Academic attitudes toward new media: An exploratory multidisciplinary study

This article looks at the attitudes of UK academics toward new media, utilizing organizational and sociocultural understandings of fields of scholarly enquiry. It focuses on four traditionally distinct disciplines—art and design, computer science, health science, and politics and international relations—representative of the range of approaches in higher education. Agreement was found among respondents across disciplinary communities about what new media represent and how they support their work. Analysis of semantic differential charts identified two dimensions underlying attitudes—“flexibility” and “fitness for scholarly purposes.” Rather than being anchored by epistemological divisions, new media are assessed by practical viewpoints relating to the activity types they allow, and by traditional measures of reliability. In response to questions about other characteristics of their disciplines (such as reputation and audience diversity), distinctions are in evidence, although in some cases these are not traditional ones.     

Wonderful secrets of nature. Natural knowledge and religious piety in Reformation Germany

Sixteenth-century Germany witnessed a tremendous flourishing of vernacular literature. An unprecedented number and variety of texts were produced for new groups of readers. This essay analyzes one underexplored genre of this vernacular literature: texts on the natural world. Numerous books on animals, plants, minerals, and natural marvels rolled off the German presses in this period, indicating a widespread curiosity about the natural world. These texts give valuable insight into the views of nature available to a broad lay audience, literate in German but not necessarily in Latin. They reveal a pervasive sense of nature as divinely created and a deep conviction that contemplation of the natural world would lead to greater piety. The divine and the mundane were thoroughly intertwined in vernacular natural histories. While other historians of science have seen the sixteenth century as a period of increasingly secular ways of thinking about nature, I argue for the persistence, and even the intensification, of profoundly religious attitudes toward the natural world.     

Girls' secondary education in Uganda: assessing policy within the women's empowerment framework

This paper makes the case that policies, such as the National Strategy for Girls' Education in Uganda (NSGE), intended to achieve gender equity in education for girls in developing countries, have limited relevance to, and impact on girls' actual educational experiences. Recent considerations of girls' education acknowledge that gender equity within education is more than access to schooling; it entails the cultivation of capabilities necessary for girls to participate fully, actively and equally in all aspects of their societies. Drawing on a longitudinal, ethnographic policy research case study with 15 Ugandan schoolgirls in rural Masaka District, Uganda, from August 2004 to September 2006, I explore the girls' educational experiences in relationship to the NSGE. I employ the Women's Empowerment Framework (WEF) to evaluate the NSGE with respect to the extent to which its interventions are ‘empowering’ for girls.     

Double jeopardy: poorer social-emotional outcomes for children in the NICHD SECCYD experiencing home and child-care environments that confer risk

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network (NICHD SECCYD), the authors examined whether interactions between home and child-care quality affect children's social-emotional adjustment at 24, 36, and 54 months (N = 771). Triadic splits on quality of home and child care were used to examine children in specific ecological niches, with a focus on those who experience the double jeopardy of poor quality home and child-care environments. Children in this niche exhibited the highest levels of mother-reported problem behavior and the lowest levels of prosocial behavior. However, there was evidence that children from lower quality home environments were able to benefit from the compensatory influence of high-quality child care. These results suggest policies aimed at the cross-context influences of protective and risky settings.     

ACHIEVING PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of constitutional principles as well as to the more local engagements with multiple publics. Knight Abowitz sketches this bifocal nature, exploring both the unitary ideal and its parameters, as well as the less understood forms of multiple, organic publics that come into being in response to localized problems in schools or districts. These publics often fail to realize their potential in the development of increased capacity for enhanced teaching and learning. The essay ultimately points to a practical application: that educational leadership of all types, and with some very specific kinds of habits and skills, is needed to help achieve public schools.     

Videobased lesson analysis: Effective science PD for teacher and student learning

The Science Teachers Learning from Lesson Analysis (STeLLA) project is a videobased analysis‐of‐practice PD program aimed at improving teacher and student learning at the upper elementary level. The PD program developed and utilized two “lenses,” a Science Content Storyline Lens and a Student Thinking Lens, to help teachers analyze science teaching and learning and to improve teaching practices in this year‐long program. Participants included 48 teachers (n = 32 experimental, n = 16 control) and 1,490 students. The STeLLA program significantly improved teachers' science content knowledge and their ability to analyze science teaching. Notably, the STeLLA teachers further increased their classroom use of science teaching strategies associated with both lenses while their students increased their science content knowledge. Multi‐level HLM analyses linked higher average gains in student learning with teachers' science content knowledge, teachers' pedagogical content knowledge about student thinking, and teaching practices aimed at improving the coherence of the science content storyline. This paper highlights the importance of the science content storyline in the STeLLA program and discusses its potential significance in science teaching and professional development more broadly. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., J Res Sci Teach 48: 117–148, 2011     

Poverty,family resources and children's early educational attainment: The mediating role of parenting

This study uses longitudinal data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study to show the extent to which episodic and more persistent poverty in early childhood and the lack of other family resources disadvantage children at the start of their school careers in terms of whether they have achieved the target indicator of ‘good level of achievement’ on the Foundation Stage Profile. Positive parenting is shown to be an important contributor to school achievement that matters for children, regardless of poverty experience or family disadvantage. It is also shown to be an important mediator in redressing the effects of poverty and disadvantage.