A case study of integration and destreaming: Teachers and students in an Ontario secondary school respond

The direction that secondary school reform should take has become a contested question in the province of Ontario, Canada, during the 1990s. This case study of one secondary school examines some of the issues surrounding the transition years. Two policies, destreaming and integration, mandatedbythe OntarioMinistryof Education in 1993, and fully implemented by 1995, are examined by means of interview and survey. Administrators, teachers and students commented on the transition from elementary to secondary school. We discuss questions related to destreaming (especially how teachers contend with mixed-ability classes) and integration (with a particular focus on mathematics, science and technology).     

Blended learning in higher education: professional development in a Hong Kong university

ABSTRACT

Online learning has become a ubiquitous part of the educational landscape and how teachers are supported in developing approaches to teaching online is a fundamental aspect of the students’ learning experience. Based on the implementation of a professional development course on becoming an online teacher offered in a blended learning mode at one university in Hong Kong, this article proposes that offering this type of professional development in a blended mode is very effective in facilitating enhanced usage of the university’s learning management system. In a blended mode, teachers are actively engaged with blended learning and were found to make more extensive use of features/tools in Blackboard after they attended the professional development course. Results support that offering professional development in a blended mode provides teachers with an authentic student perspective, at the same time as they take guided steps in the teacher’s role in blended learning.     

Parent question use during shared reading time: How does training affect question type and frequency?

This study was designed to examine whether participation in a shared reading workshop alters the frequency with which parents ask their children questions during book reading sessions, particularly questions designed to strengthen component reading skills that they may not have known about before training. Participants in the reading workshop series (N = 57) were taught strategies for asking questions about story content and word structure to build children's language and literacy skills. Findings suggest that parents may be somewhat familiar with traditional dialogic reading strategies focused on story content and utilize them without instruction, whereas parents may be less knowledgeable about sound or print‐focused skills and do not employ strategies focused on word structure until instructed to do so. It is also notable that parents do not use all story content prompts equally. This information can be used by school psychologists to refine the messages educators share with parents about how to best support their children's reading development.     

Constituting information technology research: the experience of IT researchers

The collective consciousness of effective groups of researchers is characterized by shared understandings of their research object or territory. In this study, we adopted a phenomenographic approach to investigate information technology (IT) research, and its objects and territories, as they are constituted in the experience of IT researchers. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with researchers representing different sub‐disciplines. Analysis revealed the variation in meaning associated with the idea of IT research; and the awareness structures through which participants experience variation in ways of seeing the object and territories of IT research. Eight ways of seeing IT research were found. The outcomes of our project appear to make visible the changes and developments that are an essential part of the character and experience of contemporary IT research.     

ROLF—an open learning delivery system

The Resourced Open Learning Facility (ROLF) has been developed by the UK Skills Training Agency (STA) as a means of delivering off-the-job skill training in the national network of 60 skillcentres. STA introduced ROLF as a pilot scheme in six skillcentres at a time when the government was introducing a new programme for the long-term unemployed (Employment Training). The authors evaluated the pilot scheme and concluded that ROLF was working well for low achieving adults. ROLF is also important because it is a systematic approach to open learning delivery in a chain of centres under the same management. Most educational technology literature about open learning features materials, rather than delivery.     

Education on population matters in Europe: results from a comparative survey among students in five European countries

In 1996–1997, within the framework of the European Observatory for Population Education and Information, a comparative survey was conducted among students in final classes of secondary education in several European countries. On the one hand, the survey attempted to assess the effects of education on population in terms of knowledge acquired; the issues addressed in the questionnaire pertained to knowledge of demographic facts and trends (such as the ageing of Western societies and immigration). On the other hand it tried to ascertain students' opinions on demographic trends. What are young people's views on intergenerational solidarity, how tolerant are they towards immigrants, what are their views on recent changes in family structures? This knowledge is important since it is young people's attitudes and future behaviour that will help to shape both the social tissue and the economic prosperity of the European and world population. In this article we present a comparative analysis of survey results obtained in five European countries. We examined the question whether knowledge acquired in the course of scolarisation influences opinions. The results evidence a significant relationship between knowledge of the migrants' issue and attitudes of tolerance towards migrants. By means of multivariate analyses, the impact of factors such as social origin, study orientation and gender on both students' knowledge and attitudes, are investigated. We conclude that adequate educational training on population issues can have a significant positive impact on attitudes of tolerance.     

Infant joint attention, temperament, and social competence in preschool children

Infant joint attention has been observed to be related to social-emotional outcomes in at-risk children. To address whether this relation is also evident in typically developing children, 52 children were tested at 12, 15, 24, and 30 months to examine associations between infant joint attention and social outcomes. Twelve-month initiating and responding to joint attention were related to 30-month social competence and externalizing behavior, even when accounting for 15-month temperament ratings, 24-month cognition and language, and demographic variables. These results suggest that, in addition to associations with language and cognition, infant joint attention reflects robust aspects of development that are related to individual differences in the emergence of social and behavioral competence in childhood.