A tale of three campuses: Unearthing theories of residential life that shape the student learning experience

Frank Shushok Jr., T. Laine Scales, Rishi Sriram, and Vera Kidd share some initial thoughts about responses to their Campus Residential Experience Survey. Do you recognize your institution?     

Emerging Attributes of Pedagogy and Curriculum for the “New World Order”

This article is a conceptual one designed to start dialogue on educational issues that are unfolding amidst the changes in other sectors of our society such as production, services, and recreation. We first present an overview of the fundamental but profound changes evidenced in our society and then discuss the nature of these changes and their impact on human ability to function effectively within such an environment. In light of the complexities such as uncertainties and dualistic/multiple perspectives and incongruities, we propose that a model for pedagogy and curriculum development should adopt critical thinking as the key attribute—because it has the potential to deliver an education system for the new world order.     

Some lessons for educational researchers: Repositioning research in education and education in research

This paper is a reflection on the current policy moment in educational research in Australia in the context of globalisation. Set against a consideration of the emergent structure of feeling, the paper draws on three case studies of research to draw out some lessons for educational researchers and the research community. The argument is put that the dangerous ‘we’ of AARE needs to support increased funding for education and for educational research and, for the latter, to support a range of funding sources, types of research, methodologies and dissemination approaches. Increasingly there are pressures upon such eclecticism because of governmental attempts to ‘instrumentalise’ relationships between educational research and practitioner needs as perceived by governments. While such research is necessary, there is also a need within a democratic polity for research framed by agendas set by researchers that critiques government-directed developments. The paper argues there is a complex relationship amongst researchers and educational policy and pedagogical practitioners and as such the concept of ‘impact’ as applied to educational research requires substantial theorising. Contemporary research policy has tended to inhibit the dissemination of academic research to educational practitioners, while educational policy has tended, inappropriately in the argument of the paper, to construct teachers as the mere recipients of policy and research done elsewhere.     

A partitioning technique for defining instructional groups

A technique is presented for partitioning N students into K groups of fixed sizes using a given measure of proximity for all student pairs. The measure of proximity is typically calculated from a set of variables, such as completed curriculum units or learning style, and constitutes the data needed for a criterion of partition fit. This latter index is explicitly defined by the sum of within-group proximities and when used in conjunction with the optimization procedure discussed, homogeneous groups can be obtained that satisfy externally imposed size requirements. Finally, a simple generalization is suggested for the related task of grouping students to meet upper limit size constraints only.     

Word stress production in three‐year‐old children at risk of dyslexia

We investigated Dutch word stress acquisition in 3‐year‐old children at risk of dyslexia (children with at least one parent or older sibling with reading difficulties) and normally developing children, in order to shed light on language acquisition delays in children at risk of dyslexia, as well as to investigate further phonological deficits in dyslexia. The children had to repeat non‐words with stress patterns varying in regularity. Both the at‐risk and control children performed better on imitation of regular stress targets and worse on irregular and prohibited stress patterns. However, the at‐risk children showed more difficulty imitating irregular and prohibited patterns, and had lower percentages phonemes correct than the control group. The results can be interpreted as a delay in word stress acquisition in the at‐risk group. The findings thus point towards a phonological deficit early in language development.     

Assumptions Underlying Performance-Based Budgeting

Interest in performance budgeting is growing despite a lack of research on its effectiveness. U.S. states have largely used incremental and formula budgeting processes to fund higher education. However, more than half of them are experimenting with some form of performance budgeting. There have been similar attempts to reform budget practices in the U.S. in the past, but most of these processes have been largely abandoned. Governmental performance budgeting for higher education assumes policy objectives are stable, complex decisions on budget trade-offs can be made at governmental levels on the basis of data, institutions operate as bureaucracies, resources can be linked to outcomes, outcomes are identifiable and can be agreed upon, accountability can be achieved through budget policies, and current practices create incentives to enrol unqualified students. These assumptions are not realistic. Consequently, performance budgeting will not meet proponents expectations and will suffer the fate of past budget fads.     

A theoretical note on concepts and the need for Cyclic Concept Maps

This article examines concepts and propositions from a theoretical perspective, and establishes the need for and develops an extension to Concept Maps (CMaps), called Cyclic Concept Maps (Cyclic CMaps). Cyclic CMaps are considered to be an appropriate tool for representing knowledge of functional or dynamical relationships between concepts. CMaps, on the other hand, are viewed as an appropriate tool for representing hierarchic or static knowledge. The two maps complement each other and collectively capture a larger domain of knowledge, thus forming a more effective knowledge representation tool. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 42: 741–766, 2005     

Moving Towards a Fair Start: equal gender opportunities and the careers service

Although there is now a considerable literature on gender inequality in education and employment, there is virtually no research on the Careers Service which provides a bridge between the two. Based on a national survey of all Careers Services conducted in 1987, this paper explores the significance afforded to gender discrimination and the nature and content of equal opportunities policies designed to counter it. It draws attention to the differences in meaning which the term ‘equal opportunities’ can have and to the changing context in which equal opportunities policies now operate.