Will my child ever go to a university? The link between school segregation practices and Norwegian parents’ expectations for their physically disabled child

How parents perceive their children's educational prospects can reveal a great deal about how their children will progress in the educational system. The paper examines the consequences of variations in inclusive education practices by investigating determinants of parents’ educational expectations for their child. All parents included in the study had children with physical disabilities in primary school (mainly cerebral palsy and spina bifida). The empirical material includes results from a survey (Net sample = 491), in combination with information merged from a range of official registers. The results showed that the more the child is segregated from ordinary classroom education, the lower parental expectations are for their children's educational attainments. Other factors also significantly influencing parents’ educational expectations include how parents’ view their child's school performance, as well as various measures of the severity of the child's physical disability. However, these secondary factors could not account for the empirically strong association between segregation practices and parental expectations. Parental expectations were also significantly related to parental income and education. The findings indicate that the expectations of parents with higher income and education are less affected by school segregation practices.     

Interactivity in Society: Locating an Elusive Concept

Interactivity has been identified as a core concept of new media, yet despite nearly three decades of study and analysis, we scarcely know what interactivity is, let alone what it does, and have scant insight into the conditions in which interactive processes are likely to be consequential for members of a social system. This article attempts to address this deficiency by critiquing three self-defeating tendencies and an erroneous assumption of interactivity research, then proposes four basic propositions around which systematic knowledge regarding interactivity in society may be built. In the spirit of bridging mass and interpersonal processes, a model of interactivity is proposed to initiate discussion about the concept as a cross-level and multivalent phenomenon—one with both positive and negative consequences—and to spur more socially relevant research. For interactivity to succeed as a concept, it must have some meaningful social and psychological relevance beyond its technical status as a property of media systems or message exchanges.     

Inquiry as a context-based practice – a case study of pre-service teachers’ beliefs and implementation of inquiry in context-based science teaching

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study is to provide an understanding of context-based inquiry teaching within a humanistic perspective on science education by studying pre-service teachers’ beliefs about inquiry and their implementations of inquiry in their context-based teaching sequences. Therefore, five pre-service teachers enrolled in a university undergraduate course called ‘Inquiry-based chemistry education II’ (5 ECTS) were involved in an empirical case study. The pre-service teachers’ implementations of inquiry were studied from their reports on self-designed context-based inquiry teaching sequences for students age 13–15, and their beliefs by interviewing them after the course. The results indicate that the most frequent aspects of inquiry, which were implemented, were that inquiry (i) includes a context, (ii) is a way to act, (iii) is a way to think, and (iv) includes source/information evaluation and argumentation. The pre-service teachers’ beliefs about inquiry were shown to reflect manifold aspects of inquiry, such as the difficulty in explaining it. However, this difficulty in encapsulating inquiry into a clear-cut definition is not necessarily an impediment to inquiry-based teaching. Furthermore, inquiry is inherently context-bound, and context-based teaching requires extra-situational knowledge from the context and not only declarative knowledge from science. This should be considered to support effective professional development.     

Do regression-based computer algorithms for determining the ventilatory threshold agree?

The determination of the ventilatory threshold has been a persistent problem in research and clinical practice. Several computerized methods have been developed to overcome the subjectivity of visual methods but it remains unclear whether different computerized methods yield similar results. The purpose of this study was to compare nine regression-based computerized methods for the determination of the ventilatory threshold. Two samples of young and healthy volunteers (n = 30 each) participated in incremental treadmill protocols to volitional fatigue. The ventilatory data were averaged in 20-s segments and analysed with a computer program. Significant variance among methods was found in both samples (Sample 1: F = 11.50; Sample 2: F = 11.70, P < 0.001 for both). The estimates of the ventilatory threshold ranged from 2.47 litres.min(-1) (71% VO2max) to 3.13 litres.min(-1) (90% VO2max) in Sample 1 and from 2.37 litres.min(-1) (67% VO2max) to 3.03 litres.min(-1) (83% VO2max) in Sample 2. The substantial differences between methods challenge the practice of relying on any single computerized method. A standardized protocol, likely based on a combination of methods, might be necessary to increase the methodological consistency in both research and clinical practice.     

Development of Oral Reading Fluency in Young Children at Risk for Failure

The body of knowledge on critical components of reading instruction is broad and deep with phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension serving as building blocks for literacy. The importance of fluent reading (i.e., with speed, accuracy, and proper expression, as well as comprehension) in the formula for success is widely accepted. The purpose of this study was to evaluate oral reading rates in a sample of 2nd-grade children. Using growth curve analysis, we identified models for a combined sample of at-risk and not-at-risk children. Large and important differences in oral reading were evident, but the growth rates remained the same throughout the 2nd- grade; in fact, the gap between at-risk and not-at-risk students remained constant. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research and the improvement of practice.     

Research versus educational practice: positioning the European Journal of Engineering Education

Over the past years, the European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE), the journal of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) developed as a more research oriented journal. Bibliometric analyses show that EJEE keeps pace with other leading journals in the field of Engineering Education in most respects. EJEE serves a worldwide audience with about as many contributions from Europe as from other parts of the world. Yet, the impact factor of the journal calculated according to the formula of Thomson's ISI Web of Science seems to be lagging behind. As an explanation for this phenomenon, it is argued that EJEE keeps on publishing papers that are appreciated by practitioners in the field, even if they do not generate a lot of citations in scientific journals.     

Ethnicity and engagement in first-year New Zealand law programmes

This paper investigated the extent to which the engagement levels of a self-selected cohort of students enrolled in first-year law programmes at three New Zealand universities varied according to ethnicity. When viewed in the light of factors identified within the international literature as having a bearing on student engagement and, in consequence, academic success and retention, no significant differences were identified in the ways students of Pākehā (European), Māori, Pasifika, Chinese and Indian descent interacted with the law school at which they were enrolled. This was despite some identified differences in students’ backgrounds and motivations for study and in the external factors having an impact on their study. Nevertheless, the identified differences between the ethnicities in relation to personal and external factors can be utilised to enhance and/or improve the engagement of particular groups of students. Overall, the findings indicate a need for law schools to focus on student engagement in first-year programmes with a view to improving the engagement levels of students across all ethnicities.     

Unraveling the culture of the mathematics classroom: A video-based study in sixth grade

Changing perspectives on mathematics teaching and learning resulted in a new generation of mathematics textbooks, stressing among others the importance of mathematical reasoning and problem-solving skills and their application to real-life situations. The article reports a study that investigates to what extent the reform-based ideas underlying these mathematical textbooks impact the current teaching of mathematics. Two problem-solving lessons were videotaped in 10 sixth-grade classrooms and a coding scheme was developed to analyze these lessons with regard to three aspects of the classroom culture that are assumed to enhance students’ mathematical beliefs and problem-solving competencies: (1) the classroom norms that are established, (2) the instructional techniques and classroom organization forms, and (3) the set of tasks students are confronted with. Two instruments were administered to measure students’ beliefs about learning mathematical word problem solving, and to assess their problem-solving processes and skills. The results indicate that some reform-based aspects seemed to be easier to implement (e.g., a strong focus on heuristic skills, embedding tasks in a realistic context) than others (e.g., the use of group work, an explicit negotiation of appropriate social norms).