‘Certified to make a difference’: the motivation and perceptions of newly qualified early years teachers in England

The last 20 years have brought numerous workforce reforms to the early years sector, enacted in the name of professionalisation, including the recent introduction of a new postgraduate qualification, the Early Years Teacher Status. This article features data from interviews with 22 participants who had just completed this award and situates their views in the relevant policy context and alongside a discussion of what it means to professionalise the early years sector and create a graduate led workforce. The data support findings from similar studies of Early Years Professionals, namely that the interviewees are passionate about working with young children. They view the sector as in need of change, and themselves as potential leaders and agents of change. The participants endorse the view that up-skilling the workforce is essential to the professionalisation of the sector and improving the quality of early years education.     

Imagining the mathematician: young people talking about popular representations of maths

This paper makes both a critical analysis of some popular cultural texts about mathematics and mathematicians, and explores the ways in which young people deploy the discourses produced in these texts. We argue that there are particular (and sometimes contradictory) meanings and discourses about mathematics that circulate in popular culture, that young people use these as resources in identity making as (non-)mathematicians, negotiating their meaning in ways that are not always predictable, and that their influence on young people is diffuse and nevertheless important. The paper discusses the discourses that prevail in some of the popular cultural images of mathematics and mathematicians that came up in our research. We show how mathematics is represented as a secret language, while mathematicians are often mad, mostly male and almost invariably white. We then explore how young people negotiate these discourses, positioning themselves in relation to mathematics. Here we draw attention to the fact that both those who continue with mathematics after it ceases to be compulsory and those who do not, deploy similar images of mathematics and mathematicians. What is different is how they respond to and negotiate these images.     

lol: new language and spelling in instant messaging

Written communication in instant messaging, text messaging, chat, and other forms of electronic communication appears to have generated a “new language” of abbreviations, acronyms, word combinations, and punctuation. In this naturalistic study, adolescents collected their instant messaging conversations for a 1-week period and then completed a spelling test delivered over instant messaging. We used the conversations to develop a taxonomy of new language use in instant messaging. Short-cuts, including abbreviations, acronyms, and unique spellings were most prevalent in the instant message conversation, followed by pragmatic signals, such use of emoticons, emotion words, and punctuation, and typographical and spelling errors were relatively uncommon. With rare exceptions, notably true spelling errors, spelling ability was not related to use of new language in instant messaging. The taxonomy provides an important tool for investigating new language use and the results provide partial evidence that new language does not have a harmful effect on conventional written language.     

Development of Instruments to Assess Teacher and Student Perceptions of Inquiry Experiences in Science Classrooms

This study describes the development of two instruments to investigate the extent to which students are engaged in scientific inquiry. As a result of the instrument development process employed, each finalized instrument consisted of 20-items separated into five categories. Both instruments were found to be internally consistent, with high reliability estimates. Factor analysis showed two factors for each instrument that, while not clustering the items into the five categories, did show item clustering that is consistent with research literature about students’ engagement in inquiry experiences. Based on the analyses completed, the instruments appear to be useful instruments for use in comprehensive assessment packages for assessing the extent to which students are experiencing inquiry in science classrooms.     

Measuring the impact of a pilot Geospatial Technology Apprenticeship Program for the Department of Labor

The Geospatial Technology Apprenticeship Program (GTAP) pilot was designed as a replicable and sustainable program to enhance workforce skills in geospatial technologies to best leverage a $30 billion market potential. The purpose of evaluating GTAP was to ensure that investment in this high‐growth industry was adding value. Findings from this evaluation showed that investments in geospatial technology competency development have the potential for high‐systemic payoffs and sustained economic growth.     

Examining behavioral, relational, and cognitive engagement in smaller learning communities: A case study of reform in one suburban district

The purpose of this project was to examine the impact of Smaller Learning Community reform on students’ behavioral, relational, and cognitive engagement in a suburban school district experiencing urbanization. We describe a project in which we evaluated the engagement of a cohort of 8th grade students as they transitioned to high school (n = 605). Specifically, we disaggregated the data to identify how students’ engagement differed as a function of their participation in Smaller Learning Community structures, prior achievement, and race.     

Lifetime assessment of poly-victimization in a national sample of children and youth

ObjectiveTo use a lifetime assessment of victimization experiences to identify children and youth with high cumulative levels of victimization (poly-victims). Also to compare such children to other victims and non-victims, and assess the contribution of cumulative victimization to levels of psychological distress.DesignA national sample of 1,467 children aged 2–17 recruited through random digit dialing and assessed via telephone interviews (with caretakers and youth themselves) about a comprehensive range of 33 types of victimization experiences in the previous year and at any time in their lives.ResultsNearly 80% of the children and youth reported at least one lifetime victimization. The mean number of lifetime victimizations was 3.7 and the median 2.6. The total number of different lifetime victimizations was highly predictive of symptoms of current distress. The best linear prediction of distress on the basis of cumulative victimization entailed weighting child maltreatment and sexual assault by factors of 4 and 3 respectively compared to other victimizations. We proposed classifying poly-victims as those 10% of children and youth with the highest victimization scores, and calculating different thresholds for children at different ages. Poly-victims designated in this way had significantly more distress, more non-victimization adversities than other youth and were less likely to come from an intact family.ConclusionLifetime assessment of victimization has value as a means of identifying groups of highly victimized children and youth.Practice ImplicationsThis paper describes a procedure under which practitioners can assess for a group of children, termed “poly-victims,” who have a very high burden of lifetime victimization. These children merit identification because they have high levels of psychological distress, some of the most serious victimization profiles, and a presumed vulnerability for further victimization.