Formal features in children's science television: Sound effects,visual pace,and topic shifts

This study analyzes the auditory, visual, and information‐presentation pace of children's science television programs. These half‐hour programs averaged more than 19 sound effects per minute, 14 visual changes (cuts, wipes, and fades/dissolves) per minute, and more than 27 topic shifts per program. These results indicate that the current crop of programs presents content at a pace that may reduce their effectiveness.     

Acceleration: A coat of many colours

The word “acceleration” continues to generate controversy. Although the literature makes it clear that acceleration in its various guises is a positive intervention for many gifted students, educational practitioners in Australia continue to resist the evidence and campaign actively against allowing students to take this option. This article synthesizes 3 research projects conducted in New South Wales, Australia, exploring different forms of acceleration. The first project involved an investigation of the Early Entry policy for gifted children in one region of the state; the second reports on the experiences of students who skipped at least 1 grade; and the third examines a vertical programming system that allows students to accelerate within subjects at an academically selective high school. Based on these research studies, this article explores the issues that are at the center of the acceleration debate.     

Randomised controlled trial of incentives to improve attendance at adult literacy classes

Background: Incentives have been proposed as a method to improve attendance in adult literacy classes. In the UK, several areas have piloted the use of incentives to promote attendance at adult literacy classes. To date no rigorous evaluation of this policy has been undertaken. This paper describes (as far as we are aware) the only UK‐based randomised controlled trial to evaluate the use of financial incentives in order to promote attendance in classes for adult learners.

Methods: We used a cluster‐randomised design. Twenty‐nine adult literacy classes were randomised in two groups using minimisation. Intervention group learners received £5 (US$10) for each class attended. The main outcome was class attendance; the secondary outcome was literacy scores.

Results: After allocation, one class was found to be ineligible for the study. In the 28 remaining classes there was a statistically significant reduction of about 1.5 sessions (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.28, 2.79; p = 0.019) attended by the intervention group compared with control, after adjusting for cluster size and baseline scores. The difference in reading scores between the intervention and control group, conditioned on baseline scores, was ?2.38 (with controls scoring higher than the intervention group), but this difference was not statistically significant (95% CI ?7.40 to 2.57, p = 0.33).

Conclusion: Payments to attend adult literacy classes had an adverse effect on attendance. This trial needs urgent replication, ideally with a larger incentive, before this approach is widely used by policy makers.     

Governmentality and the Sociology of Education: Media,educational policy and the politics of resentment

This paper argues that theorizations of the state which are sensitive to both its durability and its permeability, and theorizations which can account for the massive interconnections between local and global forces as well as different material and discursive sites are missing from contemporary work in the sociology of education. Drawing on Foucault's notion of 'governmentality' as a key resource for addressing this impasse, the authors highlight the constant fabrication of racial identity through the production of the pure space of racial origins or 'resentment'—the process of defining one's identity through the negation of the other. This dynamic, the article maintains, now informs key discourses both in popular culture and education. The authors conclude that these processes operate in tandem in the prosecution of the politics of racial exclusion in our times, informing key policy debates, including those around affirmative action and bilingual education.     

Automatic and conscious context effects in average and advanced readers

Average and advanced readers from the fourth and sixth grades read visually presented words as rapidly as possible. Target words were preceded by a related prime word, an unrelated word, or a neutral warning stimulus. Related trials constituted 75% of the word prime trials for half of the subjects in each group, and only 25% for the other half. All groups were sensitive to this proportion manipulation, showing only faster naming times for related targets in the 25% condition. In the 75% condition, subjects showed inhibition for unrelated targets, as well as facilitation for related targets. The results indicate that the ability to use context deliberately to facilitate word recognition reaches asymptote for the average reader by the sixth grade at the latest, and perhaps by the fourth. This ability does not appear to be one that shows further improvements at higher levels of reading skill. Some possible reasons for the discrepancies between this research and that using incomplete sentence contexts are considered.     

Relative Success? Determinants of College Graduation Rates in Public and Private Colleges in the U.S.

Amid growing criticism of public universities, there is little discussion of what appropriate institutional evaluation would entail. Six-year graduation rates are commonly used, and public bachelors granting institutions have lower rates than private institutions, but with the growth in non-traditional college attendance, these can be misleading. We develop a regression analysis as a way to evaluate institutions serving vastly different populations. We do this with a dataset constructed from publicly available sources and focus on the evaluation of public colleges. We show that public colleges are able to do more with less: our models suggest that with equivalent resources and student populations, public schools would graduate a slightly larger percentage of students than privates. Since financial resources come from very different sources, we evaluate this finding closely.     

Not Meta Just Data: Redefining Content and Metadata in Archival Theory and Practice1

How we imagine records affects what we acquire and how we manage it. I take up the call from Arjun Appadurai to view archives as deliberate creations, and from Hugh Taylor to use imagination as a means of creative engagement with archival theory. I explore how we can reimagine archival work, mandates, and records by eschewing divisions of content and metadata, acknowledging items and aggregations to be interchangeable concepts, and integrating data about use into archival data management.