Delivering the Discourse—Urban Adolescents' Perceptions of Physical Education

abstract

This study investigates how National Curriculum policy for England and Wales has been translated into practice as perceived by the pupils who are its recipients. Results suggest that pupil entitlement as enshrined in the National Curriculum rationale is at best being provided at the level of access to activity and pupil experiences are differentiated sharply by activity, by gender and by school. The paper suggests that the physical education National Curriculum already advantages certain pupil groups rather than others, and that changes in the discourse of physical education, exemplified by the texts of the latest official publications, will, if translated into practice, militate further against access to a curriculum relevant to all pupils.     

Job satisfaction among academic staff: An international perspective

This study examined aspects of academics'satisfaction with theirjob across the eight nations (Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Mexico,Sweden, UK, USA). Interesting patterns emerged across countries reflectingdifferences in the international academic climate. The study also exploredpatterns of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction more closely for theAustralian data, and examined the impact of context elements, includingworking climate and atmosphere, on general levels of job satisfaction.Results indicated that factors related to the environment in which academicswork, including university atmosphere, morale, sense of community, andrelationships with colleagues, are the greatest predictors of jobsatisfaction. Implications for university management and governing bodiesare discussed.     

BOOK REVIEWS

This paper presents findings from a collaborative evaluation project within a masters programme in professional education. The project aimed to increase knowledge of research methodologies and methods through authentic learning where participants worked in partnership with the tutor to evaluate the module which they were studying. The project processes, areas of the course evaluated and the data collection methods are outlined. The findings focus on key themes from evaluating the effectiveness of using a collaborative evaluation approach, including: enhanced student engagement; creativity of the collaborative evaluation approach; equality between the tutor and students; and enhanced research skills. Discussion focuses on the outcomes and effectiveness of the project and tutor reflections on adopting a collaborative approach. This paper highlights lessons from the project relevant to those interested in staff–student partnership approaches and those facilitating postgraduate learning and teaching programmes and educational research courses.

Cet article présente les résultats d’un projet collaboratif d’évaluation ayant eu lieu dans le cadre d’un programme de master en formation professionnelle. Le projet visait à accroître les connaissances des méthodes et méthodologies de recherche par l’entremise d’un apprentissage authentique dans le cadre duquel les participantes ?uvraient en partenariat avec le tuteur à l’évaluation du module auquel elles prenaient part. Les processus du projet, les parties du cours ayant été évaluées et les méthodes de collecte des données sont présentées. Les résultats se concentrent sur les thèmes principaux provenant de l’évaluation de l’efficacité d’une approche collaborative d’évaluation. Ceux‐ci comprennent : l’engagement accru des étudiantes ; la créativité de l’approche collaborative d’évaluation ; l’égalité entre le tuteur et les étudiantes ; et les compétences de recherche développées. La discussion porte sur : les résultats et l’efficacité du projet de même que des réflexions du tuteur au sujet de l’adoption d’une approche collaborative. L’article met en lumière les leçons tirées de ce projet pouvant être pertinentes pour ceux qui seraient intéressés par les approches de partenariat enseignant‐étudiant et pour ceux qui ont la charge de programmes de 2e ou 3e cycle en pédagogie universitaire ou de cours de recherche en éducation.     

Evaluating the effectiveness of a phonologically based reading intervention for struggling readers with varying language profiles

This study evaluates Reading Intervention—a 10-week supplementary reading programme emphasising the link between phonological awareness and reading—when delivered in a realistic educational setting. Twenty-nine 6-year-olds with reading difficulties participated in Reading Intervention and their progress and attainments were compared with those of a representative control group from the same classes, matched on age and gender. Language profiles were also explored. Children with reading difficulties showed weaknesses in phonological awareness and literacy as well as nonphonological oral language skills and nonverbal reasoning. During the intervention, the intervention group made significantly greater progress than the control group in early word reading, phoneme awareness and phonetic spelling. Over a 6-month follow-up period, the intervention group maintained its gains but during this time made significantly less progress on single word reading, phoneme awareness and phonetic spelling than the control group. These findings provide evidence that reading interventions can be delivered effectively in standard educational settings. We argue that a better understanding of how to manage withdrawal of intervention and how to address poor readers’ additional oral language weaknesses is needed.     

Governing knowledge in the scientific community: Exploring the role of retractions in biomedicine

Although the validity of knowledge is critical to scientific progress, substantial concerns exist regarding the governance of knowledge production. While research errors are as relevant to the knowledge economy as defects are to the manufacturing economy, mechanisms to identify and signal “defective” or false knowledge are poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate one such institution - the system of scientific retractions. We analyze the universe of peer-reviewed scientific articles retracted from the biomedical literature between 1972-2006 and comparing with a matched control sample in order to identify the correlates, timing, and causal impact of scientific retractions. This effort provides insight into the workings of a distributed, peer-based system for the governance of validity in scientific knowledge. Our findings suggest that attention is a key predictor of retraction - retracted articles arise most frequently among highly-cited articles. The retraction system is expeditious in uncovering knowledge that is ever determined to be false (the mean time to retraction is less than two years) and democratic (retraction is not systematically affected by author prominence). Lastly, retraction causes an immediate, severe, and long-lived decline in future citations. Conditional on the obvious limitation that we cannot measure the absolute amount of false science in circulation, these results support the view that distributed governance systems can be designed to uncover false knowledge relatively swiftly and to mitigate the costs that false knowledge for future generations of producers.