THE MEDIUM IS NOT THE MESSAGE: IMPROVING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATIONAL AID TO PAPUA NEW GUINEA STUDENTS

Australia, like many developed countries expends a proportion of its budget in assisting lesser developed countries (LDC) in educational enterprises. Such efforts may have muted results if Australian educators assume that overseas students eventually adapt to their teaching. This paper argues that institutions which accept overseas students into their courses are obliged professionally to cater for students’ learning problems particularly, if the language of instruction is not the mother tongue. Often these problems have their genesis in the LDC because students are educated in a language in which their teachers’ themselves lack facility. Moreover, in the Papua New Guinea context the learning problems with English are associated with a lack of equivalence between the concepts in the academic discourse and the students’ existing conceptual framework. Learning problems in English are more about concept acquisition than translation.     

A causality analysis of the link between higher education and economic development

The aim of this article is to shed light on the relationship between higher education and economic development by means of econometric tools designed to evaluate the existence and direction of causality: cointegration and Granger-causality tests. The results show a significant causality from national higher educational effort (proxied by the number of students per capita, i.e. not engaged in productive activities) to economic development for four countries: Sweden (1910–1986), United Kingdom (1919–1987), Japan (1885–1975) and France (1899–1986). However, such a causality link has not been found for Italy (1885–1986) or Australia (1906–1986). This suggests that this relationship is indeed not mechanistic as already pointed out by some social scientists.     

Local Redundancy Governs Infants' Spontaneous Orienting to Visual‐Temporal Sequences

Two experiments demonstrate that 5‐month‐olds are sensitive to local redundancy in visual‐temporal sequences. In Experiment 1, 20 infants saw 2 separate sequences of looming colored shapes that possessed the same elements but contrasting transitional probabilities. One sequence was random whereas the other was based on bigrams. Without any prior exposure, infants looked longer at the random sequence. In Experiment 2, 17 infants looked equally long at bigram‐ and trigram‐based sequences. However, an analysis of local redundancy revealed that in both experiments disengagement from the sequences was governed by local repetitions rather than by global sequence statistics. This finding suggests that a spontaneous sensitivity to stimulus complexity helps orient infants to sequences they can learn from.     

Books on Research Methods and Bibliography

Dennis P. Forece and Stephen Richer's Stages of Social Research: Contemporary Perspectives (Prentice-Hall, $8.95)

Denis Grogan's Science and Technology: An Introduction to the Literature (Archen Books/Shoestring Press, $17.00)

John Brown Mason, Research Resources: Annotated Guide to the Social Sciences (American Bibliographical Center/Clio Press, Riviera Campus, 2010 Alameda Padre Sierra, Santa Barbara, California 93103, $3.00 each for two volumes)     

Governing the governors: A case study of college governance in English further education

This paper addresses the nature of governors in the governance of further education colleges in an English context. It explores the complex relationship between governors (people/agency), government (policy/structure) and governance (practice), in a college environment. While recent research has focused on the governance of schooling and higher education there has been little attention paid to the role of governors in the lifelong learning sector. The objective of the paper is to contribute to the debate about the purpose of college governance at a time when the Learning and Skills Council commissioning era ends and new government bodies responsible for further education and training, including local authorities, arrive. The paper analyses the nature of FE governance through the perspectives and experiences of governors, as colleges respond to calls from government for greater improvement and accountability in the sector. What constitutes creative governance is complex and controversial in the wider framework of regulation and public policy reform. As with other tricky concepts such as leadership, professionalism and learning, college governance is best defined in the contexts, cultures and situations in which it is located. College governance does not operate in a vacuum. It involves governors, chairs, principals, professionals, senior managers, clerks, community, business and wider agencies, including external audit and inspection regimes. Governance also acts as a prism through which national education and training reforms are mediated, at local level. While governing bodies are traditionally associated with the business of FE—steering, setting the tone and style, dealing with finance, funding, audit and procedural matters—they are increasingly being challenged to be more creative and responsive to the wider society. Drawing on a recent case study of six colleges, involving governors and key policy stakeholders, this paper explores FE governance in a fast changing policy environment.