Teenagers’ web questions compared with a sexuality curriculum: an exploration

Background: Teenagers need information about their changing bodies. Many young people do not receive adequate or accurate puberty/sexuality education from their parents or school, so many teenagers are going online to have their sexuality questions answered.

Purpose: This research examines teenagers’ web questions on sexuality, and an example of the puberty and sexuality education content that some may learn in school. It looks for evidence of heteronormative conceptualisations of gender and sexuality, using a theoretical framework based on the Four Discourses of Sexuality Education.

Sample: This includes the web questions (n = 200) of an evenly gendered sample of 13–15‐year-old students (n = 180) from four English-speaking nations, namely UK, USA, Canada and Australia, selected from a reputable puberty/sexuality education site, and, for comparison, an example of an age-representative public school Health and Physical Education (HPE) puberty/sexuality education curriculum.

Method: A gendered and narrative-thematic Content Analysis was undertaken, using the Four Discourses theoretical framework, on the students’ sexuality web questions, and also on the school HPE curriculum.

Results: The discourse of Victimisation was evident in nearly half of all students’ web questions, and over a third of the HPE curriculum. The discourse of Individual Morality was present in a quarter of both students’ questions and the curriculum, while the discourse of Desire was evidenced in a fifth of students’ questions and almost a third of curriculum content. Somewhat surprisingly, the discourse of Violence was present in 9% of exclusively female students’ web questions, and in 12% of the curriculum.

Conclusion: It is recommended that the sampled HPE curriculum, and similar curricula in these sampled students’ countries, need explicitly to address gender differences in students’ metacognition and conceptualisations of puberty and sexuality. This may enable students to embrace their entitlement to sexual subjectivity, in education and across the lifespan, thus helping to ensure students’ healthy, positive and purposeful life outcomes.     

Analyzing Fairness Among Linguistic Minority Populations Using a Latent Class Differential Item Functioning Approach

ABSTRACT

Differential item functioning (DIF) analyses have been used as the primary method in large-scale assessments to examine fairness for subgroups. Currently, DIF analyses are conducted utilizing manifest methods using observed characteristics (gender and race/ethnicity) for grouping examinees. Homogeneity of item responses is assumed denoting that all examinees respond to test items using a similar approach. This assumption may not hold with all groups. In this study, we demonstrate the first application of the latent class (LC) approach to investigate DIF and its sources with heterogeneous (linguistic minority groups). We found at least three LCs within each linguistic group, suggesting the need to empirically evaluate this assumption in DIF analysis. We obtained larger proportions of DIF items with larger effect sizes when LCs within language groups versus the overall (majority/minority) language groups were examined. The illustrated approach could be used to improve the ways in which DIF analyses are typically conducted to enhance DIF detection accuracy and score-based inferences when analyzing DIF with heterogeneous populations.     

How Students’ Intellectual Orientations and Cognitive Reasoning Abilities and May Shape Their Perceptions of Good Teaching Practices

Research in Higher Education - Recent research has uncovered significant concerns about the validity of some types of college student self-reports. This study examines the extent to which student...     

Disengaged Ethics

Drawing upon scholars who call for an open and inclusive approach to journalism ethics, this paper examines empirically three recent efforts to develop or revise codes guiding journalistic practices. It explores the code developers’ intentions in their work and the values they embraced, finding widespread interest in serving the public and representing community interests. However, as new technologies and emphasis on participatory approaches have the power to reshape journalism, work on these ethical codes involved almost entirely closed processes exclusive to journalists and professional organizations. Such exclusivity calls into question the dedication to serve the public and encourage participation. It also squanders an opportunity to understand the interests of varying publics and how these might inform journalistic work, while simultaneously keeping the public from better views of journalistic practices, norms, and principles.     

