Where did distance education go wrong?

Distance education (DE) practices around the world use a wide range of audio‐visual technologies to overcome the lack of direct contact between teachers and students. These are not universally adopted by DE teachers, however, nor even encouraged by their institutions. This article discusses the organisational attitudes that can lead to outdated methods being maintained and successful ones abandoned, and it suggests that, just as educational television and programmed learning were supplanted in previous decades, so the World Wide Web could be abandoned as a viable education medium in the foreseeable future and replaced by more widely available media such as the cell phone. The article contrasts the learner‐centred philosophies underlying current DE approaches with the teacher‐centred philosophies of a generation ago. If these two philosophies are not united in a sensible middle ground, the article suggests, history may come to regard today’s DE as a Dark Age less enlightened than when Genghis Khan sent his arrow riders to deliver the mail in person across the Mongolian steppes, and when Lenin dispatched educational media experts to deliver DE materials by hand across the post‐revolutionary Soviet Union. The main losers in this scenario, the article concludes, will be the students of the developing world.     

Education and cultural change: A view from Micronesia

Traditionally, transmission of cultural knowledge between generations in Micronesia was the role of family, in particular parents and grand parents. To what extent is that role still important today? In this article, we draw on data obtained from questionnaires distributed to high school and primary school children throughout Micronesia in 2002 and 2003 to consider how culture is being transferred between generations today. We argue the importance of local communities being closely involved in all aspects of formal education including developing and managing schools and their curricula to ensure that local aspirations are satisfied. Micronesian children have expressed preferences for favourite food, drink, and entertainment that follow international trends closely and are moving away from traditional choices. The data also show a shift away from traditional family-based cultural education to a more formal school-based model that emphasises the importance of teachers being familiar and sympathetic with local culture.     

Agency and conformity in school-based teacher training

Concern has been expressed that the current climate in schools militates against trainee teachers’ self-directed development. This article explores the issue of trainees’ capacity for self-direction through the analysis of interviews with 32 trainees, investigating their perceived proactive social strategies. Three proactive strategies were identified: ‘tactical compliance’, personalising advice, and seeking out opportunities to exercise control. It is argued that these strategies are indicative of trainees’ drive to establish a personal teaching identity through self-directed development and the creation of individual development agendas. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of the development of proactive social skills in beginning teachers.     

Transforming local e-government services: the use of application service providers

This study examines the potential of application service providers (ASPs) to transform electronic government (e-government) services at the local level. The ASP model helps local governments overcome barriers to offering next wave e-government services such as a shortage of skilled IT staff and limited financial resources. The realization of full potential, however, requires first the adoption of an ASP model. Five conditions that favor the decision to use an ASP are (1) strong top management support, (2) promise of large efficiency gains, (3) enough IT capability on the part of the government unit to identify key piece of technology, (4) less burdensome outsourcing rules and procedures, and (5) a variety of high quality and reliable ASPs from which to choose locally. To ensure the success of an ASP project, local governments need to build in-house IT capability to evaluate an ASP and to develop proper performance measures. Management should focus on serving citizens and businesses and develop the capability to negotiate as well as manage service-level contracts with ASPs. Continual top management support is necessary for dealing with possible initial resistance and ensuring interdepartmental communication and cooperation.     

Network analysis of temporal trends in scholarly research productivity

We propose a method to identify the journals or proceedings that are most highly esteemed by a research group over some time frame. Using open publication databases, we identify the experts in the community, and analyse their publication pattern, and then use this as a guideline for evaluating scientific outputs of other groups of researchers publishing in the same domain. To illustrate the practicality of our method, we analyse the scientific output of Korean researchers in the security subject domain from 2004 to 2009, and comparing this groups’ output with that of well-known researchers. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that there is a persistent gap between these two research groups’ publications impact over this period, although the absolute number of journal publications greatly increased over recent years.     

An exploratory study contrasting high- and low-achieving students' percent word problem solving

This study evaluated whether schema-based instruction (SBI), a promising method for teaching students to represent and solve mathematical word problems, impacted the learning of percent word problems. Of particular interest was the extent that SBI improved high- and low-achieving students' learning and to a lesser degree on the indirect effect of SBI on transfer to novel problems, as compared to a business as usual control condition. Seventy 7th grade students in four classrooms (one high- and one low-achieving class in both the SBI and control conditions) participated in the study. Results indicate a significant treatment by achievement level interaction, such that SBI had a greater impact on high-achieving students' problem solving scores. However, findings did not support transfer effects of SBI for high-achieving students. Implications for improving the problem-solving performance of low achievers are discussed.     

Child maltreatment in the "children of the nineties": a cohort study of risk factors

AIM: To analyze the multiple factors affecting the risk of maltreatment in young children within a comprehensive theoretical framework. METHODS: The research is based on a large UK cohort study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Out of 14,256 children participating in the study, 293 were investigated by social services for suspected maltreatment and 115 were placed on local child protection registers prior to their 6th birthday. Data on the children have been obtained from obstetric data and from a series of parental questionnaires administered during pregnancy and the first 3 years of life. Risk factors have been analyzed using an hierarchical approach to logistic regression analysis. RESULTS: In the stepwise hierarchical analysis, young parents, those with low educational achievement, and those with a past psychiatric history or a history of childhood abuse were all more likely to be investigated for maltreatment, or to have a child placed on the child protection register, with odds ratios between 1.86 and 4.96 for registration. Examining strength of effect, the highest risks were found with indicators of deprivation (3.24 for investigation and 11.02 for registration, after adjusting for parental background factors). Poor social networks increased the risk of both investigation (adjusted OR 1.93) and registration (adjusted OR 1.90). Maternal employment seemed to reduce the risk of both outcomes but adjusted odds ratios were no longer significant for registration. After adjusting for higher order confounders, single parents and reordered families were both at higher risk of registration. Reported domestic violence increased the risk of investigation and registration but this was no longer significant after adjusting for higher order variables. Low birthweight children were at higher risk of registration as were those whose parents reported few positive attributes of their babies. CONCLUSIONS: This study supports previous research in the field demonstrating that a wide range of factors in the parental background, socio-economic and family environments affect the risk of child maltreatment. By combining factors within a comprehensive ecological framework, we have demonstrated that the strongest risks are from socio-economic deprivation and from factors in the parents' own background and that parental background factors are largely, but not entirely, mediated through their impact on socio-economic factors.     

Native language predictors of foreign language proficiency and foreign language aptitude

Fifty-four students were tested at specific time intervals over 10 years to determine best native language (NL) predictors of oral and written foreign language (FL) proficiency and FL aptitude. All participants completed two years of Spanish, French, or German. Each was administered measures of NL literacy, oral language, and cognitive ability in elementary school. A measure of FL aptitude was administered at the beginning of ninth grade and FL proficiency was evaluated at the end of the 10th grade. Among the variables, NL literacy measures were the best predictors of FL proficiency, and NL achievement and general (verbal) intelligence were strong predictors of FL aptitude. Results suggest that indices of NL literacy as early as first grade are related to FL proficiency and FL aptitude nine and 10 years later. Findings provide strong support for connections between L1 and L2 skills, and for speculation that “lower level” skills in phonological processing are important for written language development and oral proficiency in a FL.