Internal Party Bulletin or Paper of the Working Class Movement?

On 1 January 1930 the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) new daily newspaper, the Daily Worker, was published for the first time. It was heralded by the CPGB as a maturing of the British Communist movement, and an opportunity for the Party to spread its message to a much wider audience than previous weekly newspapers would allow. With leading Party members in control of the paper, the Daily Worker was very much a Party newspaper; however, the CPGB wanted it to be much more than an internal bulletin. This paper examines the attempts by the CPGB to create a newspaper that spoke both for and with the voice of the working-classes, whilst also spreading the Party's message. It will ultimately conclude that the CPGB's depiction of it as a paper ‘by the working-classes, for the working-classes’ reflected the Party's efforts at locating its own place within the working-class movement.     

“It’s kind of like an assault,you know”: media resisters’ meta-decoding practices of media culture

ABSTRACT

Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/decoding” essay sparked an on-going focus in media studies on reception and audience studies that remains theoretically robust today. Hall’s insight that audience members decode media content in multiple ways, some in line with the dominant cultural ideology and some resistant to that ideology, illuminates the phenomenon of media resistance. Media resisters significantly limit their media consumption and they do so based on their decodings of media culture—decodings, or readings, that resist normative messages about commercialism and consumption, about the natural diffusion and inherent benefits of mobile technologies and social media, and about the political landscape depicted and generated by news media. Hall’s encoding/decoding model is expanded here to include not only audiences’ decodings of specific content, but of media culture broadly. Concerns about media culture in the aggregate lead to media resisters’ practices of limiting media engagement, practices themselves that are counter hegemonic.     

Mentoring pathways program for first-year education doctor of education students: perspectives of a program redesigned for sustainability

ABSTRACT

Education doctoral (EdD) students face unique challenges to complete a doctorate as scholar-practitioners. An EdD mentoring pathways program for first year EdD students to receive support and advice from fellow colleagues and graduates of the doctoral program to successfully complete the degree at a mid-sized, midwestern university was initially implemented in the 2016–2017 academic year. In order to sustain the EdD mentoring pathways program, the program was redesigned and studied for sustainability the following year for first year EdD students (mentees). To better understand mentees’ perspectives of the mentoring pathways program, mentees participated in pre- and post-surveys, an interview, and a focus group during the 2017–2018 academic year. Themes emerged from quantitative and qualitative data and include: (a) mentees view mentors as successful role models and resources; (b) mentees used the mentoring program to connect with one another; and (c) mentees desire more access to and advice from mentors.     

A Framework for Evaluating Implementation of Community College Workforce Education Partnerships and Programs

Greater investments in community college workforce education are fostering large-scale partnerships between employers and educators. However, the evaluation work in this area has focused on outcome and productivity metrics, rather than addressing measures of implementation quality, which is critical to scaling any innovation. To deepen understanding of the field, sound metrics need to be assembled of the processes involved in workforce education (e.g., partnering with employers, designing and delivering instruction). This article addresses that gap with the Workforce Education Implementation Evaluation (WEIE) framework. Relying on five case studies of employer-community college collaborations, and drawing on labor-market analysis methods, partnership capital and regional ecosystem theory, and the learning sciences, the WEIE framework provides tools to characterize implementation quality. To illustrate how it works, we have applied the framework to two contrasting cases that represent the predominant approaches to engaging employers in workforce education programming: large-scale partnership and employer outreach.     

UK parents’ beliefs about applied behaviour analysis as an approach to autism education

Research into factors underlying the dissemination of evidence-based practice is limited within the field of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA). This is pertinent, particularly in the UK where national policies and guidelines do not reflect the emerging ABA evidence base, or policies and practices elsewhere. Theories of evidence-based practice in education and policy suggest that decision makers’ ‘perceptions’ of evidence are significant factors in dissemination. For professionals, scientific evidence is often critical. For others, including parents, experiential and anecdotal evidence can be as important. Within autism education, parents are often, and not necessarily by choice, key decision makers. This study is the first to try to identify and quantify UK parents’ beliefs about ABA in the education and support of children with autism. We developed and tested, using an internet survey method, the Parental Beliefs about ABA and Autism scale (P-BAA). Current and/or past use by parents of any behaviorally based approach including ABA was a significant predictor of P-BAA scores as were parent education, household income and child diagnosis: experience of a behaviorally based approach, higher levels of education and income and children at the more ‘severe’ end of the autism spectrum were associated with more positive beliefs about ABA.     

