Educational neoliberalization: the mediatization of ethical assertions in the voucher debate

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on the evolving ethical claims and empirical evidence being advanced within U.S. media relating to voucher-style programs. As such, the research seeks to better understand how and why these policies proliferate, despite scant evidence recommending them. Our specific media focus reflects the recognition that issues, problems, and solutions are defined and set within ‘ethical’ frameworks through the media, often in efforts to influence the polity. Framed by the concept of ‘neoliberalization’, the analysis notes dominant discourses and activities by both advocates and opponents around the issue. Specifically, the research reveals shifting ethical assertions. Media-based ‘choice for all’ advocacy, and support of generalized parent choice/empowerment via voucher reforms, have become more prominent, while advocacy related to expanding choice for the disadvantaged has receded (though with certain high-profile exceptions). Meanwhile, opponents engage in what sometimes appears as more reactionary, though still active, media participation in seeking to challenge such reforms.     

Language delays, reading delays, and learning difficulties: interactive elements requiring multidimensional programming

Researchers have hypothesized four levels of instructional dialogue and claimed that teachers can improve children's language development by incorporating these dialogue levels in their classrooms. It has also been hypothesized that enhancing children's early language development enhances children's later reading development. This quasi-experimental research study investigated both of these hypotheses using a collaborative service delivery model for Grade 1 children with language difficulties from a socially and economically disadvantaged urban community in Australia. Comparing the end-of-year reading achievement scores for the 57 children who received the language intervention with those of the 59 children in the comparison group, the findings from this research are supportive of both hypotheses. The interrelationships between learning difficulties, reading difficulties, and language difficulties are discussed along with children's development in vocabulary, use of memory strategies and verbal reasoning, and the need for multidimensional programming.     

Talent development of high performance coaches in team sports in Ireland

Background: Coaches are central to the development of the expert performer and similarly to continued lifelong participation in sport. Coaches are uniquely positioned to deliver specific technical and tactical instruction and mentoring programmes that support the psychological and social development of athletes in a challenging, goal-oriented and motivational environment. The current study aimed to qualitatively investigate current coach learning sources and coaches’ educational backgrounds in team sports in Ireland. Methods: Coaches from five team sports in Ireland were asked to complete an online questionnaire. Subsequently male coaches (n?=?19) from five team sports who completed the questionnaire and met the inclusion criteria were invited to attend a follow-up semi-structured interview. Inclusion criteria for coaches were that they possess at least 10 years’ experience coaching their sport and were coaching more than 4 hours per week. Results/Discussion: Formal coach education does not meet the needs of high performance coaches who rely more on self-directed learning and coaching experience as their main sources of CPD. Although prior playing experience at a high level is both valuable and desirable, there are concerns about fast-tracking of ex-players into high performance coaching roles. Conclusions: Preferred sources of education and the best learning environment for coaches of team sports in Ireland are more informal than formal. Further research is needed to examine how this learning is applied in a practical manner by examining coaching behaviours and the impact it has on the athlete development process.     

英国职业足球近10年发展述评——经济视角

为了认识现代竞技体育家族中的新成员———电子竞技运动,运用文献法、逻辑分析法在对电子竞技运动的起源、发展脉络进行研究的基础上,开发了电子竞技运动的基本概念和分类体系。     

School‐tertiary collaboration: a long‐term view

In 1985, a group of teachers and academics began what was intended to be a two‐year, collaborative, action‐research project they called the Project for Enhancing Effective Learning (peel). At the end of two years they found that, for several reasons, they could not stop and PEEL has continued to the present day during which time it has spread to over 20 schools in Australia and overseas. The paper draws on the experiences of the past nine years with PEEL groups and addresses three questions: what issues of teacher change, and especially of long‐term teacher change emerged over nine years? What are characteristics of successful school‐tertiary collaboration? Is it realistic to hope for the widespread emergence of teacher‐researchers?.     

Variation in the development of teachers’ understandings of assessment and their assessment practices in higher education

This paper reports a study into the development of staff understanding of assessment and assessment practice. Eight teachers from two universities constructed an initial concept map about assessment that was discussed in a one-to-one semi-structured interview. A year later, a new map was created and the interview focused on change in thinking and practice. Multiple models of assessment were evident in the participants’ understandings at the same time and change was characterised by subtle evolution in thinking. Development in practice was more significant and often associated with the foregrounding of assessment for learning. Vignettes are used to illustrate the variation in nature and scale of development. Interplay between this development of practice and understanding was multidirectional and external context played an important role. The approach offers detailed insight into the relationship between assessment thinking and practice and demonstrates that both research and academic development need to go beyond conventional approaches to conceptualising the development of academics and take account of the finer grained complexities of assessment thinking and practices.     

Educational and Vocational Policy and Construction of the European Union

Drawing on the author's current ESRC-funded research (The Impact of Performance Threshold Assessment on Teachers' Work), this article focuses on a current policy initiative in England, namely, the establishment of a performance management regime in schools and, in particular the Threshold Assessment. They examine three aspects of these developments. First, the manner in which the policy was initially established and the current situation regarding its development and implementation. Next, drawing upon the research they are undertaking in schools, they consider what the process of Threshold Assessmenthas felt like for various actors within the school context. Finally, they place this particular initiative within a global setting by drawing upon interviews recently undertaken in Australia and connecting these discussions to more general debates around 'globalisation'.We have progressively established a kind of 'Macworld' capitalism, where product choices whether for hamburgers or computers are increasingly homogenized and standardized across all countries, and where systems and tastes are alike controlled and developed in a proprietary mode by large corporations … The scale of markets and competition has decisively escalated in some areas, screening out local solutions and corporations in favour of transnational companies, dominant brands and standardized solutions. Cultural barriers to product acceptance have crumbled even in areas where they once seemed insurmountable. (Dunleavy, 1994, p. 50)     

Using query logs to establish vocabularies in distributed information retrieval

Users of search engines express their needs as queries, typically consisting of a small number of terms. The resulting search engine query logs are valuable resources that can be used to predict how people interact with the search system. In this paper, we introduce two novel applications of query logs, in the context of distributed information retrieval. First, we use query log terms to guide sampling from uncooperative distributed collections. We show that while our sampling strategy is at least as efficient as current methods, it consistently performs better. Second, we propose and evaluate a pruning strategy that uses query log information to eliminate terms. Our experiments show that our proposed pruning method maintains the accuracy achieved by complete indexes, while decreasing the index size by up to 60%. While such pruning may not always be desirable in practice, it provides a useful benchmark against which other pruning strategies can be measured.