Factors affecting the performance and satisfaction of adult men and women attending college

Questionnaire data collected from male and female university students 25 years of age or older were used to investigate correlates of their performance, satisfaction, and adjustment in college. Men reported lower levels of performance and satisfaction. Multiple regression analyses of predictors of college grade-point average, satisfaction with college, and affective changes occurring while in college indicated that these three measures were predicted by demographic variables, by aspects of the college experience, by the external out-of-college responsibilities of these students, and by their goals. Each of the three dependent measures was predicted by a different subset of these variables.     

THE EFFECTS OF MIDDLE SCHOOL BULLYING AND VICTIMIZATION ON ADJUSTMENT THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL: GROWTH MODELING OF ACHIEVEMENT,SCHOOL ATTENDANCE,AND DISCIPLINARY TRAJECTORIES

The current 5‐year longitudinal study examined the effects of middle school bullying and victimization on adolescent academic achievement, disciplinary referrals, and school attendance through high school (N = 2030; 1016 both boys and girls). Greater engagement in bullying behaviors was concurrently associated with lower achievement and school attendance for girls and higher levels of disciplinary problems, and, for girls, predicted increases in disciplinary referrals through high school. Victimization was unrelated to school adjustment difficulties when controlling for bullying. Moreover, academic achievement was longitudinally associated with disciplinary referrals and school attendance. These findings outline concurrent school adjustment difficulties associated with engagement in bullying behavior, the longer‐term behavioral ramifications for girls, and the relations of behavioral and academic development from middle school to high school.     

Inequality – ‘wicked problems’, labour market outcomes and the search for silver bullets

In recent years concerns about inequality have been growing in prominence within UK policy debates. The many causes of inequality of earnings and income are complex in their interactions and their tendency to reinforce one another. This makes inequality an intractable or ‘wicked’ policy problem, particularly within a contemporary context in which many of the established policy responses from previous eras are at best discussed in muted terms and more normally deemed to be unavailable. This reflects the eclipse of ‘equality of outcome’ models and the concomitant rise of ‘equality of opportunity’ as the new policy mantra from Thatcher onwards. As traditional policy responses have withered, the role of education and training as a ‘silver bullet’ that can address a host of economic and social challenges has come to the fore. This article outlines policy makers’ beliefs that improving the educational attainment of students from lower socio-economic backgrounds can enable them to compete more effectively for elite jobs, and also that increasing the supply of educated employees can transform the level of demand for skills from employers. These beliefs are then critiqued, with reference to occupational congestion, over-qualification and the evidence that skills supply does not always create its own demand.     

Talking Smack: Verbal Aggression in Professional Wrestling

The current study presents the results of a content analysis of the verbal aggression found in 36 hours of televised professional wrestling. The coding scheme was adapted from the National Television Violence Study and past research on television verbal aggression. Results show that an abundance of verbal aggression occurs in televised professional wrestling, with swearing, competence attacks, and character attacks being the most common types. In addition, the primary motives for verbal aggression use are amusement and anger. Furthermore, verbal aggression tends to be communicated and received by White, male individuals with no clear dispositional characteristics. The results are discussed in terms of potential effects of exposure to the verbal aggression found in professional wrestling.     

Dangerous learning in edgy contexts: creativity and innovation in the South African arts domain

In this paper, we outline a pilot project aimed at exploring the role of contextual factors in the facilitation of creativity and innovation within a range of South African art forms. Interviews with 11 people who have rich experience of the South African art domain delivered an insightful perspective on the contextual factors driving lifelong creativity and its continuous realization in innovative outcomes within these art forms.     

The learner experience of Curriculum 2000: implications for the reform of 14–19 education in England

In September 2000, new qualifications for 16–19 year olds, known as Curriculum 2000, were introduced in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland with the aim of broadening the advanced level curriculum. It was left to schools, colleges, and their learners, however, to decide how these new qualifications would be used to build learner programmes of study. In this voluntarist context, the views and actions of learners have been an important factor in determining the course of the reforms. This article, which is based primarily on a study of 42 learners in a school/college consortium in the south west of England, provides a chronological account of learner experiences of these reforms during their first 2 years of implementation. The consortium discussed here offered a high‐volume study programme similar in size and content to those being proposed by the Tomlinson Working Group on 14–19 curriculum and qualifications reform in England. Learners found their expanded programmes onerous, due in part to the nature of the new qualifications and in part to the context of their implementation. The article concludes by identifying a number of policy lessons for 14–19 reform arising from this research.     

New Labour's cultural turn: some tensions in contemporary educational and cultural policy

The election of a Labour government in Britain, after 18 years of Conservative rule, has seen the emergence of a new educational discourse, based on a distinctive combination of cultural, economic and social themes. In this article, we identify the components of the discourse, and explore how it is currently deployed in arguments for educational change. Specifically, our focus is on two recent documents: All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (NACCCE 1999), produced by an Advisory Committee appointed by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS); and Making Movies Matter (FEWG 1999) by the Film Education Working Group, set up by the British Film Institute at the request of the DCMS. Embodying in separate ways the features of the emergent discourse, these texts also position themselves very differently in relation to current educational policy. Through a critique of the reports, we identify some of the broader difficulties of the ‘cultural turn’ in education, and the possibility of a more productive alternative.     

Making the case for a material-dialogic approach to science education

ABSTRACT

Science is concerned with understanding the world. As such, engaging with the materiality of that world is integral to both empirical experimentation and theorising within science. However, it has been recognised for some time that the way scientists learn about the world and the way that young people learn about science cannot be simply equated. This difference has been pronounced in recent decades by the dominance of constructivist and social-constructivist theories of learning, which focus on the development of concepts in the minds of people. Whilst these theories have yielded insight into the complexity of learning, the role of the material remains undertheorised, not only within practical science inquiry, but also in relation to the broader materiality of classrooms. Through a detailed critical literature review, this paper demonstrates the need for a stronger theoretical frame through which to understand the role of the material in the learning and pedagogy of science. Building upon the gaps and possibilities that this review reveals, we outline a new material-dialogic theory via a synthesis of Barad’s Agential Realism and Bakhtinian dialogic theory. The significance of this paper lies in offering a theoretical basis for more effective practice.     

Middle years and middle schools: an analysis of national policy

The terms ‘primary education’ and ‘primary schools’ were in use long before 1945. However, it was not until 1 April 1945 that primary education became the first of three statutory stages of the English education system. At that time, primary education faced an uncertain future because of the enormous problems it had inherited from the elementary school tradition. This article charts the early challenges that were faced during the years of World War II and immediate post-war period.