Content and Context of the Administrative Internship: How Mentoring and Sustained Activities Impact Preparation

As universities prepare educational leaders for twenty-first century schools, the quality and authenticity of the internship experience require both the strengths of university faculty and the expertise of practitioners to create authentic experiences that seek to bridge the theory-to-practice divide. One mechanism to achieve this is through quality mentorship by school- and central-office-based personnel during the internship experience. A central aspect of this professional relationship is the ability for the mentor to provide access to quality activities that will prepare the aspiring leader for his/her first administrative position. This exploratory study examined language utilized by interns in their time logs as well as information gleaned from preliminary surveys of both interns and mentors upon completion of their experience. Findings revealed the complexity of language analysis and revealed a need for understanding activities of interns and interactions with mentors in a contextual fashion.     

Contraction: implications for school leaders

Ackoff's circular structure has been successfully utilised to combine hierarchy and democracy in various industries. This paper argues that this structure is the most appropriate democratic structure for the internal governance of public schools. It concludes that a circularity of power relations between administrators and teachers would create genuinely empowering teacher participation, improve co‐ordination, foster teacher self‐actualisation and expressiveness, alleviate teacher shortages, help attract high quality persons to teaching careers, ensure appropriate (service oriented) teacher supervision, and increase the number of successful school improvement projects.     

Approaching Participation in School-Based Mathematics as a Cross-Setting Phenomenon

This article reports on an ethnographic study of a 10-year-old's pursuit of school-based mathematics across school and home to suggest that participating in school-based mathematics is a cross-setting phenomenon in at least 2 ways. First, I illustrate how accomplishing school-based mathematics literally extends into the home and how individuals recruit resources from their histories of participation in alternative settings to accomplish the work of school-based mathematics. Second, I show how a youth's social identification in the classroom is shaped by his teacher's partial accounts of how learning is arranged for in the home. Approaching participation in school-based mathematics as a cross-setting phenomenon illustrates the complexity inherent in participating in schooling and raises questions about how to coordinate schooling across school and home settings.     

Transfer Student Success: Exploring Community College,University, and Individual Predictors

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates community college transfer success by exploring the relationship between individual and institutional-level characteristics at students’ two- and four-year institutions. Using statewide administrative data from North Carolina, this study employs a cross-classified multilevel model to investigate the impact that a student’s community college and four-year transfer institution have on post-transfer success. Our findings offer important and compelling insights into the relationship between transfer students, the community college they attended, the four-year transfer institution, and educational outcomes. While individual effects were small, we find several institutional factors associated with student success. Attendance at a large community college or having a public university in the same county as their community college is positively associated with student success, whereas size of the university is negatively related to grades during the first year and persistence to the second year. While the four-year institution’s selectivity is negatively related to many of our outcomes, transferring to a Historically Black College or University is positively associated with GPA, college persistence, and degree completion.     

New modeling approach of secondary control layer for autonomous single-phase microgrids

In a microgrid (MG) topology, the secondary control is introduced to compensate for the voltage amplitude and frequency deviations, mainly caused by the inherent characteristics of the droop control strategy. This paper proposes an accurate approach to derive small signal models of the frequency and amplitude voltage at the point of common coupling (PCC) of a single-phase MG by analyzing the dynamics of the second-order generalized integrator-based frequency-locked loop (SOGI-FLL). The frequency estimate model is then introduced in the frequency restoration control loop, while the derived model of the amplitude estimate is introduced for the voltage restoration loop. Based on the obtained models, the MG stability analysis and proposed controllers’ parameters tuning are carried out. Also, this study includes the modeling and design of the synchronization control loop that enables a seamless transition from island mode to grid-connected mode operation. Simulation and practical experiments of a hierarchical control scheme, including traditional droop control and the proposed secondary control for two single-phase parallel inverters, are implemented to confirm the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposal under different operating conditions. The obtained results validate the proposed modeling approach to provide the expected transient response and disturbance rejection in the MG.     

The “Wicked Problem” of Neutral Description: Toward a Documentation Approach to Metadata Standards

Increasingly, metadata standards have been recognized as constructed rather than neutral. In this article, we argue for the importance of a documentation approach to metadata standards creation as a codification of this growing recognition. By making design decisions explicit, the documentation approach dispels presumptions of neutrality and, drawing on the “wicked problems” theoretical framework, acknowledges the constructed nature of standards as “clumsy solutions.”     

Identification of the optimal faculty behaviors for performance improvement in distance education

Asia Pacific Education Review - The current study reports the findings of the first step of a comprehensive performance improvement study, identification of the optimal behaviors. In this sense,...     

Testing and ideology: policy debates about literacy assessments for Colorado’s bilingual students

ABSTRACT

The Colorado Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act requires grade-level attainment in literacy in English for students in grades K-3. Its practical outcome, however, has been to pressure schools with bilingual programs to shift their instructional language allocations towards more English in the early grades. Proposed rule revisions debated by the state Board of Education sought to facilitate testing in students’ language of instruction for those in bilingual programs. Analysis of written and verbal opposition to the proposed rule revisions demonstrates the persistence of insidious ethnoculturalist discourses opposing bilingual education as well as the cooptation of liberal multiculturalist discourses that, while framing bilingualism as an asset, argue that it is underdeveloped in bilingual programs that do not include English instruction from the outset. Given that bilingual instruction has demonstrated time and again that it benefits students acquiring English in schools, such new discursive turns pose a threat that must be recognized to fend off further legislative and regulatory attempts against bilingual education.     

Personality as a Predictor of First‐Semester Adjustment to College: The Mediational Role of Perceived Social Support

Personality was hypothesized to predict college adjustment because of the role of perceived social support. A sample of 111 freshmen completed measures of personality, perceived social support, and college adjustment twice in their 1st semester. Perceived social support mediated the relationships between 3 personality factors (Emotional Stability, Social Boldness, and Abstractedness) and college adjustment, highlighting perceived social support as a point of intervention to improve 1st‐semester students' college adjustment.