Civic Science for Public Use: Mind in the Making and Vroom

Mind in the Making and Vroom are partner initiatives that exemplify a unique “civic science” approach to “bringing developmental science into the world.” Mind in the Making offers families and professionals working with children 0–8 access to developmental research, by engaging them in an active process of professional development and community outreach. Vroom is an outreach and communication initiative that brings “brain building basics” to communities, inviting parents to participate in the science of early learning through partnerships with trusted entities. These initiatives use collaborative, iterative processes in disseminating findings and implications of child development research. Preliminary evidence shows early promise of these initiatives to help promote engaged learning and life skills based on executive function in adults and children.     

Dilemmas of Prescriptive Practices and Perceived Alignment in Program Implementation

This paper studies the early implementation of a school improvement effort in two high schools. We examine what explains variation in the teacher adoption of program practices. Our findings highlight the tension between encouraging immediate adoption of program practices and the longer term goals of schoolwide culture change. We find that highly structured practices and those that are already aligned with teachers' extant beliefs and classroom practices can be implemented with little preexisting capacity. These conditions could also lead to more consistent and quicker initial adoption. However, this type of implementation might not encourage sufficient understanding of program goals and may inhibit the diffusion of practices into the school culture. Findings highlight dilemmas associated with program practices when the goal is to bring educational reforms to scale.     

Learning conceptions of young students in the final year of primary education

The purpose of this research was to describe young pupils' learning conceptions. In this study, a learning conception was defined as a cluster of interrelated beliefs about different aspects of learning. Firstly, 27 pupils, all in the final year of primary school, were interviewed to elicit learning-related issues as being relevant for six-graders. Secondly, a questionnaire, developed on the basis of the outcomes of the interviews, was used to determine the interrelatedness of pupils' beliefs about the selected aspects. The results showed the young pupils to have different beliefs about five aspects of learning: purpose of school; learning orientation; regulation; learning demands; and mental activities. In exploring group differences, three different learning conceptions could be distinguished: a restricted learning conception; a functional learning conception; and a developmental learning conception. The characteristics of these different learning conceptions may be indicative of how young pupils conceive learning-related aspects.     

Student Hits in an Internet‐Supported Course: How Can Instructors Use Them and What Do They Mean?

The world of education is changing as Web‐based technology and courseware are increasingly used for delivery of course material. In this environment, instructors may need new measures for determining student involvement, and ultimately student performance. This study examines whether hits to a Web site have any value for predicting student performance in a traditional course supported by Web activities. Total Hits at the end of the semester was used as one measure. Hit Consistency, determined by assigning a 0 when no hits occurred between class meetings and by assigning a 1 when one or more hits occurred between class meetings, was another. Hit Consistency was significantly correlated with course average (r= .37, p < .001) for 108 students in two course sections. Hit Consistency started to show a significant relationship with course average by the third week (or class). Total Hits was not found to significantly correlate with course average (r= .08, p > .05) at the end of the semester or during any week. These results suggest that students who consistently access a Web site will perform better than those who do not. When Hit Consistency and Total Hits were entered as independent variables into a stepwise regression with course average as the dependent variable, the model was enhanced by the addition of Total Hits after Hit Consistency was entered (R= .43, p < .001) . Hierarchical regression analysis in which cumulative grade point average was entered as the first controlling variable suggested that online access may go beyond the predictive value of achievement alone for predicting course performance with Hit Consistency appearing to be the dominant causal variable.     

Indicators for national science and technology policy: how robust are composite indicators?

This article addresses a set of issues that were central to Keith Pavitt's research, that is, the construction and use of tools to measure national innovative performance and to design national policies relating to innovation. It presents an overview of the development of science and technology (S&T) indicators and their use in national policy making and provides evidence of the vulnerability of composite S&T indicators to manipulation. A brief history of the development of S&T indicators begins with the role of the United States followed by their worldwide diffusion with particular emphasis on Europe. Newer developments towards composite indicators, benchmarking and scoreboarding are discussed. To investigate the robustness of innovation scoreboards empirically, a sensitivity analysis of one selected case is presented. It is shown that composite scores and country rank positions can vary considerably depending on the selection process. Thus, the use of scoreboards leaves room for manipulation in the policymaking system. Further research is needed on alternative methods of calculation to prevent their misuse and abuse.     

“Simultaneous immersion”: How online postgraduate study contributes to the development of reflective practice among public service practitioners

This paper examines how the process of engaging simultaneously in study and work – through online distance-based study – affects students’ capacity to apply their learning in and for the workplace. The paper takes as its starting point the importance of extending notions of “educational effectiveness” beyond course-based attainment to encompass the impact of learning within the workplace. It explores the interface between study and work, focusing on the case of online postgraduate programmes in public management at the University of York. It finds that simultaneous immersion in study and work can create the conditions for “public reflection” that underpin work-based learning and that a key factor is the student-practitioner's ability to mobilise “episodic power.” The paper suggests ways in which existing approaches to online postgraduate learning might be enhanced in order to capitalise on these conditions of simultaneous immersion.     

Cultural Components of Sex Differences in Color Preference

Preferences for pink and blue were tested in children aged 4–11 years in three small-scale societies: Shipibo villages in the Peruvian Amazon, kastom villages in the highlands of Tanna Island, Vanuatu, and BaYaka foragers in the northern Republic of Congo; and compared to children from an Australian global city (total N = 232). No sex differences were found in preference for pink in any of the three societies not influenced by global culture (ds − 0.31–0.23), in contrast to a female preference for pink in the global city (d = 1.24). Results suggest that the pairing of female and pink is a cultural phenomenon and is not driven by an essential preference for pink in girls.     

High school science enrollment of black students

How can the high school science enrollment of black students be increased? School and home counseling and classroom procedures could benefit from variables identified as predictors of science enrollment. The problem in this study was to identify a set of variables which characterize science course enrollment by black secondary students. The population consisted of a subsample of 3963 black high school seniors from The High School and Beyond 1980 Base-Year Survey. Using multiple linear regression, backward regression, and correlation analyses, the US Census regions and grades mostly As and Bs in English were found to be significant predictors of the number of science courses scheduled by black seniors.     

Bias and the limits of pooling for large collections

Modern retrieval test collections are built through a process called pooling in which only a sample of the entire document set is judged for each topic. The idea behind pooling is to find enough relevant documents such that when unjudged documents are assumed to be nonrelevant the resulting judgment set is sufficiently complete and unbiased. Yet a constant-size pool represents an increasingly small percentage of the document set as document sets grow larger, and at some point the assumption of approximately complete judgments must become invalid. This paper shows that the judgment sets produced by traditional pooling when the pools are too small relative to the total document set size can be biased in that they favor relevant documents that contain topic title words. This phenomenon is wholly dependent on the collection size and does not depend on the number of relevant documents for a given topic. We show that the AQUAINT test collection constructed in the recent TREC 2005 workshop exhibits this biased relevance set; it is likely that the test collections based on the much larger GOV2 document set also exhibit the bias. The paper concludes with suggested modifications to traditional pooling and evaluation methodology that may allow very large reusable test collections to be built.