Transaction and transformation at Trinity: private sponsorship,core values and Christian ethos at England's most improved academy

The Academies Programme in England, whereby new schools may be privately sponsored and managed but publicly funded, has expanded rapidly with over 200 academies already open before 2010 and many more likely given the education policies promoted by Michael Gove as Conservative Secretary of State for Education. A significant number of academies are sponsored by Christian organisations and this article draws upon the author's recent case study of Trinity Academy which has both a business sponsor and a Christian ethos. Trinity Academy, which is located at the heart of a former mining community in South Yorkshire and serves a social priority area with a history of educational underachievement, was designated ‘England's Most Improved Academy’ and the ‘Most Improved School in Yorkshire and Humberside’ just prior to the commencement of the research. In this article the contribution made by Trinity is assessed and the perspectives of sponsor, school leaders, teachers and 14‐year‐olds are evaluated. The concept of the ‘transaction’ to indicate exchange and interdependence informs both research design and analysis. The nature and quality of transactions between those who ‘author’ the authorised ‘texts’ of school life and the young people and teachers who ‘read’ and respond to these value‐laden ‘texts’ at Trinity Academy are reported. The conclusion is drawn that transactions between Trinity Academy's students, its ‘secular’ core values and its Christian ethos, and also between the public and private sectors, have supported an innovation in schooling that has transformed the opportunities and life‐chances of young people. Transactions such as those at Trinity are advocated as an ethical and socially just means of bringing about transformation in educational attainment while providing moral education that fosters autonomy and critical thinking.     

NSSE Benchmarks and Institutional Outcomes: A Note on the Importance of Considering the Intended Uses of a Measure in Validity Studies

Surveys play a prominent role in assessment and institutional research, and the NSSE College Student Report is one of the most popular surveys of enrolled undergraduates. Recent studies have raised questions about the validity of the NSSE survey. Although these studies have themselves been criticized, documenting the validity of an instrument requires an affirmative finding regarding the adequacy and appropriateness of score interpretation and use. Using national data from NSSE 2008, the present study found that the NSSE benchmarks provided dependable means for 50 or more students and were significantly related to important institutional outcomes such as retention and graduation rates.     

Phonological skills and comprehension failure: A test of the phonological processing deficit hypothesis

Shankweiler and colleagues argue that text comprehensionproblems in young children arise from phonological processingdifficulties. Their work has focused on children with poor wordreading ability. We investigated this hypothesis for children whoexperience comprehension difficulties in the presence of age-appropriate word reading skills. We found that good and poorcomprehenders performed comparably on various measures ofphonological processing and differed on a task that made greaterdemands on working memory, Bradley and Bryant's odd-word-outtask. In a final study, hierarchical regression analyses supportedthis distinction: the odd-word-out task was a strong predictor ofreading comprehension performance even after IQ, vocabulary and single word reading had been controlled for, but a lessmemory-dependent phonological task was not. These studiessupport previous work which indicates that poor comprehenders'problems arise from higher-level processing difficulties.     

Investigating the causes of reading comprehension failure: The comprehension-age match design

The reading-level (or reading-age) match design has become a widely-used tool for investigating the possible direction of the relation between particular skills and word reading ability: Cause or consequence. This paper outlines an analogous method for identifying candidate causes of reading comprehension failure, the `comprehension-age match design' and discusses the strengths and limitations of this design.     

The cultural value of heritage: evidence from the Heritage Lottery Fund

The Heritage Lottery Fund has, over the past 13 years, given £4billion to heritage projects of all kinds. As the Fund has matured a greater emphasis has been placed on the evaluation of the social and economic outcomes of this funding. In 2004 we reported on progress with evaluation of the programmes targeted at particular types of heritage (Clark, 2004 Clark, K. 2004. Why fund heritage? The role of research in the Heritage Lottery Fund. Cultural Trends, 52: 65–85.  [Google Scholar]). The greater challenge has been to evaluate the outcomes from the Fund's generic programmes, which can fund any type of heritage and which between them account for over two-thirds of total funding. This article reviews the Fund's experience over the last 3 years in developing and implementing an evaluation system using the Public (or Cultural) Value framework. It presents some initial results from the research so far completed and reviews how far the framework has been useful in suggesting research priorities and organizing findings.     

Discolouration of Gold Decorations

Discoloured 18-carat gold decorations from Sweden have been analysed by scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray electron spectroscopy (XPS)/electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis (electron spectroscopy).The original gold composition was close to 75% gold, 13% silver, and 12% copper. After manufacture, many details were boiled in sulphuric acid. As a consequence of this, the surfaces are irregular and porous with a gold concentration around 90% and with less than 1% copper. With XPS the outermost 10–20 atomic layers could be examined. No copper was present here, and the silver concentration was significantly higher. Also carbon, sulphur, oxygen, and (in one case) chlorine were present. The valence numbers indicated that gold only occurred in its metallic state, while silver (as Ag⁺) was preferably associated with sulphur to form black silver sulphide (Ag₂S). The grey discolorations are basically due to silver sulphide and organic dirt. Sometimes green, violet, and ‘copper-shining’ colours occur, presumably as a result of light refraction phenomena.