Distancing to self‐protect: the perpetuation of inequality in higher education through socio‐relational dis/engagement

This paper explores the social class‐differentiated behaviours of access and traditional‐entry students, based on a three‐year constructivist grounded theory study with 45 undergraduates at an Irish university. The participant groups behaved significantly differently within the socio‐relational realm, engaging in various forms of distancing behaviours motivated by a desire to self‐protect and based on perceived relative social positioning. The paper illustrates some ways in which both disadvantage and privilege are performed at the post‐entry stage in a widening participation context. It is argued that the ‘closure’ behaviours of class‐based groups constrain the building of social capital by working‐class students, thus potentially limiting the ability of widening participation policies in achieving equality goals.     

Current conceptions of literacy – insights from work with children and older learners with sensory needs

There have been many efforts to conceptualise literacy, both in terms of its essence and component parts, but it has proved difficult to define. This paper considers work that is undertaken with children and older learners with sensory needs in order to promote the early stages of literacy. Recent government initiatives aimed at fostering literacy development have caused teachers of children with sensory needs to re-examine their practice. The paper discusses early literacy as part of children's attempts to communicate and describes children with sensory needs engaging in a range of activities that are termed 'literacy' by those working with them. By taking into account these activities, the authors endeavour to throw light on the broader questions around concepts of literacy.     

Attention Deficit Disorder as a factor in the origin of behavioural disturbance in schools

The education of children with behavioural difficulties is under scrutiny from various quarters. The provision of specialised school environments isbeing questioned and, at the same time, there is pressure to minimise the exclusion of disruptive pupils. The study reported in this article lookedat a group of children whose behaviour had prompted placement in a school for emotionally and behaviourally disordered (EBD) pupils. The results showed the overall rate of psychiatric disturbance in the group was 86% and, in particular, that the rate of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was 70%. These findings suggest that a significant minority of disruptive pupils may have their difficulties compounded by the presence of ADHD, and raises the question of whether specific screening processes should be established for such pupils.     

Web-Based Student Assessment for Program Evaluation

As part of an overall evaluation of the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment, (GLOBE) program, we designed a Web-based assessment environment to measure students' environmental awareness and data analysis skill. It was expected that students who were identified as high implementers in the GLOBE program would outperform low implementers in their ability to construct environmental inferences and the degree to which they could analyze environmental data. Seven high and middle school classrooms were identified as either high or low GLOBE implementers depending on the amount of atmospheric data they had collected during the year. Within each classroom students were assigned into smaller learning groups of three students per group. A total of 32 groups participated in this study. Analysis of students' responses to the tasks revealed that the students differed in their performance. Overall, the results showed that students in the high implementing classrooms were more likely to construct higher-level environmental inferences than students in the low implementing classes. Contrary to expectations, middle school students were more likely than high school students to solve the data analysis problem correctly. However, upon further analyses, high school students constructed more data graphs and were more skilled in providing correct evidence to support their decision making than were middle school students in GLOBE. This study confirms the viability of using technology-based assessments for measuring students' environmental awareness and data analysis.     

Application of Quality Function Deployment for the Improvement of Quality in an Engineering Department

In adopting a customer‐oriented approach to higher education, quality function deployment (QFD) is one of the total quality management techniques which can be applied for process and design improvement. Following a review of some practices in this sector, this paper outlines a QFD model in which the opinions of three groups of customers are utilized for quality planning. A developed framework for the dimensions of quality in engineering education was used in conjunction with the quality processes in a departmental quality management framework proposed by the Engineering Professors’ Council. The results from the QFD led to a strategy for prioritizing the different quality processes within a school/department.     

Academic self-concept and emotion relations: Domain specificity and age effects

The present study investigated the relations between academic self-concepts and the emotions of enjoyment, pride, anxiety, anger, and boredom as experienced in mathematics, physics, German, and English classes (N = 1710; grades 8 and 11). In line with our hypotheses derived from appraisal-based emotion theories and self-efficacy research, within-domain relations between self-concepts and emotions were relatively strong and notably stronger within quantitative domains (mathematics and physics) than verbal domains (German and English). Also consistent with our hypotheses, stronger relations between self-concepts and emotions were observed among older students. Self-concept and emotion relations further differed as a function of the specific emotion assessed, with pride showing the strongest and boredom the weakest relations with academic self-concepts in the four domains assessed. Methodological and educational implications as well as directions for future research are discussed.     

Jamaican Deaf Children Interacting with Written Language: Support for Bilingual Instruction?

The interrelationship among language components is the main conceptual framework for this study which examined the written language performance of Jamaican children with severe to profound hearing loss. Twelve subjects aged 15 to 16 years completed text level tasks in writing, reading and sign language. Hearing children aged 13 to 14 years completed writing and reading tasks. Multilevel analyses were undertaken. Differences and parity in performances were observed within and between groups at the word, sentence and text levels. Deaf children's ability to express complex ideas in sign language in the Jamaican education system indicated a need for nontraditional approaches in the teaching of written language. Suggestions are outlined for developing an instructional model to enhance written language using a bilingual approach.     

Exploring Gender and Phenomenography

A critical feature of phenomenographic study is its generation of the “outcome space” which constitutes the results of the study. The central idea underlying this article is that women may be “lost in space" — the phenomenographic outcome space. First, women seem to be literally missing in the majority of phenomenographic studies. These studies have usually been in fields in which women are poorly represented and in research samples in which women have not been present. Second, the traditional disciplines of study, the values of which largely determine the structure of the typically hierarchical outcome space, are patriarchal. Without attention to the hidden as well as the explicit aspects of what learners are coming to know, the understanding that we gain from the outcome space may be distorted. Third, the outcome space tends to be defined in many studies in cognitive terms, excluding or neglecting the affective dimension often associated with women's ways of knowing. This article explores the implications of looking for and elaborating on women's experience in phenomenographic research and suggests several ways in which women's experience might be recognised: by ensuring that women are included in research; by questioning in gender‐sensitive ways; by collecting and analysing the data with attention to the gendered construction of disciplinary knowledge and gendered ways of knowing.