminate him for students, who will be exposed at the same time to the syntactical and narrative skills of fiction writers.     

Book reviews

When designing lessons to meet the needs of our increasingly diverse population of students, educators need to rethink planning and structuring lessons so that all students achieve better results. Therefore, teacher preparation programmes need to prepare pre‐service teachers accordingly. Within this paper, a new lesson planning template is unveiled that builds on many of the foundational concepts of inclusive education. This template is meant for teacher educators to use with pre‐service teachers across the curriculum to guide the design of inclusive lessons. This paper discusses the foundations, unique features, and applications of this student‐centred lesson design template to create creative and active learning for students in inclusive classrooms.     

Metaphorical views of school: A cross-cultural comparison of college students

To compare the metaphorical views of elementary and secondary school environments, as recalled by American and Chinese college students preparing to become teachers, preferred and actual school experiences were related to metaphors, such as being in a crowd, in a prison, on a team, or in a family. The analysis of data revealed that American elementary schools were most often compared to being in a family and secondary schools to being on a team. Hong Kong students, on the other hand, compared elementary schools to being on a team and secondary schools to being in a family.     

A good student subject: a Foucauldian discourse analysis of an adolescent writer negotiating subject positions

In this article, we draw on the work of Michel Foucault to analyze one student’s subject development in an expository writing classroom. James, the participant, was embarking on the project of becoming a good student, as he understood it, after struggling and leaving school previously. Drawing on interviews, classroom observations and written artifacts, we use Foucauldian concepts and discourse analysis, along with one James Gee’s discourse analysis tools – the identities building tool – to conduct a microanalysis of James’s efforts to objectify himself as a good student subject. The data show how James acquiesced to the truths and practices of the regime of school, including how he mobilized truths of the regime through a process we call masked confession. That is, he negotiated his good student subject position by masking or silencing other subject positions. James’s masked confession was his way of negotiating the realm of ‘multiple truths,’ or multiple subject positions.     

A Domain-Referenced Approach to Diagnostic Testing Using Generalizability Theory

This paper describes a four-step approach to constructing diagnostic test profiles that provide precise but practical information on students' instructional needs. The approach is based on the specification and analysis of a domain and uses generalizability theory to determine which skills within the domain need to be assessed to diagnose gaps in students' skills and to estimate score profiles. A 64-item test of pronoun use was constructed to represent 32 categories of usage defined by different combinations of five factors in the domain. Generalizability analyses were conducted to determine the optimal number of categories to be included in students' profiles and the number of items needed for each category, and to produce univariate and multivariate estimates of students' universe scores. Multivariate profiles of universe scores were the most accurate and differed substantially from observed score and univariate universe score profiles.     

Effects of single-sex and mixed-sex cooperative interaction on science achievement and attitudes and cross-handicap and cross-sex relationships

Single-sex cooperative, mixed-sex cooperative, and individualistic learning situations were compared to determine if they promoted systematic differences in relationships between male and female students and handicapped and nonhandicapped students. One-hundred-fifty-four 5th-and 6th-grade students were assigned to conditions on a stratified random basis controlling for ability, sex, grade level, homerooms, and handicap. They participated in a study for 45 minutes a day for 21 days in science class. The results indicate that cooperative learning situations, compared with individualistic ones, promoted more positive cross-sex and cross-handicap relationships. Males achieved higher and had more positive attitudes toward science than did females.