Persistence to Graduation among At‐Risk Criminal Justice and Criminology Students: Experiences in Intervening with a Sophomore Cohort∗

A Seminar targeting academically at‐risk sophomores was developed and introduced in 2002 to address weak connectedness to the university and poor academic abilities. We measured changes in approaches taken to college studies by those at‐risk sophomores who enrolled in the course, as well as employed a longitudinal, quasi‐experimental design to track this experimental group (n = 29) and the remainder of the at‐risk cohort as a comparison group (n = 36). Our preliminary findings suggest that the Seminar has had a variety of positive outcomes, the most impressive impact being that the experimental group had dramatically better retention and graduation rates than the comparison group.     

Becoming Co-Authors: Toward Sharing Authority in Religious Education

This article offers an alternative model, the model of shared authority, to the traditional, authoritarian model for authority and obedience for Religious Education. This model moves away from the authoritarian model of a teacher as the authority and the students as obedient listeners in the direction of a shared authority model in which teachers and students participate in learning as partners, in other words, “to become co-authors.”     

New Vision and Challenges in Inquiry-Based Curriculum Change in Singapore

A new primary science syllabus with strong inquiry focus has been implemented in Singapore since 2008. In this study, we attempted to understand how teachers experience the emphasis of inquiry-based curriculum under the current educational conditions that is routined and highly teacher fronted. We invited 50 pre-service and 41 in-service teachers to participate in survey questionnaires and narratives, reflective writings, and group discussions related to science inquiry which formed our data corpus. Data analysis in the form of thematic coding was carried out using NVivo8, with over 80% inter-rater coding agreement level. Three key aspects of teachers’ perceptions of science inquiry were revealed: (1) teachers’ responsibilities as facilitators, (2) privileging content knowledge rather than process skills, and (3) pressure of assessment systems in current educational contexts. These understandings bring out conflicts of inquiry teaching between teacher- and student-centredness, content and process, and curriculum and assessment. Based on these teachers’ perceptions and dilemmas of inquiry science teaching, the visions and challenges of inquiry science curriculum change against assessment requirements are discussed.