高等教育财政

在所有OECD国家以及很多其他国家所出现的高等教育扩张,既是必要的、有益的,同时也是昂贵的,它需要与其他公共服务竞争政府的财政支出.高等教育财政的重要性不言而喻,但并不是所有国家都充分地认认到了这一点,同时这也是政治上很敏感的一个话题.本文先从经济理论以及一些国家的实际经验两个方面分析高等教育财政,继而从这两个角度审视了英国2004年公布的高等教育财政改革方案,最后在总结中指出了那些尚未完成的工作.     

Racialised Education in Singapore

The Singapore education system plays a central role in the mythology of the young country’s nation building project. The education system is portrayed as the cradle of Singapore’s multiracialism, fostering racial harmony and understanding. Yet this historical study of primary school English textbooks from the 1970s to the present reveals that since the beginning of the 1980s they have been systemically designed in such a way that they evoke high levels of racial consciousness, and at their worst have displayed a pro-Chinese bias that has deprived non-Chinese children of inspiring role models. This study helps to explain the results of recent sociological research that has cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Singapore education system as an instrument for promoting racial harmony.     

Faculties of Education in Traditional Universities and Universities of the Third Age: A Partnership Model in Gerontagogy

This article discusses “Universities of the Third Age”, whose function is quite distinct from established universities' traditional role in teaching, research, and community services. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop a model of partnership between traditional universities and Universities of the Third Age, ensuring better training for educators working with senior citizens. Determining the roles of teachers, supervisors, and students will facilitate greater cooperation, and allow for a linkage of Universities of the Third Age (U3A) with traditional faculties of education, as well as further refinement of the theoretical and practical professional training of future educators of older people.     

Using phenomenography to build an understanding of how university people conceptualise their community-engaged activities

Higher education institutions are seeking greater community engagement through academic, social and civic activity. In response, researcher attention has turned to impacts on students’ education, and benefits to both university and community partners. This phenomenographic study examines how a diverse group of teachers, researchers and administrators at one New Zealand university conceptualised their involvement in community-engaged learning and teaching. We identified an outcome space where university people conceived their community engagement in three ways: within an expert/novice discourse, as advocacy, and in the most complex conception, as reciprocal learning. When working with and within communities, we suggest that university people should be supported to approach community engagement as reciprocal learning rather than adopting approaches that render community partners in passive roles.     

Adults'' Responses to Infants Varying in Appearance of Age and Attractiveness

The relations among age appearance, facial attractiveness, and adult expectations of the developmental maturity of infants were examined in 3 studies. In Study 1, a relation was demonstrated between ratings of the attractiveness (77 judges) and age appearance (53 judges) of 6-month-olds: less attractive infants were judged to be older than their attractive age-mates. In Study 2, 75 parents judged the specific developmental abilities of 6-month-old infants and estimated the age of the babies. Parents overestimated both the age and the developmental abilities of the unattractive infants. Furthermore, ability estimates for the unattractive infants were significantly higher than judgments of the typical abilities of 6-month-olds made by another group of 35 parents. Finally, the results of Study 2 were replicated in Study 3 conducted with 348 mothers. It was also demonstrated in Study 3 that, although mothers expected unattractive infants to be capable of more specific developmental skills, they nevertheless rated the general competence of the unattractive infants to be lower than that of attractive infants. Specious contradictions in the attractiveness and age appearance literatures are resolved by these results: age appearance seems to function as an informational cue with respect to specific age-appropriate abilities, whereas attractiveness elicits evaluative attributions of general competence. Both types of information conveyed in faces may have important implications for adult evaluations of infants and older children.     

Culture, Climate, and Contribution: Career Satisfaction Among Female Faculty

Retention of female faculty is an important issue for institutions of higher education aiming for excellence and diversity. However, an essential first step in understanding retention is to examine what contributes to career satisfaction for academic women. This study is based on data from a census survey of faculty conducted in 1996 at a Research I university located in the Midwest. Using Hagadorn's (2000) model for conceptualizing faculty job satisfaction, the study identifies domains of environmental condition, departmental climate, and demographics that play a role in female faculty's overall career satisfaction.     

Discriminant Validity of the Parent and Child Scales of the Parenting Stress Index

The aim of the present study was to further validate the Parental Stress Index (PSI; Abidin, 1990) which claims to measure distinct sources of stress related to the parent and the child. Two hundred and forty five mothers completed the French version of the PSI and other questionnaires including the DAS (Spanier, 1976), the CBCL (Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1981) and the BDI (Beck, et al., 1961). A subsample of 218 mothers and their preschoolers were also directly observed during a problem solving task in the laboratory. In general, regression analyses indicated that both parent and child scales contributed significantly and independently to the prediction of marital adjustment, depression, the child's problems as reported by the mother and behaviors observed in the laboratory. As expected, the parent's scale when entered first explained most of the variance for factors related to the mother, such as marital adjustment (29%) and depression (45%), and the child's scale obtained no significant results when entered last. Moreover, the child's scale contributed over and above the parent's scale in predicting the child's difficulties (12%) as reported by the mother, and accounted for all the variance when entered first (31%). Intriguingly, results showed that the child scale significantly predicted mother and child behavior in the laboratory situation, but the parent scale contributed to the explained variance only when entered first. In general, these results suggest that the two main factors of the PSI represent valid and relatively independent sources of information. Considering clinical and research applications, the PSI may be particularly useful in assessing combinations of stressors, which appear to be specifically harmful for the parent-child relationship.