From Public Education to Educational Publics

Students tend to comprehend little and lose focus of classroom instruction when their teachers fail to use instructional strategies that match students’ learning styles. Differentiated instruction can alleviate or eliminate this disengagement. This article describes a case involving a child having difficulty learning and shows how differentiated instruction was used to help this student learn. The author describes the theories on which differentiated instruction is based and provides practical strategies teachers can use to implement this method of teaching.     

Understanding Interdisciplinarity: Curricular and Organizational Features of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Programs

Though the number of interdisciplinary undergraduate programs has increased rapidly over the past several decades, little empirical research has characterized such programs. In this article we report on our investigation of the characteristics of interdisciplinary programs and develop typologies to describe the multiple ways in which such programs are structured with respect to curricular and organizational features. Using cluster analysis, we show differences in both curricular structures and organizational features across programs, irrespective of the program’s content focus. This typology will guide future research to explore differences in student learning outcomes across the interdisciplinary program types.     

Democratic Communities and Business/Education “Partnerships” in Secondary Education

Democratic ideals of equality, freedom, and common problem-solving help ensure that schools are governed as communities, in Dewey's sense of the term, wherein all members share in defining the purposes and processes of the group. In this paper, qualitative case study data of a business–public school partnership is examined in order to describe, analyze, and evaluate this partnership based upon democratic criteria established by Deweyan pragmatism. The analysis of the business/education partnership enables educators to better understand the potential for, and inhibitors of, the kind of genuine social growth among school and corporate partners that can serve public agendas rather than private profits.     

The Value of a Programme-wide Approach to Assessment

Reliability is important in the academic judgements that higher education institutions pass to employers, graduate schools and other stakeholders. However, there are well-known limits to the levels of reliability that can be reached at reasonable cost and without sacrificing validity. It is argued that a systemic approach to the assessment of student learning shows how resources may be freed up to invest in securing more reliable assessments where they are desirable and might reasonably be had.     

Treatment fidelity reporting in intervention outcome studies in the school psychology literature from 2009 to 2016

Both student outcomes and treatment fidelity data are necessary to draw valid conclusions about intervention effectiveness. Reviews of the intervention outcome literature in related fields, and prior reviews of the school psychology literature, suggest that many researchers failed to report treatment fidelity data. The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend previous reviews of treatment fidelity in four school psychology journals between 2009 and 2016. Results indicate that a plurality of studies reviewed operationally defined some, but not all intervention(s). Further, the majority of studies (72.8%) include a quantitative treatment fidelity data, a 35% increase from the Sanetti, Gritter and Dobey (2011) review of these same journals. Results also indicate many studies include data on multiple dimensions of fidelity. Of the multiple dimensions, adherence is (a) the most commonly reported dimension, (b) most often reported using a single index, (c) assessed using in vivo observation, and (d) high in a majority of studies. Further, results indicate some study and design characteristics are associated with the presence of operational definitions and treatment fidelity data.     

The WIL to learn: students’ perspectives on the impact of work-integrated learning placements on their professional readiness

ABSTRACT

Work-integrated learning (WIL) has assumed life as a central feature of higher education curriculum design in a wide range of disciplines with the ultimate goal of producing work-ready graduates. Under recent Australian government initiatives affecting teacher education, placement forms of WIL have been touted as the panacea for perceived problems with graduate teacher quality; resulting in the national regulation of placement design and length in this discipline. This article reports the findings of a qualitative study into the perspectives of fifteen teacher education students from one regional Australian university. The study investigated these students’ placement experiences and the impact of these experiences on their perceptions of readiness for a career in the teaching profession. Thematic analysis is the method used to identify two key themes in the data collected through semi-structured interviews. Despite recognising the benefits of real-world opportunities for skill development and practice inherent in WIL placement experiences, the study highlights important limitations of these forms of WIL on the development of professional readiness arising from the contextual features of particular placement sites; relationships with workplace supervisors and performance pressure associated with assessment during placements. These findings not only confirm the importance of social processes in the preparation of work-ready graduates but question reliance on placement forms of WIL learning for nurturing graduates’ readiness for professional work.