Adaptive learning in university students’ opinions: Cross-border research

Education and Information Technologies - Contemporary education is often based on using e-learning courses, which have become a popular means of delivering didactic material to students. Among the...     

Direct and indirect effects of education on job satisfaction: A structural equation model for the Spanish case

Empirical literature has traditionally analyzed the effect of education on job satisfaction with single-equation models that ignore interrelationships between theoretical explanatory variables. Their results are somewhat inconclusive. We propose estimating a structural equation model to obtain both the direct effects and the set of indirect effects. Analysis of these effects allows us to explain the apparent contradictions that have existed to date, and to improve knowledge of the economic value of education. The proposed model shows that people with higher levels of formal education are more satisfied with their jobs, because they are more likely to access jobs with characteristics that provide greater satisfaction.     

Bringing the Classroom to the Web: Effects of Using New Technologies to Capture and Deliver Lectures

Technology expands instructional options for faculty, and this study examines the differential learning effects of offering a lecture on physics to students in a traditional classroom versus internet video formats. Based on an experiment conducted in a natural educational context, results indicate enhanced transfer of lecture information in the video formats relative to the live condition, with students also responding more positively to personalized video presentation.

Retention and persistence of African‐American students in school psychology programs

This qualitative study investigated eight African‐American specialist‐level students’ experiences with and perceptions of their retention and persistence toward degree completion in school psychology programs. Findings indicate that participants deemed the general supports faculty offered to all students and positive, supportive relationships with faculty as retention strategies they experienced as effective and access to diversity in support systems as a retention strategy they perceived would be beneficial. Participants described social engagement and reliance on family and classmates as persistence strategies they used. Based on these findings, the article provides recommendations for school psychology faculty interested in retaining African‐American students and African‐American students who aim to persist to degree completion.     

Bureaucratic governance,family economies and the 1930s NSW teachers’ marriage bar,Australia

This paper reports the findings of an analysis of a collection of Statutory Declaration forms completed by teachers seeking exemption from dismissal under the NSW Married Women (Lecturers and Teachers) Act (1932–1947). Most sought exemption on hardship grounds, recording details of their husbands’ inability or unwillingness to provide them with ‘adequate’ support. The collection offers insight into the gendered finances of a particular group during the 1930s Depression, revealing some complex interdependencies—such as the need to support extended kin—and offering insights into the role of the state in the making of the family as a social and economic unit. The bureaucratic apparatus of regulation and standardised paperwork operated materially and discursively to distinguish the exceptional (salaried married women) from the more desirable or legitimate order of gendered responsibilities (financially dependent wives). Finally, the forms are strikingly silent about the professional teaching work of the women.     

Masculinity and social class,tradition and change: the production of ‘young Christian gentlemen’ at an elite Australian boys’ school

High fee-charging non-government schools for boys comprise a small but significant sector of the Australian schooling market. In different ways in different historical periods these schools have represented themselves as being concerned with more than just an instrumental or utilitarian education, making both explicit and implicit claims about the kinds of values they work to instil in their students and the kinds of men they aim to produce. This article looks closely at one such school in order to gain an understanding of how it sought to shape a particularly classed, leadership-oriented masculinity, during a period of institutional change. The historical context for the study is the final decade of the twentieth century, a period that saw the approximate beginning of a ‘boys’ crisis’ in Australian education, which for schools like the one in this study meant a degree of reconceptualisation of practices and ideologies of masculinity. The article draws on a set of oral history interviews with former students and executive staff of the school.     

What Matters to Whom: Predictors of Teacher Satisfaction in a Career Development Plan

This article examines several workplace predictors of career satisfaction for teachers involved in a career development plan. Furthermore, it examines whether different aspects of the work environment, including intrinsic job characteristics and positive personnel evaluation, are predictors of career satisfaction for teachers in different groups. The predictors of career satisfaction vary according to divergent work roles and career phases. Among the independent variables emerging as important are informational resources and hierarchy of authority for entry-level teachers, rationality of promotion for career-level teachers, and positive evaluation by the principal for experienced teachers who are not participating in the career development plan.     

The Psychological Uses of Ruthlessness in a Children's Fantasy Tale: Beatrix Potter and The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) is one of the top best-selling children's books of all time. In an attempt to account for its staggering success, this paper examines the dynamic processes through which meaning shapes itself out of fictional constructs. A study of Potter's tale presents insights into the psychic logic of the author's intentions and her uses of narrative to give order through form to desire. Drawing on the work of Freud, Brooks and Winnicott, concepts such as transference, masterplot and wish fulfilment are considered as ways of illuminating the symptomatic uses of Peter for Potter. Arguably, the little hero's enactments of ruthlessness, 'mouth love' and defiance function as symbolic containing devices through which the author expresses her capacity for self-knowledge. The story's symbolization of greed serves not only as a displacement of the psychic reality of hunger felt by a gifted, rigidly controlled Victorian female author, but equally important, as a transitional space for child readers through time to imagine the capacity to go to extreme limits in terms of satisfying psychic spaces left empty and angry by want.