‘I Am the Hate that Dare Not Speak its Name’: Dealing with homophobia in secondary schools

This paper describes the outcomes of a small‐scale project involving 19 secondary schools. The project investigated how effectively issues of homophobic bullying and sexualities were addressed through secondary schools' formal policies and areas of the curriculum. Outcomes indicate that sexual orientation was mentioned in two‐thirds of Equal Opportunities policies but was not mentioned specifically in any Anti‐Bullying policies. Staff highlighted the need for training in issues surrounding sexualities, homophobic bullying and clarification of Section 28. Implications for the work of educational psychologists are discussed, including raising awareness and clarifying issues in schools as well as informing whole school development work.     

The superstar phenomenon in the knowledge management and intellectual capital academic discipline

This paper reports on the first documented attempt to investigate the presence of the superstar (or Matthew) effect in the knowledge management and intellectual capital (KM/IC) scholarly discipline. The Yule–Simon model and Lotka's square law were applied to the publication data obtained from 2175 articles from 11 KM/IC journals. Based on the findings, it was concluded that the KM/IC discipline represents a very young, attractive academic field that welcomes contributions from a variety of academics and practitioners. In their paper acceptance decisions, KM/IC journal editors are not biased towards a small group of highly productive researchers, which is a positive sign that the field has been progressing in the right direction. The discipline is driven more by academics than by practitioners, and the distribution of articles is more concentrated among a few academic but not practitioner institutions. It was also observed that the Yule–Simon model and Lotka's square law may produce different distributions with respect to institutions.     

A Multidimensional Scaling Analysis of Students’ Attitudes about Science Careers

To encourage students to seek careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, it is important to gauge students’ implicit and explicit attitudes towards scientific professions. We asked high school and college students to rate the similarity of pairs of occupations, and then used multidimensional scaling (MDS) to create a spatial representation of occupational similarity. Other students confirmed the emergent MDS map by rating each of the occupations along several dimensions. We found that participants across age and sex considered scientific professions to be less creative and less people‐oriented than other popular career choices. We conclude that students may be led away from STEM careers by common misperceptions that science is a difficult, uncreative, and socially isolating pursuit.