Changing Focus: Internal Quality Audit as an Element in External Quality Evaluation

In summer 2000, the HungarianAccreditation Committee (HAC) completed theinitial round of its eight-year cycleevaluations of all higher educationinstitutions in Hungary. Based on theexperiences and information gained during thisinitial phase of quality control in Hungary,higher education institutions are developing aninternal quality audit mechanism. Some havealready submitted draft reports outlining theirbasic and specific standards relating to theirmissions and programmes. Since autumn 2000,they have been submitting a quality auditreport to the HAC annually. Concurrently, theHAC is working on a new quality evaluationmanual intended to eliminate redundancy of dataand include the institutions' annual qualityaudit results in its own external evaluation.     

Contemporary high-profile scientists and their interactions with the community

This article presents a case study of 10 high-profile Australian research scientists. These scientists are highly committed to engaging with the public. They interact with a wide range of groups in the community, including the traditional media. They are aware that they are seen as representatives of science at a time when the authority of science and scientists is threatened in Australia by controversy around issues such as climate change and vaccination. Through their experiences of interacting with non-scientists, they have developed views about qualities, characteristics and knowledge that contribute to, or inhibit, positive interactions between scientists and non-scientists. Their experiences and insights highlight aspects of contemporary science that are not generally acknowledged in science curricula.     

The Relationship between Parenting Types and Older Adolescents' Personality, Academic Achievement, Adjustment, and Substance Use

The purpose of the present study was to examine Baumrind's T3 conceptual framework using a multiple informant design and an older adolescent population. With 178 college students and their families as participants, the present study found many of the predicted relations between parents' child-rearing style (Authoritative, Democratic, Nondirective, Nonauthoritarian-Directive, Authoritarian-Directive, and Unengaged) and their adolescent children's behavior in the 4 domains assessed: personality, adjustment, academic achievement, and substance use. The differences between parenting types on the criterion measures were not as large as reported in Baumrind's study, and significant effects were predominantly due to the poor scores from children with Unengaged and Authoritarian-Directive parents. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the Authoritative parenting type, the utility of using a typology, and areas for future research.     

Angry Anglos and aspirational Asians: everyday multiculturalism in the selective school system in Sydney

ABSTRACT

‘Asian whiz kids’ perfect test scores.’ ‘Selective schools and tiger parents.’ These types of headlines highlight the increased visibility of academically successful students from Asian migrant backgrounds, in Australia and other Western countries. They also point to anxiety about the perceived aggressive ‘tiger’ parenting often associated with Asian academic success. This paper focuses on the forms of everyday multiculturalism found in and around high-performing selective schools and classes in Sydney, Australia, almost all of which are dominated by Asian-Australian students. Drawing on interviews with parents and students from Anglo- and Asian-Australian backgrounds, it documents the different positionalities adopted by participants within these culturally diverse settings, including anger, aspiration and cosmopolitanism. This potentially volatile combination of approaches to diversity reveals some of the social consequences of neoliberal migration and education policies.     

Negotiating colonial structures: challenging the views of Pakeha student teachers

This paper describes an attempt to address, through pre‐service teacher education, the complex interaction of the ideologies carried by schooling, the denial of the rights of Maori as promised by the Treaty of Waitangi and the underachievement of Maori children in New Zealand schools. It is set in the context of an action research project that sought to reveal student teachers' responses to this component of their degree programme. The authors describe how, as teacher educators, their teaching evolved in response to the research findings through three distinct phases.     

Teaching Basic Science and Clinical Medicine at a distance: An Evaluation of Satellite Communication

The evaluation plan arid preliminary results are reported for the ATS‐6 Satellite interactive telecommunication program for teaching at sites remote from an established medical school. The technical aspects of the system were seen as quite adequate and did not appear to substantially inhibit interaction. In the Fairbanks broadcasts analyzed, the average number of interactions ranged from 1.49 to 2.60 per minute. Ninety percent of the interaction flowed across the Satellite during Omak transmissions. Participants tended to initiate communication when they were on camera rather than when viewing their counterparts. Omak participants directed a higher percentage of the communication in student/resident programs (70%) than in faculty continuing education programs (59%). Interaction analysis indicated the categories of giving opinion, information, and suggestion were most frequent. Asking for opinion and suggestion occurred infrequently. The most frequent emotional expression was offering solidarity (e.g., reassurance), while there were exceedingly few expressions of disagreement, tension and antagonism. User acceptance of the system was determined to be very high. Participants with frequent exposure to the Satellite modality tended to have positive reaction. A significant difference in knowledge gain is reported in one of two basic science areas taught via Satellite as compared to regular instruction.     

Mind the gap: accountability,observation and special education

There is an absence of observation-based tools designed to evaluate teaching in special education classrooms. Evaluations derived from classroom observations are integral to the accountability process, adding value to understanding teaching and learning by providing a lens into the classroom that test scores cannot capture. The present paper systematically examined existing classroom observation tools, identifying constructs measured and noting elements unique to special education classrooms. Results demonstrate that most extant tools tap into three primary categories of teacher behaviours, but overlook the role paraprofessionals play as well as teacher professional behaviours. Taken together, results reflect the need for a tool designed specifically for special education classrooms. Limitations and implications for practice and policy are discussed.     

Self-efficacy as a predictor of clinical skills among speech pathology students

Bandura's self-efficacy theory was used a model for examining levels of confidence and clinical skills among undergraduate speech pathology students. Forty-four second-year students rated their confidence in their ability to perform a number of clinical tasks at the beginning and at the end of the academic year, which was their first clinic experience. These efficacy expectations were compared with clinical supervisors' assessments of the students' performance on the same tasks. An attempt was also made to assign students to pairs and small groups for training on the basis of their initial efficacy expectations Efficacy strength (but not level) increased significantly over the year, and efficacy level (but not strength) was moderately and significantly related to clinical supervisors' ratings of clinic performance. Practical problems arose with the grouping, but the results suggested that there may be some possible benefits from assigning students to pairs on the basis of their self-efficacy. These results show self-efficacy to be only moderately well related to clinic performance, but it is suggested that relatively high baselines may have attenuated the strength of the obtained relationship. The role of self-efficacy in clinical skills training warrants further investigation.     

The future of higher education in Ireland: a postcolonial perspective

The transformation that Irish higher education (HE) has undergone since the mid-2000s has been particularly rapid and unidirectional. Following the Global Financial Crisis, the Irish Government sought to take control of tertiary education in an attempt to shield the country from future economic shocks. This paper succinctly discusses the circumstances leading to the current policy position and what these changes have meant for Irish HE. A postulation that neoliberalism will inevitably deepen further within Irish HE will be explored through the lens of Postcolonial theory. In conclusion, I will show that the application of this theoretical stance may succeed in buffering many of the effects of neoliberalism to ensure ample space in HE for all subject areas and disciplines.