Central Government and Higher Education Planning 1965–1986

The development of a planning body for public sector higher education in England has created the potentiality for an integrated planning approach to university and non-university higher education. Following a difficult birth, the National Advisory Body has worked with the University Grants Committee on a range of transbinary issues. The contrasting relationships between the Department of Education and Science and the two planning bodies is discussed and the need for further developments of the planning machinery debated. The arrangements for Wales and Scotland are also discussed .     

School Effectiveness and School Improvement in Context: The Case of South Africa

This article explores the issue of whether lists of characteristics constituting the effective school are universally valid. It argues that the effectiveness or otherwise of schools must be understood contextually as there are significant differences between both the material and ideological contexts of schooling. The article uses the example of South Africa to demonstrate the difficulties in judging schools in one context using criteria developed in another. Three examples of schools that can be considered effective in the context of the new South Africa are described and discussed and the article concludes by arguing that education for peace and democracy is an essential feature of school effectiveness in South Africa.     

School Design: A Classificatory Framework for a 21st-Century Approach to School Improvement

As attention turns from restructuring to school design as a means of securing school improvement, a bewildering range of design programmes/models are available. How are schools to make informed choices about their relative merits? This article suggests a classification, based on 10 criteria, by which to categorize their features, and to draw comparisons between them. The particular design adopted by the case school is described and analysed in terms of the classificatory framework, and its implementation by the perspective of the school leader/change agent. Finally, conclusions are drawn about the usefulness of the framework as a heuristic “device” for characterizing school design models (SDM) and their implementation. It is argued that refinement of the classificatory framework would result from similar case studies and the perspectives of others – besides the school leader/change agent – involved in their implementation.     

Self-esteem and academic achievement: a comparative study of adolescent students in England and the United States

Utilizing mixed methodology, this paper investigates the relationship between self-esteem and academic achievement for young adolescents within two Western cultural contexts: the United States and England. Quantitative and qualitative data from 86 North American and 86 British adolescents were utilized to examine the links between self-esteem and academic achievement from the beginning to the end of their academic year during their 11th–12th year of age. For both samples, quantitative results demonstrated that fall self-esteem was related to multiple indicators of later year academic achievement. While country differences emerge by the end of the year, math appears to have a consistent relationship with self-esteem in both country contexts. Qualitative analyses found some support for British students’ self-perceptions as more accurately reflecting their academic experience than the students from the United States.     

A model for using a concept inventory as a tool for students' assessment and faculty professional development

This essay describes how the use of a concept inventory has enhanced professional development and curriculum reform efforts of a faculty teaching community. The Host Pathogen Interactions (HPI) teaching team is composed of research and teaching faculty with expertise in HPI who share the goal of improving the learning experience of students in nine linked undergraduate microbiology courses. To support evidence-based curriculum reform, we administered our HPI Concept Inventory as a pre- and postsurvey to approximately 400 students each year since 2006. The resulting data include student scores as well as their open-ended explanations for distractor choices. The data have enabled us to address curriculum reform goals of 1) reconciling student learning with our expectations, 2) correlating student learning with background variables, 3) understanding student learning across institutions, 4) measuring the effect of teaching techniques on student learning, and 5) demonstrating how our courses collectively form a learning progression. The analysis of the concept inventory data has anchored and deepened the team's discussions of student learning. Reading and discussing students' responses revealed the gap between our understanding and the students' understanding. We provide evidence to support the concept inventory as a tool for assessing student understanding of HPI concepts and faculty development.