Designing Rural School Improvement Networks: Aspirations and Actualities

Rural school educators are often isolated and have few opportunities to learn from neighboring schools or colleagues. This is an especially daunting challenge for low-performing rural schools faced with implementing significant reform efforts (e.g., turnaround approaches, educator effectiveness systems, college- and career-ready standards and assessments). This paper discusses the design and start-up of a large-scale project to connect “like with like” rural and remote schools within the northwest region of the United States to identify and share promising and innovative school reform practices. The authors present a network design framework based on previous work supporting and studying similar educational networks for innovation and improvement in the United States and beyond. They also present lessons learned about designing and launching a network that others might consider when initiating a school improvement network.     

The Middle Ground in Education: A Rejoinder to the Plea

The mental and emotional state so very evident in the article entitled “A Plea for the Middle Ground in Education” is not an uncommon phenomenon among teachers who are engaged in the arduous task of changing habits and attitudes and standards. Nor is it limited to teachers. Among prison guards, army officers, college administrators, church deacons and vestrymen, policemen, parents, hospital nurses, and all other institutionalists, there are many persons whose feeling of security and certainty are rudely shaken by reforms or radical changes of procedure and aims.     

Power,participation and decision making in the primary classroom: children as action researchers

This article discusses a project focused on children researching their role in decision making in their classrooms and schools, with a view to increasing their involvement. The action research project was carried out by children, their class teachers and university researchers in six Norfolk primary schools from 2004 to 2006. As the project aimed to introduce more participatory approaches to decision making in classrooms, this necessarily had implications for the ways in which adults worked with children as action researchers. The article explores the constraints encountered by both children and teachers in sharing decisions and in carrying out action research, and identifies two dimensions: the teachers’ thinking and action, as well as children’s research and decision making. The teachers struggled with their need to mediate the project aims in the context of the changing nature of their professional role in the current target‐driven school culture.     

Effects of acute exercise,dehydration and rehydration on cognitive function in well-trained athletes

This study investigated the effects of aerobic exercise, fluid loss and rehydration on cognitive performance in well-trained athletes. Ten endurance-trained males (25 ± 5 years; 175 ± 5 cm; 70.35 ± 5.46 kg; VO_2max, 62.95 ± 7.20 ml · kg.min^?1) lost ~2.5 ± 0.6% body mass via continuous cycling exercise at ~65% peak sustainable power output (60 min duration) before consuming different beverages (Water = W1 and W2, Sustagen Sport = SS, Powerade = PD) and food ad libitum on four separate occasions. Cognitive function using a four-choice reaction time task (CRT), body mass, fluid consumption volumes, urine samples and subjective ratings (alertness, concentration, energy) were obtained before and after exercise, and hourly during recovery (for 4 h). CRT latency was significantly reduced immediately after exercise compared to pre-exercise measures for all trials (W1 = ?16 ± 18 ms, W2 = ?22 ± 21 ms, PD = ?22 ± 22 ms, SS = ?19 ± 26 ms). However, this effect was short-lived with subsequent measures not different from pre-exercise values. No difference in CRT accuracy was observed at any time across all trials. Subjective ratings were not different at any time across all trials. Aerobic exercise, hypohydration or an interaction between these two may provide a small cognitive performance benefit. However, these effects are temporary and confined to the immediate post-exercise period.     

Drawings of People by Australian Aboriginal Children: the Inter-mixing of Cultural Styles

The general developmental changes observed in human figure drawings of modern-day young children in western societies are reviewed in this paper. Differences in style over historical time and in other societies throw doubt on the notion of a fixed and universal pattern of development. Even so, children’s drawings seem to become more westernised as schooling has spread to more and more remote, rural societies. In Australia, however, the Warlpiri Aboriginal people have continued to use their traditional pictorial symbols in their paintings, sand drawings and school books; Warlpiri school-children use and develop both the indigenous and the westernised styles of drawing.