A Research Preparatory Program for First-Year College Students: Student Selection and Preparation Lead to Persistence in Research

Undergraduate research experiences may increase persistence in STEM majors. We describe a research program that targets first-year students selected for their curiosity and attitudes towards science. We explain the implementation of the program over 3 years and present evaluation data using a group of matched controls. Participants and controls pursued STEM degrees at equivalent rates, but participants were significantly more involved in research. Initial laboratory interest and mentor pairing may have played a role in this finding. Female participants, particularly those with male laboratory mentors, engaged in more research than men.     

Countering post-truths through ecopedagogical literacies: Teaching to critically read ‘development’ and ‘sustainable development’

Abstract

A key aspect of teaching ‘development’ is understanding the conundrums and tensions between balance and imbalance with constructs of global (all humans, all societies, all populations) and planetary (all of Earth, including humans) spheres. This article deconstructs some key tenets of populist post-truth frameworks (termed as post-truthism in this article) as affecting how development and sustainability is taught within ecopedagogies and argues for structural grounding of ecopedagogical literacy within pedagogies as increasingly imperative. Rooted in critical theories and popular education movements in Latin America, through reinvention of Freirean Pedagogy, the literacy’s root word ecopedagogy is transformative teaching in which educators dialectically problem-pose the politics of socio-environmental connections through local, global, and planetary lenses. Without deepened and widened readings of development and sustainability viewed within both global and planetary spheres, in conjunction with development’s effects upon local societies and ecological systems, developmental actions are unsustainable and defies the definition of development. Discussed will be the ecopedagogical tenets, including emergent ecopedagogical literacies, of critical socio-historical analysis, local and diverse epistemologies, deconstruction of pedagogies on the environment, and problem-posing one’s and others’ livelihood to counter post-truthism.     

Teachers’ and school leaders’ perceptions of commercialisation in Australian public schools

This paper explores teachers’ and school leaders’ perceptions of commercialisation in Australian public schools, reporting on findings from an open-ended survey question from an exploratory study that sought to investigate teacher and school leader perceptions and experiences of commercialisation. Commercialisation, for the purposes of this paper, is understood as the creation, marketing and sale of education goods and services to schools by for-profit providers and often includes (but is not limited to) the provision of curriculum content, assessment services, data infrastructures, digital learning, remedial instruction, professional development and school administration support. Our account highlights that commercialisation is prevalent in the day-to-day practice of Australian public schools. The perceptions of teachers and leaders suggest that commercialisation is complex, with both affordances and challenges. Respondents acknowledged that aspects of commercialisation are necessary for successfully running schools and classrooms in the 21st century, but also noted that there is a fine line beyond which these seemingly innocuous services become perilous. Concerns focused on how particular services are leading to the deprofessionalisation of teachers as they have less autonomy over what to teach and how to teach it. Moreover, teachers and school leaders reported being perturbed by the idea that commercial providers and services might work to replace teachers in the future. Drawing on these data we argue that growing commercialisation in Australian public schools clearly requires an ethical debate that schools, education professionals, policy makers and interested publics are yet to have.     

The politics of teaching time in disciplinary and control societies

Abstract

This article argues that education reform agendas which use policy levers, standardised testing and new regulatory authorities to steer teachers’ work at a distance are creating a new temporal politics. Evidence from interviews with teachers and principals in Australian schools suggests that these reforms are impacting on individual experiences of the rhythms of their day-to-day work. First, there is a disquieting perception of an acceleration of their working life. Second, and related, many teachers and principals spoke of feeling ‘out of time’, or out of rhythm, with the new expectations of their work. Using Deleuze’s control societies, we posit that this arrhythmia exemplifies the experience of the classroom being ‘opened up’ for the purposes of comparison. This breakdown of the enclosed classroom is affected through the datafication of teaching.     

Maternal Sensitivity and the Security of Infant-Mother Attachment: A Q-Sort Study

40 mothers and their 12-month-old infants were observed twice at home by 2 observers for 2 hours. After the second visit, the observers described the infant using the Waters Attachment Behavior Q-sort and the mother's interactive behavior with the Maternal Behavior Q-sort developed by the present authors and Ainsworth's rating scales. Maternal sensitivity was unrelated to maternal age, income, or SES, but correlated positively with maternal education. Mothers of more difficult children were less sensitive. A strong relation was found between infant attachment and maternal sensitivity as measured by the Maternal Behavior Q-sort and by the Ainsworth scales. Using the Q-sort procedure, mothers of more secure infants were more frequently characterized as noticing their babies' signals and using these signals to guide their behavior; they also were more knowledgeable about their infant and appeared to enjoy them more than mothers of less secure infants.     

Educational implications and the changing role of accountants: a conceptual approach to accounting education

Professional accrediting bodies and accounting education reviews have long expressed concerns about student capabilities and learning outcomes, including the ability to apply knowledge and make reasoned judgements. In response, we report on a new design that uses a web of threshold concepts to guide curriculum development. With an associated focus on students’ active learning, the new design encouraged students to critically engage with threshold concepts in accounting. The aim was to transform their understanding of the discipline material from a set of discrete concepts that could be rote-learnt, to critical appreciation of the relationships between such discipline concepts. The design structures students’ active participation in associated learning activities, leading to improved student engagement and conceptual understanding, as evidenced by better attendance and results.     

Ethnic Differences in Children's Intelligence Test Scores: Role of Economic Deprivation, Home Environment, and Maternal Characteristics

We examine differences in intelligence test scores of black and white 5-year-olds. The Infant Health and Development Program data set includes 483 low birthweight premature children who were assessed with the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. These children had been followed from birth, with data on neighborhood and family poverty, family structure, family resources, maternal characteristics, and home environment collected over the first 5 years of life. Black children's IQ scores were 1 SD lower than those of white children. Adjustments for ethnic differences in poverty reduced the ethnic differential by 52%. Adjustments for maternal education and whether the head of household was female did not reduce the ethnic difference further. However, differences in home environment reduced the ethnic differential by an additional 28%. Adjustments for economic and social differences in the lives of black and white children all but eliminate differences in the IQ scores between these two groups.     

How linguistically‐informed are phonics programmes?

Successive UK government policies have strengthened the phonics element of the National Curriculum for English in England. The policies have included inviting publishers to submit completed self‐assessments of their systematic phonics programmes. The self‐assessment criteria focus on what is deemed to be ‘high‐quality provision’, as defined in the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading chaired by Jim Rose. The programmes whose self‐assessments were judged to be accurate by small panels of independent evaluators have been subsequently listed on a central government website. The authors have acted as independent evaluators in this process and, between them, had the opportunity to inspect the content of over 100 phonics programmes. They have noted that many of these programmes (most of which did not meet the Rose criteria) contained numerous linguistic inaccuracies, particularly in relation to the English spelling system and its grapheme‐phoneme correspondences. The existence, number and range of these errors jeopardise policy implementation and National Curriculum delivery and pose risks for the quality of teaching and learning. The article suggests some reasons for these findings in related published debates and in policy documents, and that phonics programmes need to be more linguistically‐informed. The article concludes with some implications for practice.