Practices and opinions reported by coordinators of graduate programs

Information is presented about the organization of graduate studies, based on questionnaire responses of 582 coordinators of Canadian graduate programs. These coordinators, who were representative of disciplines and geographic regions, provided information about a wide range of matters, including enrolments, staff, admissions, supervision, research, publications, financial support, teaching experience, and completion rates and times. Many substantial differences were noted among the percentage frequencies of responses for departments classified by discipline and size. For example, students were perceived to choose their doctoral theses topics themselves much more frequently in education, social sciences, and humanities than in engineering, medical sciences, physical sciences, and biological sciences. Also, departments with smaller numbers of full-time graduate students tended to provide all doctoral students, with some teaching experience to a greater extent than did larger departments.     

Use of situations in mathematics education

Situations are often regarded as the panacea which guarantees concretisation of abstract notions. Recent research results have led us to qualify this opinion. After analysing briefly the notion of situation, we raise various issues on the basis of the responses of children aged 11–15 to the racing car problem. We observed various limits brought about by the situation in the abstraction prócess, and also that the task involved more abstract notions (even pictorial) than expected. The conclusion singles out some principles ensuring a better use of situations and points out key problems such as the role of mental images and the importance of the spoken language.     

Statistics in the speed cameras debate

This article illustrates how statistical arguments can be used to influence public policy . . . for better or for worse.     

Editorials

This article discusses historical and contemporary influences on changes in special education assessment, with emphasis on three persistent themes: accurate classification, fairness to minority students, and special education outcomes. Dunn's contributions to each of the themes are discussed, along with other influences such as legislation and litigation. Current dynamics leading to significant changes in special education assessment are discussed, particularly in the disability category of specific learning disabilities.     

Unfulfilled promise: radical discourses in South African educational historiography, 1970–2007

This paper examines the discourses and modes of representation embodied in educational historiography from the 1970s to the present and their implications for intellectual identity construction in SA. The paper shows how the theoretical foundations of the liberal and Afrikaner nationalist discourses, which vacillated between race and ethnicity, shifted to social class and gender in radical and neo‐Marxist discursive formations of the 1980s. It highlights how the decline of radical scholarship has resulted in a synthesis of constructivist and postmodernist discourses that privilege nation‐building, identity and cultural diversity after apartheid within a predominantly neo‐liberal paradigm. It argues that the transition to post‐apartheid education came to be thought about within a horizon of possibilities different from the rigid paradigmatic tradition of the short‐lived neo‐Marxist school of the 1970s and 1980s.     

Predicting intraindividual changes in teacher burnout: The role of perceived school environment and motivational factors

Based on self-determination theory, this study proposes and tests a motivational model of intraindividual changes in teacher burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment). Participants were 806 French-Canadian teachers in public elementary and high schools. Results show that changes in teachers’ perceptions of classroom overload and students’ disruptive behavior are negatively related to changes in autonomous motivation, which in turn negatively predict changes in emotional exhaustion. Results also indicate that changes in teachers’ perceptions of students’ disruptive behaviors and school principal’s leadership behaviors are related to changes in self-efficacy, which in turn negatively predict changes in three burnout components.     

Theme D: interaction between engineering education and industrial development

Within a conference devoted to the interaction between engineering education and society, it was only natural to give a place to the contribution of engineering education to industrial development. This rich and undoubtedly delicate topic has been dealt with from three viewpoints:

— the contribution of educational establishments to the actualization of engineers' technological knowledge.

— the participation of industry in the precise definition of curricula.

— the contribution of engineering education to the industrial growth of developing countries.     

A microeconometric study of theatre demand

We develop a model of theatre demand with learning by consuming, and test some of its implications on a large random sample of theatregoers and non-theatregoers. This seems to be the most comprehensive econometric study of demand for the theatre from individual data. We hypothesize that each time the consumer watches a play, he experiences a degree of pleasant or unpleasant surprise on the basis of which he will revise his future expectations of his own taste. The learning phase is likely to be unusually long for highly differentiated cultural goods. Our set of data contains unique information about the full price and the fixed cost of theatre, the objective quality of the outing, past experience of and taste for the theatre, and consumption of substitute leisure activities such as reading, television and cinema. Our methodology and data enable us to infer price elasticity on survey data from knowledge of theatregoing experience and taste. After controlling for many variables, we conclude that demand for the theatre is price-elastic, which contradicts previous estimates on aggregate time-series data. Moreover, we estimate demand conditional on past attendance after controlling for selectivity bias. Satisfaction reported by consumers after the last play is also estimated and interpreted as an ordinal conditional choice.