Evaluating Teacher-Leaders for Careers as Administrators: Effects of Job Attributes, Teacher Leader Role, and Teaching Assignment Area

Recruitment of public school administrators is an important issue due to the shortage of qualified job applicants nationwide. The shortage of applicants requires school districts to evaluate their internal pools of potential applicants for administrative vacancies. This evaluation research addressed the recruitment of teacher-leaders to serve as assistant principals (APs) using a recruitment simulation technique. The participants were secondary school teacher-leaders who were counselors, school council members, department chairs, or resource teachers. The evaluation technique used involved an innovative experimental design approach. Teacher-leaders, whose current or past primary teaching assignment was in the core content areas (e.g., English/language arts, mathematics, science, social studies), rated the job of AP highest. Resource teachers rated the job significantly higher when the AP job emphasized instruction than when the job emphasized discipline. Implications for recruitment practice and future research are discussed.     

Writing and knowledge: Effects and re-effects

Recent cognitive research on writing deals with various factors influencing writing (in the sense of textproduction). One of these factors is knowledge of a specific topic. The opposite effect of writing on knowledge, however, is rarely examined in research. Being interested in the relationships between knowledge and writing some of our results of a research project which has been conducted in the years 1987 to 1989, will be reported.     

Can we make sense of learning theory?

This article discusses a range of theoretical models of the learning process that have been published in recent years, and examines whether it is possible to relate them systematically to one another. Problems in such an enterprise include those of terminology; globe trotting; the development of separate schools of research that have proceeded largely independently, each with their own central concerns, perspectives, and methodology; and the problem of whether the various different activities popularly described by the word learning do in fact have anything much in common. Despite these difficulties, however, the article argues that the various major models each contain certain key concepts, not necessarily identical in each model, from which it is possible to produce a meta-model - a framework or cognitive map within which the individual models can be located and therefore better understood. The article ends by proposing one such meta-model, and suggesting some ways in which it might be used.     

MARKETING HIGHER EDUCATION: MYTHS AND PROBLEMS

The budgetary decentralization of higher education in the United Kingdom calls for individual institutions and units within them to take increasing responsibility for raising their own funds. The author, who argues that higher education institutions must derive an increasing proportion of their budgets from the marketing of their products goes on to explain how this can be done. To begin with, the nature of marketing and of market research must be well understood, and the legitimacy of the marketing process itself must be accepted by all the members of the university community. It is then necessary to do a marketing audit so as to establish what a given institution has to sell and what its outside environment wishes to buy. Flexibility on the part of the seller with regard to type, level, duration, and scheduling of courses is very important. It is also necessary to be able to persuade the potential buyer that he wants to have what the seller has to offer. At this point, however, the author cautions the reader as to the dangers of some seven market myths as applied to higher education and the dangers of oversell. He concludes that with prudence higher education can be marketed to the satisfaction of all concerned with results which avoid the “unhappy paradox” that the marketing of higher education is both essential and disastrous.     

Truth or fiction: problems of validity and authenticity in narratives of action research

Abstract

In what sense is it helpful to argue that the truth criteria for research reports can be understood through analogies with creative narratives, such as novel and short stories? One argument is that both are founded on the notion of constructing the ‘authentic’ voices of those whose world is presented in the narrative. Problems with the concept of authenticity are explored, and a further analogy is presented, between the principles of action research and those of ‘modernist’ fiction, in order to show how narratives can avoid simply reproducing the authoritarian texts of realist fiction and of hierarchically organised research.     

COMMUNITY COLLEGE FACULTY RECRUITMENT: EFFECTS OF JOB MOBILITY,RECRUITER SIMILARITY-DISSIMILARITY,AND APPLICANT GENDER

The study reported in this article was a factorial experiment that addressed the usefulness of the Rynes and Barber (1990) applicant attraction model and the Byrne (1971) similarity-attraction hypothesis as theoretical frameworks for conducting empirical research about community college faculty recruitment. Study participants (N = 136) were business professionals completing the masters of business administration degree who position announcements of community college business faculty vacancies. The independent variables were job mobility (relocation required vs. relocation not required), recruiter background (business vs. education), and applicant gender. The dependent variable was a composite rating for applicant reaction to a job described in a faculty position announcement. Both male and female applicants rated jobs most favorably when the job did not require relocation F(1,128) = 5.16, p.05 and the recruiter conveying the job message had a professional background similar to that of the applicant F(1,128) = 11.97, p.001. These findings have implications for theory, educational recruitment practice, and future research.     

Special and inclusive education in the Republic of Ireland: reviewing the literature from 2000 to 2009

Provision for pupils with special educational needs in Ireland has undergone considerable change and review in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. In response to international demands for a more equitable education system that recognises diversity and considers how schools might address the needs of pupils who have been previously marginalised, Irish legislation has focused upon the development of inclusive schooling. Researchers during this period have endeavoured to understand how responses to the demand for greater inclusion have impacted upon the perceived need for change. This paper reviews the research literature for this period and identifies four key themes under which research has been conducted. The literature pertaining to these themes is explored and a possible agenda for future researchers identified.