'Noisy, fallible and biased though it be' (on the Vagaries of Educational Research)

Scholarship in education beyond school has developed largely outside university departments of education, and has rarely engaged systematically with the study of education in schools. The paper concentrates on three areas: adult education, higher education, and further education. The development of the extra-mural tradition meant that adult education was less an object of scholarly study than a means of spreading scholarship to the wider population, with important exceptions such as historical studies. Since the 1970s, the volume of research and postgraduate education in adult education in British universities has grown considerably. The study of higher education was marginal until the 1960s; its subsequent development was relatively slow until the 1990s, when the quality of university teaching came under wider external scrutiny. The study of further education and vocational training is characterised by disciplinary fragmentation, with much activity taking place in departments of psychology, economics, sociology and management, as well as in those former polytechnics that specialised in training further education teachers. The rise of integrative concepts such as lifelong learning suggest greater potential for cross-disciplinary scholarship that can engage the diverse body of those interested in teaching and research about this field.     

Teaching the design and interpretation of graphs through computer-aided graphical data analysis

Graphs are one of the primary means of exploration and communication in the practice of science, but students in science laboratories are customarily taught only the low-level mechanics of constructing a single kind of graph when given a table of information. The use of a microcomputer can relieve the drudgery of plotting, allowing students to pursue higher-level issues in the design and interpretation of graphs through repeated “thought experiments.” We introduced computer-assisted graphical data analysis to inner-city high school students with weak math and science backgrounds, emphasizing the dynamic manipulation of various kinds of graphs to answer specific questions. Drawing on extensive recordings and classroom observations, we describe examples of the performance of these students on open-ended problem-solving tasks in which graphs can be used to arrive at meaningful answers to applied data analysis problems.     

College and university requirements for teachers of the deaf at the undergraduate level: a twenty-year comparison

College and university requirements for undergraduate deaf education teacher preparation programs from 1986 and 2006 were compared. Thirty percent fewer undergraduate programs were in existence in 2006 than in 1986. Compared to programs in the 1986-1987 academic year, programs in 2006-2007 placed less emphasis on course work related to speech and hearing and more emphasis on the development of sign language skills. These findings are discussed in relation to the increasing probability that future employment for program graduates will be in itinerant and resource placements within public schools with children whose hearing losses are less severe than those of children in the past.     

The Louisville Twin Study: developmental synchronies in behavior

The Louisville Twin Study includes nearly 500 pairs of twins and their siblings who have participated in a longitudinal study of mental development, beginning in infancy and extending to adolescence. The results show that individual differences beginning in infancy and extending to adolescence. The results show that individual differences in intelligence progressively stabilized by school age, and each child followed a distinctive pattern of spurts and lags in mental development. Monozygotic twins became increasingly concordant over ages and matched each other closely for developmental trends. By contrast, dizygotic twins regressed to an intermediate level of concordance, comparable with that found for siblings and parent-offspring sets. A comprehensive home assessment was performed to identify the home/family variables that contributed to mental development. The overall results pointed to a strong developmental thrust in the growth of intelligence, which was principally guided by an intrinsic genetic ground plan. Qualitative features of home and family did, however, add significantly to prediction of offspring IQ. The results are interpreted in the context of Waddington's developmental model, and some recent advances in neurobiology and genetics are surveyed for their implications for developmental behavior genetics.     

The relationship of role expectations to faculty behavior

This study examines sources of influence over 290 faculty members of a large public university. The role expectations a faculty member has for himself and the role expectations of the employing organization both predict positively and significantly the role behaviors of the respondents. The departmental colleagues' expectations predict significantly role behaviors for the research role only. In addition, the degree of person—role conflict a faculty member is exposed to is related to his productivity (research) but not to his satisfaction. The implications of the results are explored for both role theory and for the understanding of faculty behavior.     

Moving to a Global Stage: A Media View

The Times Higher Education Supplement was the first newspaper to publish an international ranking of universities in November 2004 Jobbins, D. 2002. “The Times/The Times Higher Education Supplement – League Tables in Britain: An Insider's View”. Higher Education in Europe, 27(4): 383–389. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar]. This article describes the evolution of the international rankings from their origin in a limited peer review exercise through the gradual refinement of a national ranking based on, as far as possible, publicly available, verifiable, and accepted data. The author describes the methodology of the international ranking and presents the case for the integrity of commercially produced rankings, national and international, which can be as objective, robust, and transparent as initiatives from within the university community itself.     

Using multidimensional scaling for curricular goal analysis

Multidimensional sealing and related analytic procedures were used to estimate the accuracy of a set of goals used to pattern the design of a graduate curriculum. The analysis suggests that this goal set faithfully represents the essential elements within the area of professional practice to be taught. The procedures described have utility for a wide range of goal-focused analyses.