From Condescension to Complexity: post‐Plowden schooling in the inner city

The 2004 Higher Education Act introduced variable tuition fees of up to £3,000 for full‐time undergraduates in England. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) charging the maximum tuition must give low‐income students bursaries of £300. On top of this mandatory minimum, HEIs now provide additional discretionary financial support exceeding this level to these and other students. The degree to which these new bursaries and discretionary financial support have become a policy instrument for improving access and widening participation has not, as yet, been documented. Little is known about why the government introduced bursaries and what the government saw as their role. Even less is known about the type of bursaries HEIs have introduced or how they are being used, because up till now they have not been examined systematically. This article presents the first such analysis. It concludes that, from the evidence currently available, a mismatch exists between government aspirations and HEIs’ actual use of bursaries and scholarships. Moreover, the bursaries and scholarships put in place may perpetuate existing divisions within and across higher education.     

Doctoral women: managing emotions,managing doctoral studies

This paper explores the experiences of women doctoral students and the role of emotion during doctoral candidature. The paper draws on the concept of emotional labour to examine the two sites of emotional investment students experienced and managed during their studies: writing and family relationships. Emotion is perceived by many dominant stakeholders as soft, subjective and an impediment to acquiring objective knowledge. The importance of emotion is under recognised. When it is discussed, the role of emotion in the doctoral undertaking is often subsumed in the passionless language of bureaucratic rationalisation and economic imperatives. This paper builds on a growing literature that examines students' emotions and doctoral candidature. It draws on the experiences of women undertaking their doctoral studies at a large metropolitan university in Sydney, Australia, to show first, how emotional labouring can enable students to channel emotions towards productive behaviours that can contribute to successful doctoral candidature, and second, that studies that attend to emotion offer more nuanced insights into students' experiences during the doctoral undertaking.     

Investigating Patterns of Participation and Conversation Content in an Online Mentoring Program for Northern Canadian Youth

In this study, we describe participant characteristics, conversation content, and program success of an online mentoring program for northern Canadian youth. We investigate the associations between demographics and program success. The profiles and conversations of students and mentors that participated in the program between 2009 and 2013 were analyzed. Students were categorized into two groups (high and low engagement) based on the number of words written to their mentors. The high group contained proportionally more urban than rural students and equal proportions of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students, while the low group contained equal numbers of rural and urban students and proportionally more Aboriginal than non-Aboriginal students. This study provides valuable information on the use of online mentoring in northern communities.     

Theory of mind,executive function and social competence in boys with ADHD

Abstract

Twenty-two boys with a diagnosis of ADHD were com-KEYWORDS pared with 22 typically developing boys on an advanced theory of mind task and on two tasks measuring aspects of executive function. Parents completed rating forms measuring general social competence, as well as mentalizing and non-mentalizing social behaviours. There were no differences between the groups on the advanced theory of mind measure.The children with ADHD scored more poorly than controls on an inhibition task but not on a planning task once age and IQ had been covaried. Ratings of social competence were correlated with theory of mind and executive function ability for the typically developing controls but not for the children with ADHD. The results are discussed in terms of inhibitory and social information processing accounts of ADHD.     

Family and Sociodemographic Predictors of School Readiness Among African American Boys in Kindergarten

Research Findings: Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999, were used to examine the relation between parenting, sociodemographic characteristics, and school readiness among (N = 1,136) African American boys in kindergarten. Parenting was defined as parenting style (i.e., warmth and control), home learning stimulation, and culturally relevant parenting. Two child outcomes previously linked to school readiness were examined: kindergarten reading and approaches to learning. Hierarchical regression analyses were performed to address 2 research questions. First, does parenting predict kindergarten reading above and beyond the contribution of sociodemographic characteristics? Second, does parenting predict kindergarten approaches to learning above and beyond the contribution of sociodemographic characteristics? Practice or Policy: Children with parents who set consistent bedtimes, provided more books in their homes, and read to them more frequently had better kindergarten reading scores after socioeconomic status, environmental safety, and maternal education were controlled. Similarly, children with parents who provided more books in their home and read to their children more frequently had more positive teacher-rated approaches to learning scores in kindergarten. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Popular Music

Donald M. Marquis' In Search of Buddy Bolden, First Man of Jazz (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1978—$9.95)

David A. Jasen and Trebar Jay Tichenor's Rags and Ragtime: A Musical History (New York: Seabury Press, 1978—$14.95)

Arnold Shaw's Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Macmillan, 1978—$19.95/9.95)

Robert Stephen Spitz's The Making of Superstars: Artists and Executives of the Rock Music World (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978—$8.95)

Vivian Claire's Judy Collins, and Linda Ronstadt (New York: Quick Fox (33 West 60th St.), 1978—$3.95, each, paper)

Edward Greenfield, Robert Layton, and Ivan March's The Penguin Stereo Record Guide (New York: Penguin Books, 1977—$8.95, paper)     

Open Access to Research Outputs—Institutional Policies and Researchers' Views: Results From Two Complementary Surveys

This paper presents the results of two complementary surveys undertaken in 2008 as part of a wider project investigating the effects and impact of open access to research outputs in the UK. The institutional view, from a survey of academic librarians, is compared to researchers' perceptions and practices. Researchers were largely unaware of their institutions' policies with regard to open access, or whether they had an institutional repository. Reasons for making research outputs available on open access, or not doing so, were sought, and the role of open access material as a research resource investigated. The surveys found that many researchers maintained a suspicion of open access publications, both as authors and as users of scholarly material, together with a degree of ignorance about open access and the role of institutional repositories. This suggests that a degree of culture change may be needed, as institutions develop repositories with a view to future research assessment requirements, and more funders adopt open access mandates for the outputs from research which they fund.     

Preparing technologybased teachers

Conclusion The goals of the Seminar in Elementary and Secondary Education course and the Lehigh University—Moravian Academy Partnership included the development of techniques that helped emerging teachers close the gap between the potential of technology and its realization by teachers in their own classrooms. Certainly the experiences of both the preservice and the inservice teachers varied depending on the match made between the two and the expectations that each group had going into the partnership. Generally speaking, however, each pair succeeded with the overall objective: integrating a new piece of technology into an established curriculum. Some had more success than others with the working partnership created within each team. The field notes provide an outlet for the preservice teachers to express concerns. The inservice teachers used meeting time and e-mail messages to communicate concerns or problems     

Reference, or advisory, groups involving disabled people: reflections from three contrasting research projects

Increasingly in recent years, the involvement of disabled people as co-researchers has been regarded as 'good practice'. This has been informed by growing participatory and emancipatory research paradigms as well as user-focused policy imperatives. The benefits of these shifts apply to the research itself (improved definition, direction, applicability and impact), to non-disabled researchers (personal growth and enhanced understanding of the reflexive research process), to people with disabilities involved as researchers or collaborators (personal growth and enhanced opportunities), and (if externally funded) to the funder whose ways of operating are likely to be challenged profoundly. In this paper, Ann Lewis, Sarah Parsons and Christopher Robertson (based at the University of Birmingham), Anthony Feiler, Beth Tarleton and Debby Watson (based at the University of Bristol) and Richard Byers, Jill Davies, Ann Fergusson and Claire Marvin (based at the University of Cambridge) discuss the work of three independent research teams carrying out concurrent projects. The authors share their experiences of trying to take seriously the participation of disabled people in research. All three projects were informed, to a significant degree, by their respective reference groups of disabled people. The work of these groups in each of the three projects is outlined and then discussed in relation to five common themes: formal contracts with members of reference groups; considerations concerning drawing on an established reference group; planning for reference group involvement; style of reference group involvement; and building on good practice.