Transition of students with autistic spectrum disorders from primary to post‐primary school: a framework for success

The purpose of this research was to investigate best practice in relation to the planning, process and strategies that support the transition of students with ASD from primary to post‐primary school. A questionnaire survey was sent to graduates of a postgraduate Certificate/Diploma in SEN (ASD) in Ireland who were working in primary and post‐primary schools. Findings included strong oral communication between schools, transition programmes in many post‐primary schools, a variety of generic and ASD specific strategies in both primary and post‐primary schools and a large number of personnel involved in the transition process. Analysis of findings and current literature enabled the researchers to propose a framework that the Department of Education and Skills, support agencies and schools may use to examine practice in order to enhance the transition programmes based on students' needs, the profile of the school and its community.     

Do 45% of College Students Lack Critical Thinking Skills? Revisiting a Central Conclusion of Academically Adrift

The educational literature, the popular press, and educated laypeople have all echoed a conclusion from the book Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (which has now become received wisdom), namely, that 45% of college students showed no significant gains in critical thinking skills. Similar results were reported by Pascarella, Blaich, Martin, and Hanson after the publication of Arum and Roksa's book in 2011. However, these authors' statistical tests were conducted incorrectly, and therefore this 45% finding is fundamentally untrue. We demonstrate that a correct statistical analysis would have found that far fewer students show significant gains in critical thinking. However, this does not reflect on student learning; instead, it reflects on how hard it is to find a statistically significant result when assessing student change on a student‐by‐student basis. This article discusses valid methods for testing the significance of gain scores of individual students.     

Prisoners of our own perspectives: recasting action research in modern/postmodern times

The case that contemporary social theories such as postmodernism can be used in the reflection stage of Action research is the central theme of this paper. Using the modern/ postmodern couplet, the paper attempts to challenge the Action researcher who is prepared to acknowledge the value of alternative views.     

Race and the Educated Imagination: Outlining a Pedagogy of Belonging

Abstract

A teaching life can be a powerful intervention into the structures of racial antagonism that shape the West, but only if we can find a way to overturn our colonial legacies and draw the dominant trajectories of Western educational institutions toward more life giving ends. A life that teaches in this racially agonistic moment must be angled in a new direction beyond simply building intellectual capacities, toward presenting an embodied desire to learn from and join others. To be teachers who live by faith at this moment is to be those who speak a word of belonging not simply by their words but by their lives.     

Finding,Serving, and Housing the Homeless: Using Collaborative Research to Prepare Social Work Students for Research and Practice

Social work plays a key role in engaging with clients and communities directly affected by housing insecurity and homelessness, and advocating for the right to safe and affordable housing. This article describes methodologies of the Point-in-Time Count and Homeless Management Information Systems and proposes strategies for integrating additional content around homelessness into the social work curriculum in research courses and beyond. This integration can meet student needs regarding experiential research, as well as agency and community needs for effective collection and use of data. A case example and proposed best practices describe opportunities for university–community collaborations in homelessness research.     

Challenges and possibilities of Holocaust education and critical citizenship: An ethnographic study of a fifth-grade bilingual class revisited

This classroom ethnography examines the engagement of fifth-grade children in a year-long study of rights, respect, and responsibility, which culminated in a focused study of tolerance and intolerance organized around literature regarding the Holocaust. A close examination of one teacher’s approach to teaching about the Holocaust, the study highlights the importance of long-term engagements, a layered curriculum that supports children in building understandings over time, and varied opportunities for making meaning together. This approach included empathy-building, a focus on rescue and resistance and the bystander response, building a knowledge base about the Holocaust, stories of individual experiences, and opportunities to make personal connections. Drawing on samples of student talk, writing, and art, the article illustrates how children built upon academic and social practices established from the first days of school to expand their repertoire of meanings, language, and actions of (in)tolerance, gaining more complex understandings of the social, political, and moral implications of the Holocaust. Students in this bilingual class also developed individual and social actions in speaking out against social injustice in their own communities. The author argues that this classroom experience supported students as critical citizens who conscientiously and compassionately participate in the day-to-day building of more equitable communities.