Pedagogical design considerations in sex education on interactive multimedia using CD‐Rom: an example of sexual intercourse

Human sexuality is a significant issue for educators to understand and teach about, and for young people to learn about. The development of interactive multimedia technologies has added a range of new dimensions associated with designing pedagogies for sex education on Interactive Multimedia (IMM). Here, a module on CD‐Rom on Sexuality and Human Relationships designed for student teachers is presented as an example of a resource, and analysed for the pedagogical considerations that accompany it. The paper concludes that the conceptualisation and design of IMM on CD‐Rom on sexuality is able to address a range of commonly used pedagogies. The most significant pedagogical renegotiation appears to lie in the transposing of human‐to‐human interaction, as in discussion, real life scenarios, simulation, role analysis, values and attitude clarification, to human‐to‐screen interaction. This may be addressed principally by using camera phones where human‐to‐human interaction occurs visually and in real time, whilst email and discussion groups can cater for delayed, typed text human‐to‐human interactions. For some learners, using IMM on CD‐Rom for sex education may be less effective, but for others it may be ideal as it provides for privacy, solo contemplation, self‐dialogue, and negates embarrassment in front of peers or teachers.     

When Do Honors Programs Make the Grade? Conditional Effects on College Satisfaction,Achievement, Retention,and Graduation

Many people within and outside of higher education view honors programs as providing meaningful academic experiences that promote learning and growth for high-achieving students. To date, the research exploring the link between honors participation and college grades and retention has obtained mixed results; some of the seemingly conflicting findings may stem from the presence of methodological limitations, including the difficulty with adequately accounting for selection into honors programs. In addition, virtually no research has explored the conditions under which honors programs are most strongly related to desired outcomes. To provide a rigorous examination of the potential impact of this experience, this study conducted propensity score analyses with a large, multi-institutional, longitudinal sample of undergraduates at 4-year institutions. In the full sample, honors participation predicts greater college GPA and 4-year graduation, while it is unrelated to college satisfaction and retention. However, these results differ notably by institutional selectivity: Honors participation is associated with greater college GPA, retention to the third and fourth years of college, and 4-year graduation at less selective institutions, but it is significantly related only to GPA at more selective institutions. These relationships are also sometimes larger among students from historically underrepresented groups.     

Citation Needed

The ability to add hyperlinks to a news story is a key feature of online news. In addition to the—aging—technical novelty, one can wonder what functions hyperlinks perform in news stories. Previous research, as well as my previous examination of meta-journalistic discourses, has shown that one of the alleged functions of links is to display the writer's sources. In that sense, hyperlinks are “journalistic objects of evidence” as they can directly point to the documents, data or discourses used as rough material for a news story. The present paper puts that particular function of hyperlinks to the test. It conducts a content analysis on a sub-sample of the stories published on six Belgian news sites that contain at least one external link, and compares the links with the sources explicitly mentioned in the news story itself. Results highlight that links and the mentions of sources do not overlap completely. Many sources are not reflected in links, and most links do not point to primary sources per se. Other functions of links emerge, such as providing a service or contextual information to the readers. These findings thus question the material nature of “journalistic objects of evidence” and the possibility for journalists to build networks of distributed responsibility with links.     

Investigating Linguistic Sources of Differential Item Functioning Using Expert Think-Aloud Protocols in Science Achievement Tests

Even if national and international assessments are designed to be comparable, subsequent psychometric analyses often reveal differential item functioning (DIF). Central to achieving comparability is to examine the presence of DIF, and if DIF is found, to investigate its sources to ensure differentially functioning items that do not lead to bias. In this study, sources of DIF were examined using think-aloud protocols. The think-aloud protocols of expert reviewers were conducted for comparing the English and French versions of 40 items previously identified as DIF (N?=?20) and non-DIF (N?=?20). Three highly trained and experienced experts in verifying and accepting/rejecting multi-lingual versions of curriculum and testing materials for government purposes participated in this study. Although there is a considerable amount of agreement in the identification of differentially functioning items, experts do not consistently identify and distinguish DIF and non-DIF items. Our analyses of the think-aloud protocols identified particular linguistic, general pedagogical, content-related, and cognitive factors related to sources of DIF. Implications are provided for the process of arriving at the identification of DIF, prior to the actual administration of tests at national and international levels.