Reducing School Exclusions: An evaluation of a multi-site development project

The article reports the findings of an evaluation of a 1996-1999 British Home Office funded project which placed social work trained home-school support workers in comprehensive schools with the aim of reducing school exclusions. Set in the context of a review of the research evidence for the reasons for rapidly rising school exclusions in England during the 1990s, quantitative and qualitative data are analysed in relation to the impact of the project on rates of fixed-term and permanent exclusions. Exclusions were considerably reduced by a variety of strategies adopted by the support workers and over the three-year project duration permanent exclusions were cut by 25%. It is argued that teacher social workers are helpful in alleviating the conflict between the New Labour government's Standards agenda and its Inclusion agenda.     

Philosophy and Indigenous Cultural Transformation

The politics of difference emerges as the new desideratum for understanding the complex nature of oppression in education and the way in which multiple and contradictory subjectivities and identities are socially constructed at die intersections of race, gender, and class, among their configurations. (Peters, 1995, p. 55)     

Improving energy expenditure estimates from wearable devices: A machine learning approach

ABSTRACT

A means of quantifying continuous, free-living energy expenditure (EE) would advance the study of bioenergetics. The aim of this study was to apply a non-linear, machine learning algorithm (random forest) to predict minute level EE for a range of activities using acceleration, physiological signals (e.g., heart rate, body temperature, galvanic skin response), and participant characteristics (e.g., sex, age, height, weight, body composition) collected from wearable devices (Fitbit charge 2, Polar H7, SenseWear Armband Mini and Actigraph GT3-x) as potential inputs. By utilising a leave-one-out cross-validation approach in 59 subjects, we investigated the predictive accuracy in sedentary, ambulatory, household, and cycling activities compared to indirect calorimetry (Vyntus CPX). Over all activities, correlations of at least r = 0.85 were achieved by the models. Root mean squared error ranged from 1 to 1.37 METs and all overall models were statistically equivalent to the criterion measure. Significantly lower error was observed for Actigraph and Sensewear models, when compared to the manufacturer provided estimates of the Sensewear Armband (p < 0.05). A high degree of accuracy in EE estimation was achieved by applying non-linear models to wearable devices which may offer a means to capture the energy cost of free-living activities.     

Mathematical education and Aboriginal children

This paper is concerned with the issues surrounding the mathematical education of traditionally oriented Aboriginal children. A wide-ranging review of the relevant literature is presented and discussed with a view to developing more effective educational procedures. The discussion will be found to be relevant to other culture-conflict educational situations.