‘If there's a dead rat,don't leave it’. Young children's understanding of their citizenship rights and responsibilities

Concerns about pupil disengagement from school and society have led to compulsory citizenship education in state schools in England. However, there is little evidence that the new citizenship education is meeting its goals. The research described here assesses a new approach to citizenship education that appears to overcome some of the identified obstacles in current practices. Hampshire's ‘Rights, respect and responsibility’ initiative is a rights‐based whole school reform of school policies and practices. Under this initiative the contemporaneous citizenship status of pupils is respected, pupils are taught about their rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and democratic participation is made meaningful in classroom and school functioning. Of particular interest is that the initiative starts in infant schools. This research indicates that young children can understand their rights and responsibilities in ways that are meaningful to their everyday behaviour and that rights‐based whole school reform has the capacity to improve pupil learning and citizenship behaviours.     

Alternative education programmes and middle school dropout in Honduras

Honduras has made steady progress in expanding post-primary school coverage in recent years, but many rural communities still do not provide a middle (lower secondary) school. As a result, Honduras has implemented a number of middle school alternative programmes designed to meet the needs of at-risk populations throughout the country. This article analyses dropout in three of the four main alternative lower secondary school programmes in Honduras over a three-year period for a cohort of roughly 5,500 students. The results show that these programmes are indeed reaching a vulnerable population in the country, but dropout rates are generally very high – upwards of 50 per cent in some cases – between Grades 7 and 9. Furthermore, even in the control school comparison samples made up of formal lower secondary schools, about 25 per cent of children leave school between Grades 7 and 9. The authors’ analysis includes propensity score matching (PSM) methods that make more focused comparisons between students in alternative programmes and control samples. These results show that dropout rates in alternative programmes are not much different than in control schools, and only significant in one programme comparison, when taking into account family background characteristics like socioeconomic status (SES). Multivariate analysis within alternative programme samples finds that attrition is lower in those learning centres which have adopted key features of formal schools, such as university-educated teachers. The results highlight the tremendous variation in the alternative middle school sector in terms of programme features, school quality and student outcomes, as well as the challenges of expanding this sector to meet the growing demand for lower secondary schooling in Honduras.     

Concreteness Fading in Mathematics and Science Instruction: a Systematic Review

A longstanding debate concerns the use of concrete versus abstract instructional materials, particularly in domains such as mathematics and science. Although decades of research have focused on the advantages and disadvantages of concrete and abstract materials considered independently, we argue for an approach that moves beyond this dichotomy and combines their advantages. Specifically, we recommend beginning with concrete materials and then explicitly and gradually fading to the more abstract. Theoretical benefits of this “concreteness fading” technique for mathematics and science instruction include (1) helping learners interpret ambiguous or opaque abstract symbols in terms of well-understood concrete objects, (2) providing embodied perceptual and physical experiences that can ground abstract thinking, (3) enabling learners to build up a store of memorable images that can be used when abstract symbols lose meaning, and (4) guiding learners to strip away extraneous concrete properties and distill the generic, generalizable properties. In these ways, concreteness fading provides advantages that go beyond the sum of the benefits of concrete and abstract materials.