School Closure: What are the consequences for the local society?

School closures have been common in rural areas since the middle of the last century, when new and modern schools replaced small old‐fashioned schools with only one or two classrooms. Due mainly to the industrialisation of farming and hastened by the merging and globalisation of industry, the last 50 years have seen a migration of people from rural areas to large towns. This has caused closures of schools built in the 1950s and 1960s, which had been the pride of and a sign of development in local societies. These closures most often give rise to heated debate, the main cry of protest being that the closure of the school is a death‐blow to the local society. The present study is based on a qualitative analysis performed in 2003 of 30 Danish school closures in the period 1990–1999. The results show that school closure in itself does not have the devastating effects mentioned in the debate. The main problem for local societies is a lack of people and thus lack of human capital, and in remote areas and on small islands school closure is a sign of a community in the final phase of the death process, not a cause.     

School-based management committees in low-income countries: Can they improve service delivery?

With the advent of school-based management, citizen committees in low-income countries or areas are often expected to oversee the functioning of schools, health centres, and other community resources. However, studies of their effectiveness show mixed results. Though members of such committees may be able to repair buildings, they often cannot monitor the quality of instruction or of medical services. This article draws on psychological research to predict the performance of such committees, given their levels of education, group dynamics, and complexity of decisions. The research suggests that committees of the very poor may lack the time and resources to make good decisions; they also lack the experience with quality schools to accurately evaluate service delivery. Thus, donors and governments must understand better the decision-making dilemmas of people with limited literacy. Targeted research may clarify the chains of causality leading from management committee decisions to service delivery and may help improve services to the poor.     

The Effects of Public School Choice on Those Left Behind: Evidence from Durham,North Carolina

Using student-level data from Durham, North Carolina, we examine the potential impact of school choice programs on the peer environments of students who remain in their geographically assigned schools. We examine whether the likelihood of opting out of one's geographically assigned school differs across groups and compare the actual peer composition in neighborhood schools to what the peer composition in those schools would be under a counterfactual scenario in which all students attend their geographically assigned schools. We find that many advantaged students have used school choice programs in Durham to opt out of assigned schools with concentrations of disadvantaged students and to attend schools with higher achieving students. Comparisons of actual peer compositions with the counterfactual scenario indicate only small differences in peer composition for nonchoosers on average. More substantial differences in peer environment emerge, however, for students in schools with concentrations of disadvantaged students and schools located near choice schools attractive to high achievers. The results suggest that expansions of parental choice may have significant adverse effects on the peer environments of a particularly vulnerable group of students.     

Changing over a project changing over: a project–research supervision as a conversation

Extracts from the written conversation between research student and supervisor show the nature of educative research supervision. The authors argue that researcher–supervisor relationships are methodological in nature as they shape and influence the people, the project and the field. Such relationships, which construct meanings, are complex. A conversational approach, spoken or written, with its freedom, spaces and power dynamics, provides possibilities for reflexivity and growth for all parties. This conversational freedom is illustrated in the structure of this text, as a dialogue to which the voice of the UK editor of this journal is added, constructing another layer to the conversation. As in conversation, the form and content of the text is messy and open to interpretation, yet its construction reflects the argument presented in the text. Supervision as conversation replaces then subverts the managerialist approach to research supervision and its carefully planned, linear route to a dissertation.     

Just a little story: the use of stories to aid reflection on teaching in higher education

In the context of teaching in higher education story writing as an aid to reflection on practice would seem to be a little-used research tool. We examine its value as part of an action research project focusing on dissertation supervision, in which five lecturers were invited to write stories on this theme. The ways in which this dimension was introduced into the project are explored, and its distinctive contribution to the research, together with the use of interviews and group discussion, is discussed. We consider the purposes of story writing within action research, and the ways in which it might benefit both writer and readers, and offer suggestions for how others might develop this aspect of action research into teaching in higher education.     

Secondary School Students’ Epistemic Insight into the Relationships Between Science and Religion—A Preliminary Enquiry

A number of previous studies have shown that there is a widespread view among young people that science and religion are opposed. In this paper, we suggest that it requires a significant level of what can be termed “epistemic insight” to access the idea that some people see science and religion as compatible while others do not. To explore this further, we draw on previous work to devise a methodology to discover students’ thinking about apparent contradictions between scientific and religious explanations of the origins of the universe. In our discussion of the findings, we highlight that students’ epistemic insight in this context does seem in many cases to be limited and we outline some of the issues emerging from the study that seem to boost or limit students’ progress in this area.     

Online Lexical Competition During Spoken Word Recognition and Word Learning in Children and Adults

Lexical competition that occurs as speech unfolds is a hallmark of adult oral language comprehension crucial to rapid incremental speech processing. This study used pause detection to examine whether lexical competition operates similarly at 7–8 years and tested variables that influence “online” lexical activity in adults. Children (n = 20) and adults (n = 17) were slower to detect pauses in familiar words with later uniqueness points. Faster latencies were obtained for words with late uniqueness points in constraining compared with neutral sentences; no such effect was observed for early unique words. Following exposure to novel competitors (“biscal”), children (n = 18) and adults (n = 18) showed competition for existing words with early uniqueness points (“biscuit”) after 24 hr. Thus, online lexical competition effects are remarkably similar across development.     

The Development of Upright Posture

The study was designed to investigate the relationship between differences in educational training at the time of entry into part-time undergraduate studies and persistence with such a program. The sample consisted of 612 students who enrolled for the first time in a part-time evening undergraduate program. A specially designed questionnaire was used as the chief measuring instrument. Possession of a high school diploma, having not repeated a year in high school, undertaking certain types of training, and delaying university entry by a year or more were found to be conducive to persistence. High school matriculation average, type of high school attended, amount of delay, and reasons for delaying entry to university were not found to be related to drop-out. The findings of the study stand in sharp contrast to previously reported research.