Doing ‘it’ differently: relinquishing the disease and pregnancy prevention focus in sexuality education

Despite policy provision enabling sexuality education to address more than disease and pregnancy prevention, this focus continues to permeate many school programmes. This paper problematises the danger prevention emphasis in sexuality education, examines school's investment in it and asks how useful it is. The ways this kind of sexuality education may inhibit the reduction of ‘negative’ sexual outcomes and fail to support young people's sexual well‐being is explored. Suggesting sexuality education might be conceptualisxed without this danger prevention emphasis necessitates an exploration of what might replace it. Foucault's work around an ethics of pleasure is drawn on as one example of how the objectives of sexuality education might be re‐envisaged.     

Exploring learning goals and assessment approaches for Indigenous health education: a qualitative study in Australia and New Zealand

In higher education, assessment is key to student learning. Assessments which promote critical thinking necessary for sustained learning beyond university are highly valued. However, the design of assessment tasks to achieve these types of thinking skills and dispositions to act in professional practice has received little attention. This research examines how academics design assessment to achieve these learning goals in Indigenous health education. Indigenous health education is an important area of learning for health practitioners to help address worldwide patterns of health inequities that exist for Indigenous people. We used a constructivist qualitative methodology to (i) explore learning goals and assessment strategies used in Indigenous health tertiary education and (ii) examine how they relate to higher education assessment ideals. Forty-one academics (from nine health disciplines) involved in teaching Indigenous health content participated in a semi-structured interview. Thematic analysis revealed learning goals to transform students’ perspectives and capacities to think critically and creatively about their role in Indigenous health. In contrast, assessment tasks encouraged more narrowly bounded thinking to analyse information about historical and socio-cultural factors contributing to Indigenous health. To transform students to be critical health practitioners capable of working and collaborating with Indigenous people to advance their health and well-being, the findings suggest that assessment may need to be nested across many aspects of the curriculum using a programmatic approach, and with a focus on learning to think and act for future practice. These findings accord with more recent calls for transformation of learning and assessment in health education.     

Attitudinal impact of hybridized writing about a socioscientific issue

The development of scientifically literate citizens remains an important priority of science education; however, growing evidence of students' disenchantment with school science continues to challenge the realization of this aim. This triangulation mixed methods study investigated the learning experiences of 152 9th grade students as they participated in an online science‐writing project on the socioscientific issue of biosecurity. Students wrote a series of hybridized scientific narratives, or BioStories, that integrate scientific information about biosecurity with narrative storylines. The students completed an online Likert‐style questionnaire, the BioQuiz, which examined selected aspects of their attitudes toward science and science learning, prior to their participation in the project, and upon completion of the writing tasks. Statistical analyses of these results and interview data obtained from participating students suggest that hybridized writing about a socioscientific issue developed more positive attitudes toward science and science learning, particularly in terms of the students' interest and enjoyment. Implications for research and teaching are also discussed. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 878–900, 2011     

Teachers and ICT: current use and future needs

In Scotland, ICT is clearly integral to the existing curriculum in primary and secondary education, see, for example, the 5–14 Development Programme or Higher Still in which information technology is identified as one of the core skills areas (HSDU, 1998). In light of current UK-wide developments such as the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) and the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) funded training in ICT for teachers and librarians, it is all the more important to understand teachers' ICT skills and knowledge needs, to discover their priorities for future development and to establish what will encourage teachers to adopt ICT where appropriate in their professional lives as classroom practitioners, as planners and managers and as learners. An investigation of the ICT skills and knowledge needs of teachers working in Scotland was therefore commissioned by the Scottish Office and completed by the authors. This paper reports on that study indicating relatively low use of ICT and a number of key issues which have implications for teacher training and development. The full report is available on the Scottish Executive website (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/).     

Do the Colors of Educational Number Tools Improve Children’s Mathematics and Numerosity?

This study examined how colored educational tools improve children’s numerosity (“number sense”) and/or mathematics. We tested children 6–10 years (n = 3,236) who had been exposed to colored numbers from the educational tools Numicon (Oxford University Press, 2018) or Numberjacks (Ellis, 2006), which map colors to magnitudes or Arabic numerals, respectively. In a free association task pairing numbers with colors, a subset of children spontaneously provided colors matching one of these schemas. These children, who had internalized Numicon (colored magnitude), showed significantly better numerosity but not mathematics compared to peers. There was no similar benefit from internalizing Numberjacks (colored numerals). These data support a model in which colored number tools provide benefits at different levels of numerical cognition, according to their different levels of cross-modal mappings.     

Interactivity reexamined: A baseline analysis of early business web sites

This study reexamined the concept of interactivity and proposed that interactivity be defined as the extent to which the communicator and the audience respond to each other's communication need. Interactivity was construed as consisting of five dimensions: 1) playfulness, 2) choice, 3) connectedness, 4) information collection, and 5) reciprocal communication. Web sites for products, services, and retail outlets appeared to differ significantly in terms of connectedness, information collection, and reciprocal communication.     

Webcasting Business Models of Clicks-and-Bricks and Pure-Play Media: A Comparative Study of Leading Webcasters in South Korea and the United States

This article identifies the business models of leading Webcasters in the United States and South Korea and proposes a cross-cultural framework to analyze the determinants of business models. The file transmission methods, content strategies, and revenue sources of clicks-and-bricks and pure-play Webcasters were compared in the study. After analyzing the business practices of 48 leading Webcasters--using a content analysis of their sites--we found that the content aggregator model and the branded content model are the 2 most commonly used business models of leading Webcasters in the United States and South Korea. Although clicks-and-bricks and pure-play Webcasters in both countries have a similar reliance on advertising as their major source of revenue, they employ different content strategies to their own media's advantages. Korean Webcasters are more likely to use pay-per-view as a revenue source than U.S. Webcasters.     

Beyond the birds and the bees: constituting a discourse of erotics in sexuality education

A tradition of predominately feminist literature has revealed that there is a ‘missing discourse of desire’ in many sex education programmes. Building on this work, this article explores the gendered effects of this de‐eroticized and clinical form of education. It is argued that young women and men's (hetero)sexual subjectivities are differentially affected by the invisibility of desire and pleasure in this curriculum. To offer young women a sense of personal empowerment and entitlement, and young men a broader range of (hetero)sexual subjectivities, it is proposed that sex education include a discourse of erotics. This would comprise more than an acknowledgement of desire and pleasure and incorporate the embodied practicalities of these experiences. As a means of developing this discourse within sexuality programmes, empirical evidence of 17‐ to 19‐year‐olds' experiences of desire and pleasure are examined.