Who says we are not attracting the best and brightest? Teacher selection and the aspirations of Australian school students

Internationally, the quality of teachers is a growing focus of educational reform, with new policies attempting to ensure that only the ‘best and brightest’ are selected for the teaching profession. This article tests the assumption underpinning these developments that prospective teachers lack the desired academic and personal qualities. Drawing on data on the career aspirations of 6492 Australian school students in Years 3–12, we investigated who, among these students, expressed interest in teaching and their reasons for doing so. Using logistic regression, we found that interest in teaching was widespread and prior academic achievement was not a significant predictor. Thematic analysis of reasons expressed for interest in teaching indicated that working with children and/or in specific subject areas, altruism, and perceptions of personal suitability for the job dominated student responses. These data provide a counter-narrative to the primacy, in policies for teacher recruitment and selection, of needing to attract ‘better’ students. We argue that policies for improving teacher quality should also capitalise on the widespread interest in teaching among school students. Without such a discursive broadening, we caution that current attempts to attract the ‘best and brightest’ risk undermining the very goals espoused.     

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN THE NEW UNIVERSITIES: HOW TO APPROACH HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

The view taken in this article is that Total Quality Management (TQM) in the new universities (the former Polytechnics) and the development of a so‐called managerialist ideology has led to the inevitable adoption of an approach to Human Resource Management (HRM) policy and practice that is functionalist. The criteria favoured by managerialism represented by TQM is not only inappropriate in higher education, but more importantly, it limits the productive activity of individuals. This limitation occurs to the extent that at the level of the individual academic in higher education organizations, quality control and assurance, that has traditionally been a localized process of self‐ and close‐peer review, has become formalized by externally imposed systems and procedures ‐ a necessary condition under the current funding arrangements for enabling internal quality assurance systems to meet the requirements of external agencies. However, the authors suggest that only a truly professionalizing, soft, individualistic, and user‐focussed collegial culture will provide a sufficient condition for total quality enhancement to become a reality.     

Evaluating metacognitive scaffolding in Guided Invention Activities

Invention and Productive Failure activities ask students to generate methods that capture the important properties of some given data (e.g., uncertainty) before being taught the expert solution. Invention and Productive Failure activities are a class of scientific inquiry activities in that students create, implement, and evaluate mathematical models based on data. Yet, lacking sufficient inquiry skills, students often do not actualize the full potential of these activities. We identified key invention strategies in which students often fail to engage: exploratory analysis, peer interaction, self-explanation, and evaluation. A classroom study with 134 students evaluated the effect of supporting these skills on the quality and outcomes of the invention process. Students in the Unguided Invention condition received conventional Invention Activities; students in the Guided Invention condition received complementary metacognitive scaffolding. Students were asked to invent methods for calculating uncertainties in best-fitting lines. Guided Invention students invented methods that included more conceptual features and ranked the given datasets more accurately, although the quality of their mathematical expressions was not improved. At the process level, Guided Invention students revised their methods more frequently and had more and better instances of unprompted self-explanations even on components of the activity that were not supported by the metacognitive scaffolding. Classroom observations are used to demonstrate the effect of the scaffolding on students’ learning behaviours. These results suggest that process guidance in the form of metacognitive scaffolding augments the inherent benefits of Invention Activities and can lead to gains at both domain and inquiry levels.     

Hierarchical Mentoring: A Transformative Strategy for Improving Diversity and Retention in Undergraduate STEM Disciplines

In the United States, less than half of the students who enter into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate curricula as freshmen will actually graduate with a STEM degree. There is even greater disparity in the national STEM graduation rates of students from underrepresented groups with approximately three-fourths of minority students leaving STEM disciplines at the undergraduate level. A host of programs have been designed and implemented to model best practices in retaining students in STEM disciplines. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professors Program at Louisiana State University, under leadership of HHMI Professor Isiah M. Warner, represents one of these programs and reports on a mentoring model that addresses the key factors that impact STEM student attrition at the undergraduate level. By integrating mentoring and strategic academic interventions into a structured research program, an innovative model has been developed to guide STEM undergraduate majors in adopting the metacognitive strategies that allow them to excel in their programs of study, as they learn to appreciate and understand science more completely. Comparisons of the persistence of participants and nonparticipants in STEM curricular, at the host university and with other national universities and colleges, show the impact of the model’s salient features on improving STEM retention through graduation for all students, particularly those from underrepresented groups.     

JOINT CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS OF THE WOODCOCK‐JOHNSON TESTS OF COGNITIVE ABILITIES,THIRD EDITION,AND THE STANFORD‐BINET INTELLIGENCE SCALES,FIFTH EDITION,WITH A PRESCHOOL POPULATION

This study examined the underlying constructs measured by the Woodcock‐Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities, Third Edition (WJ‐III COG) and the Stanford‐Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition (SB5), based on the Cattell‐Horn‐Carrol (CHC) theory of cognitive abilities. This study reports the results of the first joint confirmatory factor analysis of the WJ‐III COG and SB5 with an independently collected preschool‐aged sample. The WJ‐III COG and SB5 were administered to 200 preschool‐aged children of 4 to 5 with no known disorders or disabilities. Confirmatory factor analyses using maximum likelihood estimation were conducted to evaluate three models of increasing complexity and two alternative models to determine which model best describe the underlying constructs measured by the WJ‐III COG and the SB5. Though none of the models displayed a good fit to the data, results showed that the underlying construct of the two tests was best represented by a Three‐Stratum alternative CHC model in which the Gf factor and subtests were omitted. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to provide further insights into the actual latent structure underlying the data. Implications of findings to guide school‐based practitioners in using cross‐battery assessment with preschool children were addressed.