Using Knowledge: The dilemmas of 'Bridging Research and Policy'

The 'knowledge agenda' has become a central part of development discourse. This paper addresses one aspect of this discourse - the use of policy research in the social sciences - and the dilemmas that have been encountered by both development agencies and researchers in communicating and making use of that research. Development agencies as well as NGOs have initiated work to evaluate and document the effectiveness of research partnerships, knowledge capacity building and (social) science policy impact. As a multilateral initiative, the Global Development Network (GDN), and especially its 'Bridging Research and Policy' project, provides a vehicle to address issues related to research impact. Twelve perspectives on improving research and policy linkages are outlined to reveal that how the problem is defined shapes policy responses. Taken together, these explanations provide a multifaceted picture of the research-policy nexus indicating that there are many possible routes to 'bridging' research and policy. These diverse perspectives will be categorised into three broad categories of explanation: (i) supply-side; (ii) demand-led; and (iii) policy currents. However, knowledge is part of the solution to many development problems but not of itself a panacea.     

A social learning theory comparison of the sexual victimization of adolescent sexual offenders and nonsexual offending male delinquents

OBJECTIVE: This paper tests hypotheses based on Garland and Dougher's (1990) formulation of the "victim to victimizer" relationship which is a social learning theory etiological approach to adolescent sexual offending. METHOD: Two hundred sixteen adolescent sexually victimized sexual offenders and 93 adolescent sexually victimized nonsexual offending delinquents from three Michigan sexual offender treatment facilities participated in an anonymous cross-sectional survey regarding their sexual victimization and offending as well as a social desirability measure. RESULTS: When comparing the two groups, nonsexually offending delinquents and sexually offending delinquents, the latter were found to have: closer relationships with their perpetrators; a higher chance of having a male perpetrator(s); a longer duration of sexual victimization; more forceful sexual victimization; and the experience of penetration as part of their sexual victimization. Logistic regression showed that the gender of the perpetrators being both male and female and the forcefulness of the perpetrators were the best predictors of being in the sexual offender group. CONCLUSIONS: The social learning theory hypotheses were generally supported. Further multivariate research on this theory is warranted.     

Concept substitution: An instructional strategy for promoting conceptual change

Numerous studies have shown that students often hold conceptions that conflict with accepted scientific ideas, both prior to and after instruction. The failure of instruction to affect students' conceptions can be interpreted as a failure to facilitate conceptual change. In this paper, an instructional strategy will be described that facilitates conceptual change in the special case where conceptual difficulties appear to arise because students confuse related physics concepts. The strategy involves two parts. Firstly, students observe an experiment or demonstration that conflicts with what they expect to see. Secondly, the instructor identifies students' intuitions that are correct but that they have associated with an incorrect physics term, and substitutes the correct physics term. Students can thus develop more scientifically acceptable understandings of physics concepts without having to give up their intuitive ideas. The use of this strategy will be illustrated in two domains of physics. Specializations: physics education, conceptual development, instructional design, improvement of tertiary science education.     

Weaving curriculum webs: Planning,guiding, and recording curriculum activities in the day care classroom

One Monday morning, Sandra walked into her day care classroom with a heavy box filled with rocks. She announced with pleasure to her four- and five-year-old classmates that she had begun a rock collection. Other children quickly came over and began making comments about the colors and sizes of the rocks and about rocks they had found themselves.Diane E. Levin is Associate Professor of Education at Wheelock College in Boston, MA.     

Evaluation of a State Initiative to Improve Child Care Quality

Wisconsin's Early Childhood Excellence Initiative was a $15 million public policy effort designed in 2000 to increase child care quality for low-income children. An evaluation revealed significant improvement in classroom quality, the quality of caregiver interaction, and caregivers' beliefs about children following a complex multi-faceted intervention in 28 selected child care centers. The evaluation also revealed higher quality in Centers for Excellence relative to Comparison centers. Research over the past 35 years has demonstrated that high quality early care and education is one of our best hopes for optimizing the long-term developmental outcomes of infants and young children in poverty. Positive results from this evaluation suggest that it may be within the power of state government to raise the quality of early care and education, should the commitment be there to do so.     

Intersections of Gender,Race and Class in the Primary School

In order to highlight the gender dimension of groupwork I undertook a piece of research in an inner city primary school. My aim was to discover how the group dynamic is affected by altering the gender composition. Consequently I set up a research project in which two groups of primary aged children, one mixed sex, the other girls only, worked on an identical craft, design and technology task. My research findings illuminate the contradictions, complexities and paradox with which issues of gender in the primary school are riven. The findings support the view that the impact of gender on girls is not uniform and consistent across boundaries of race and class but that the three categories are inextricably interwoven. Race and class make significant contributions to any discourse on inequality and although my research is purportedly about gender, the evidence revealed a need for far more investigation into the ways in which gender intersects with race and class.     

Interactivity Between Protégés and Scientists in an Electronic Mentoring Program

Interactivity is defined by Henri (1992) as a three-step process involving communication of information, a response to this information, and a reply to that first response. It is a key dimension of computer-mediated communication, particularly in the one-on-one communication involved in an electronic mentoring program. This report analyzes the interactivity between pairs of corporate research scientists (mentors) and university biology students (protégés) during two consecutive implementations of an electronic mentoring program. The frequency and structure of the interactions within each pair were examined to provide context: 542 messages were posted among the 20 mentors and 20 protégés. These messages were formed into 5–10 threads per pair, with 3–4 messages per thread, indicating a high level of interactivity (there were more responses posted than independent messages). Mentor–protégé pairs rated as effective by both mentors and protégés posted more messages overall, had well-structured threads, had protégé and mentor postings that were similar in topic coverage and message length, and had little overt “management” behavior by mentors. However, there appears to be no clear recipe for successful interaction. Not only are there a variety of factors at play in developing an online relationship in this context, but mentor–protégé pairs can falter at various stages in the process and in various ways.     

Connaissances utilisées par des elèves de 8 à 12 ans dans la formulation de problèmes arithmétiques concrets

This study analyses children development of semantic, linguistic, procedural and schematic knowledge in the context of writing arithmetic word problems. 139 children aged between 8 and 12 years old were presented with a task which consisted in writing arithmetic word problems, according to some contraints: words, questions or measures to include in their problems; type of problems to write. Results show the relevance of actual theoritical models of problem solving (Mayer, 1983; Kintsch & Greeno, 1985). Schematic knowledge seem indeed more important than other knowledge in the process of writing arithmetic word problems; semantic knowledge are also used to choose relevant numbers or measures; the roles of linguistic and procedural knowledge seem less evident. Finally, some hypotheses related with the development of mental models of arithmetic word problems are formulated.