Cheating or cheated? Surviving secondary exit exams in a neoliberal era

Cheating on exams is a rampant and highly developed practice among youth in the Arab world, often involving elaborate networks, advanced technology and adult authorities. Rather than viewing cheating as mere laziness or immorality, this article interrogates the social meanings of cheating by comparing the practices and discourses of cheating on high-stakes high school exit exams – the tawjihi in Jordan and the Baccalauréat in Morocco. Using informal networks to obtain higher grades, and thereby better futures, cheating is one way youth contest the putative meritocracy of the state to reclaim a sense of control over their lives. Ironically, cheaters develop twenty-first century skills of collaboration, networking and creativity outside the school in order to evade the nation’s formal system of educational sorting. We argue that cheating illuminates the declining effectiveness of the public school in the nation-building project and the simultaneous emergence of the outcomes-oriented ‘neoliberal student’.     

Breaking the tyranny of office hours: Overcoming professor avoidance

ABSTRACT

Studies have found that Faculty–Student Interaction (FSI) has many positive benefits for students including academic support, professional development, mentoring, and career planning. Research-intensive universities exhibit the lowest levels of faculty–student interaction within higher education. This article utilises qualitative methods to explore faculty, student, and staff perceptions of faculty–student interactions, particularly those that take place out of the classroom, at a research-intensive public U.S. university. We identify social distance between faculty and students based on unequal status within a rigid, hierarchically-organised culture as a key barrier to FSI. We then discuss methods that some of the faculty in our study used to mitigate their social distance with students in an effort to increase FSI.     

The use of career information delivery systems in the states

Conclusion The ever increasing demands on guidance and counseling programs has added new responsibilities to the tasks of the counselor specifically in the area of career development. Along with this increase in responsibility, the issue of accountability has been added. Career information delivery systems assist the counselor in meeting the need for accurate, relevant occupational and educational information that can be disseminated in a timely efficient manner. Therefore, CIDS should be a vital part of all comprehensive career guidance and counseling programs.Mary Elizabeth McCormac is an Occupational Information System Specialist, National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee, Washington, D.C.     

Conditioning with taste as the CS in conditioned flavor preference learning

There appear to be unconditioned affective reactions to the four basic tastes: liking for sweet and salt and disliking for sour and bitter. We attempted to modify these reactions by pairing the tastes with calories and with sweeter tastes. Differing sucrose concentrations were ineffective in reversing the preference for salt over citric acid or for saccharin over quinine. We could, however, reverse the preference for salt over citric acid, producing an actual preference for sour over salt, by using sucrose and saccharin as the reinforcers. The initial reactions to tastes could also be modified by reducing the initial difference in affect produced by the tastes through mixing both tastes with sucrose.     

The unintended consequences of school inspection: the prevalence of inspection side-effects in Austria,the Czech Republic,England, Ireland,the Netherlands,Sweden, and Switzerland

It has been widely documented that accountability systems, including school inspections, bring with them unintended side effects. These unintended effects are often negative and have the potential to undo the intended positive effects. However the empirical evidence is limited. Through a European comparative study we have had the rare opportunity to collect empirical evidence and study the effects (both intended and unintended) of school inspections (a key system of accountability) in a systematic way, across seven countries. We present the findings of the unintended effects in this paper. Survey self-report responses from school principals in each country, with differing school inspection systems, are analysed to measure the prevalence of these unintended effects and to investigate the part played by pressure to do well in inspections. A key finding is that increasing pressure in school inspection systems is associated with the undesired effect of the narrowing and refocusing of the curriculum and instructional strategies. We also show that a proportion of school principals admit to misrepresenting the school in data sent to the inspectorate and show evidence for formalisation/proceduralisation (excessive focus on records) and ossification (fear of experimentation in teaching), although these factors are less related to changes in pressure.     

Inter-Parietal White Matter Development Predicts Numerical Performance in Young Children

In an effort to understand the role of interhemispheric transfer in numerical development, we investigated the relationship between children's developing knowledge of numbers and the integrity of their white matter connections between the cerebral hemispheres (the corpus callosum). We used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography analyses to test the link between the development of the corpus callosum and performance on symbolic and non-symbolic numerical judgment tasks. We were especially interested in the interhemispheric connections of parietal cortex in 6-year-old children, because regions of parietal cortex have been implicated in the development of numerical skills by several prior studies. Our results revealed significant structural differences between children and adults in the fibers of the corpus callosum connecting the left and right parietal lobes. Importantly, these structural differences were predictive of individual differences among children in performance on numerical judgment tasks: children with poor numerical performance relative to their peers exhibited reduced white matter coherence in the fibers passing through the isthmus of the corpus callosum, which connects the parietal hemispheres.