Pupils' views on equity in schools

This paper presents student perspectives on what they consider to be a fair and equitable national education system, based on their own experiences of primary and secondary level schooling by the age of 13 or 14. A survey of 5432 students in five countries involved a questionnaire administered as part of an EU‐funded project to develop indicators of equity in European school systems. Overall, the UK students reported favouring an egalitarian system where all students were treated in the same way, and this was largely what they felt that they experienced. In this respect, they differed from their peers in the other EU countries, a substantial proportion of whom thought that the least able should receive more support and attention in class, but who found that more attention was actually given to the more able. The UK students also appeared to be more self‐confident about their ability to succeed in school. We discuss these results in terms of policies for school allocation, student assessment and the formation of personal notions of justice. In particular, we argue that equity in structure and procedure is important for the effective teaching of notions of justice in citizenship studies.     

Teachers’ Lives in Context: A Framework for Understanding Barriers to High-Quality Teaching Within Resource Deprived Settings

There is a profound for more effective schools, especially within resource-poor communities in low- and middle-income countries. A wide range of literature identifies teachers as the most critical component of schools in regards to student learning. Despite this, there is a dearth of literature on how teachers' experiences influence their ability to attend school, remain in the teaching profession, and provide high quality teaching within the classroom. This study presents a theoretical framework for understanding the role of teachers' lives in context (skills, knowledge, and attitudes; poverty and health; contextual supports/barriers to teaching) in influencing teacher effectiveness. This framework builds upon Tseng and Seidman's (2007) systems framework for understanding youth social settings in order to incorporate teachers' lives into a larger model of educational effectiveness. This synthesis reveals significant gaps in our understanding of teachers' experiences and how they affect teaching. At the teacher attendance, attrition, and pedagogical quality and a key moderator of educational interventions. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.     

Marketing for the Teaching Artist

As teaching artists enter the field of arts education, they are faced with the challenge of distinguishing themselves in the job search—developing a digital presence is one great way to stand out. After conducting thorough research into their local markets, teaching artists can set long-term career goals while honing online content for a specified audience.     

Taxisin Aplysia dactylomela (Rang, 1828) to water-borne stimuli from conspecifics

Sixteen reproductively matureAplysia dactylomela were observed in a unidirectional stream under each of four conditions: sea water only, one sea hare, six sea hares, and a copulating sea hare pair. Streams containing conspecific stimulation were significantly more effective in eliciting a positive taxis towards the stimulus source. A copulating pair was not different from one or six animals in producing the approach. The sea hares showed a distinct final head orientation to six sea hares when compared with sea water only; final orientation did not differ in any other comparison.     

Media rich, resource poor: practical work in an impractical environment

Film and media courses appear well placed to exploit technology convergence in exposing students both to practical skills and to theoretical concepts. For the University of Cape Town's (UCT) large film and media studies courses, it is impractical simply to use the technology of professionals as this would typically be too expensive to purchase and time‐consuming to run. Our approach has been to develop activities that can run with large classes in generic computer laboratories and which simulate environments and tools of the real world. Two illustrative examples, emphasising writing skills in context, involve the production of a TV news story and the development of a proposal for an educational soap opera. Using these, we reflect on our experience of integrating practical skills into the curriculum of a traditional academic institution, where these skills have a lower status and must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate changes in the higher‐status academic components. This suggests that such flexibility has to be part of the design of practical interventions and that they should additionally aim to provide a challenge to some of the more theoretical aspects of these courses. While developing one's own interventions allows for some of this flexibility to be incorporated into the design, it remains difficult for academic departments to adopt these solutions as their own, thus requiring continued involvement of the original developers to adapt to changes.     

Evaluating the quality of peer and self evaluations as measures of student contributions to group projects

ABSTRACT

Educators in higher education commonly use peer and self evaluations to help assess student performance on group projects. Although these evaluations provide multiple benefits, many educators are wary of using them due to concerns about their quality. This study addresses three questions debated in the literature regarding the quality of these assessments. How much do students differentiate among peer contributions through their ratings? How reliable are peer ratings? How much agreement exists between peer and self ratings? Although these questions have been addressed to varying degrees in past work, their answers have been far from settled. While many studies focus on just one of the questions, this study’s data make it possible to address all three questions for the same group of students as well as examine each question by student performance level. The evaluations assessed in this study were completed by a large number of students under conditions associated with obtaining more valid and reliable ratings. Overall, the results provide support for using peer and self evaluations to help assess student contributions to group projects. Peer ratings were largely reliable as group members generally agreed on the scores given to their peers. In addition, most students differentiated among group member contributions through their ratings. Students also tended to rate themselves higher than their peers rated them. This study has implications for how peer and self evaluations can be most effectively used by educators to measure student performance in group work.     

Interpretations of child compliance in individuals at high- and low-risk for child physical abuse

OBJECTIVE: Our studies compared individuals at high- and low-risk for child physical abuse on measures of social information processing. METHOD: Two studies were conducted using similar methods. Twenty-eight childless women in Study 1 and 36 mothers in Study 2 read vignettes of parent-child interactions in which the child's level of compliance was difficult to interpret. Participants were asked a series of questions about the child's behavior and their own reactions. RESULTS: Accuracy and bias in identifying compliant behavior were assessed using a signal detection paradigm. In both samples, high- and low-risk participants did not differ in their overall accuracy in identifying children's behaviors. However, they used different evaluation standards such that high-risk participants were biased toward seeing more noncompliance and low-risk participants were biased toward seeing more compliance. High- and low-risk participants also made different types of errors in interpreting children's behavior. Low-risk participants were more likely to misinterpret noncompliant behavior as compliant, and there was a trend for high-risk participants to not perceive compliant behavior when it occurred. There were no differences in reported disciplinary responses in either study and the results for affective reactions were mixed. CONCLUSIONS: Specific differences in social information processing between high- and low-risk individuals replicated across samples, suggesting a reliable association between evaluation standards and risk of child physical abuse. However, the absence of differences in reported discipline and inconsistent findings on affective reactions indicate the need to identify the mechanism through which cognition influences parenting behavior.     

Nonword recall and phonemic discrimination in four‐ to six‐year‐old children

Previous research has established that the degree of ‘wordlikeness’ of nonwords affects young children's nonword repetition performance. Experiment 1 examined the possibility that output processes are responsible for the wordlikeness effect by using a probed recall procedure. Wordlikeness was defined in terms of phonological neighbourhood density, although this measure was found to be related to the traditional measure of wordlikeness involving adult ratings. A significant effect of number of phonological neighbours/wordlikeness was observed in favour of nonwords with many neighbours. In Experiments 2 and 3 the wordlikeness effect was qualified by a significant interaction with nonword repetition ability. Children with poorer repetition ability were affected by number of neighbours/wordlikeness, while children with better repetition ability were not. Children with poorer repetition ability were significantly poorer than the better repeaters with nonwords with few neighbours. The results were interpreted in terms of theories of phonological development that suggest progressive segmentation of lexical representations. In Experiment 4 the relationship of children's nonword repetition ability to phonemic discrimination ability was investigated. The results demonstrated that children with better nonword repetition ability had superior phonemic discrimination performance than children with poorer nonword repetition ability.