Professionalism and competing responsibilities: moderating competitive performativity in school autonomy reform

Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is constrained by technologies of competitive performativity, now the norm across Australian and other school systems. Entrepreneurial policies focused on competition, compliance and improved performance make schools, their leaders and teachers, more responsible to external accountabilities. At the same time, autonomy is creatively exercised by leaders due to public service orientations associated with traditional teacher professionalism. This analysis of two Australian case studies of IPS, a secondary school in Queensland and a primary school in Western Australia, illustrates how school leaders navigate conflicting demands of the audit and performance culture by exercising autonomy according to differing notions of professional responsibility, disrupting and moderating the more inequitable priorities and effects prevalent in many performative systems.     

The effects of behavior-specific praise and public posting in secondary classrooms

Behavior-specific praise (BSP) and other forms of positive feedback and public acknowledgment are underutilized in secondary classrooms. Surprisingly, few studies have evaluated the independent effects of BSP in these settings. Using a multiple baseline design with an embedded A/B/B + C condition sequence, the purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of BSP and BSP combined with public posting on the appropriately engaged and disruptive behaviors across 4 secondary classrooms. Results supported a functional relation between BSP alone and improvements in students' appropriately engaged and disruptive behaviors. Combining BSP with public posting, which involved writing students' names on the classroom whiteboard, further increased students' appropriately engaged behaviors but had mixed effects on students' disruptive behaviors. Practical implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Conversation with Brad与Brad对话： How to Improve English Writing？

如何提高英语写作能力？写出英文美文有一蹴而就的捷径吗？你是否在英语学习中也面临着这些困惑呢？     

The Calligraphy Connections Project: Reviving Historical East Asian Texts

Abstract

Historical texts have much to offer young researchers in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Yet, many students feel that such resources are of no value to them. Consequently, academic library usage rates for historical East Asian texts are low, and continue to drop. In Hong Kong and Mainland China, however, there still remains a widespread appreciation of Chinese calligraphy. Through leveraging this interest, academic libraries in East Asia can motivate university students to engage with historical texts and discover what they have to offer. This paper will recount and reflect upon the Calligraphy Connections Project, an initiative aimed at getting students to engage with historical East Asian texts through the creation of calligraphy artworks, which were subsequently exhibited to the public.     

Language, cognitive flexibility, and explicit false belief understanding: longitudinal analysis in typical development and specific language impairment

The hypothesis that language plays a role in theory-of-mind (ToM) development is supported by a number of lines of evidence (e.g., H. Lohmann & M. Tomasello, 2003). The current study sought to further investigate the relations between maternal language input, memory for false sentential complements, cognitive flexibility, and the development of explicit false belief understanding in 91 English-speaking typically developing children (M age = 61.3 months) and 30 children with specific language impairment (M age = 63.0 months). Concurrent and longitudinal findings converge in supporting a model in which maternal language input predicts the child's memory for false complements, which predicts cognitive flexibility, which in turn predicts explicit false belief understanding.     

Reliability and variability of day-to-day vault training measures in artistic gymnastics

Inter-day training reliability and variability in artistic gymnastics vaulting was determined using a customised infra-red timing gate and contact mat timing system. Thirteen Australian high performance gymnasts (eight males and five females) aged 11–23 years were assessed during two consecutive days of normal training. Each gymnast completed a number of vault repetitions per daily session. Inter-day variability of vault run-up velocities (at ‐18 to ‐12 m, ‐12 to ‐6 m, ‐6 to ‐2 m, and ‐2 to 0 m from the nearest edge of the beat board), and board contact, pre-flight, and table contact times were determined using mixed modelling statistics to account for random (within-subject variability) and fixed effects (gender, number of subjects, number of trials). The difference in the mean (M_diff) and Cohen's effect sizes for reliability assessment and intra-class correlation coefficients, and the coefficient of variation percentage (CV%) were calculated for variability assessment. Approach velocity (‐18 to ‐2 m, CV = 2.4–7.8%) and board contact time (CV = 3.5%) were less variable measures when accounting for day-to-day performance differences, than pre-flight time (CV = 17.7%) and table contact time (CV = 20.5%). While pre-flight and table contact times are relevant training measures, approach velocity and board contact time are more reliable when quantifying vaulting performance.