“I’m Being a Man Here”: Urban Boys’ Performances of Masculinity and Engagement With Science During a Science Museum Visit

The importance of increasing and widening participation in post-compulsory science and informal science learning (ISL) spaces is widely recognized—particularly for working-class and minority ethnic communities. While there is a growing understanding of the intersection of femininity with class, ethnicity, and science learning across formal and informal settings, there has been little work on how masculinity may shape urban boys’ science (non)participation and (dis)engagement. This article analyzes performances of masculinity enacted by 36 urban, working-class boys (from diverse ethnic backgrounds) during school science museum visits, exploring how these performances relate to science identity and engagement. We identify three main performances of masculinity enacted during the visits (“laddishness,” “muscular intellect,” and “translocational masculinity”), and trace the implications of each for boys’ science engagement. We consider the power implications of these performances, notably the extent to which hegemonic masculinity is normalized within the science museum space, the ways in which this normalization is co-constitutive of the boys’ performances of masculinity, and the implications of the boys’ performances of masculinity for other students (notably girls and less dominant boys). The article concludes with implications for research, policy, and practice regarding how to promote equitable participation and science learning within ISL.     

Knowing about Guessing and Guessing about Knowing: Preschoolers' Understanding of Indeterminacy

In this article we investigate preschool children's understanding of indeterminacy by examining their ability to distinguish between determinate situations—in which the available evidence eliminates all uncertainty about an outcome—and indeterminate situations—in which it does not. We argue that a full understanding of indeterminacy requires the coordination of 3 processes: search, evaluation , and mapping . We describe 3 experiments aimed at discovering the extent to which these processes, each of which has been implicated in previous accounts of indeterminate reasoning, are developed in preschoolers and the extent to which different children organize the processes into different strategies. Experiment 1 examines 5-year-olds' performance on 1- versus 2-solution problems having different configurations of irrelevant information. Experiments 2 and 3 extend the possible sources of indeterminacy from 2 to 4 and vary the amount of consistent, inconsistent, and to-be-discovered evidence. Our results show that 4- and 5-year-old children readily give "Can tell" responses to determinate problems, as well as "Can't tell" responses when they think that the evidence warrants such a response. In addition, we report 2 new findings: ( a ) different children use different strategies to process determinate evidence, and these strategies, in turn, predict their performance on indeterminate problems; ( b ) evidence patterns in which a single positive instance is contrasted with 1 or more negative or unknown instances are particularly difficult to resolve. Many children use a decision rule—the Positive Capture rule—that produces consistent errors on this type of problem.     

THE ROLE OF AN ITV EDUCATION OFFICER

The author describes her twofold role as education officer of an independent television company with a large area of responsibility and scattered population: an education officer's contribution to the production of material and to liaison with schools and the public, is outlined.     

Mixed methods,mixed outcomes? Combining an RCT and case studies to research the impact of a training programme for primary school science teachers

A randomised controlled trial (RCT) and a series of case studies were used to determine the impact of two variants of an intervention (a professional development programme) aimed at improving primary school science teachers’ subject and pedagogic content knowledge, and enhancing their subject leadership ability. Ninety-six schools were randomly assigned to full or partial treatment groups or a ‘business-as-usual’ control group. Quantitative data were collected from teachers and pupils through an assessment of scientific knowledge based on standardised assessment items. Qualitative data were collected through interviews and lesson observation initially in thirty case study schools. There were three data collection points: pre- and post-intervention, and one year later.

[Guskey, T. (1986). Staff development and the process of teacher change. Educational Researcher, 15(5), 5–12.] Levels of Professional Development Evaluation model was used as the analysis framework. The quantitative data from the teachers’ subject knowledge assessment indicated neither the full nor the partial training programmes had a statistically significant impact on teachers’ performance. In contrast, the qualitative data suggested that many teachers in the full treatment group believed that their subject knowledge had improved and reported increased confidence in their teaching of science. Lesson observations provided corroborating evidence of change in teachers’ practice, and some modest evidence of wider change in schools. There was no statistically significant improvement in pupil performance in subject knowledge assessments when teachers had participated in the intervention. In the context of research methods, the study suggests that a mixed-methods approach to evaluation is likely to yield a more rounded and nuanced picture of the overall impact of an intervention.     

Gender Bias in Predicting College Academic Performance: A New Approach Using Item Response Theory

The possibility of differential prediction of college academic performance for men and women is, at present, an issue of concern both to measurement specialists and to the general public. In prior studies, the use of a single equation to predict grade point average (GPA) from preadmissions measures has generally led to the systematic underprediction of women's college grades. In the following study, Item Response Theory (IRT) was used to develop a form of adjusted cumulative GPA, called the IRT-based GPA. Significant underprediction for women occurred using a version of the cumulative GPA as the outcome measure. In contrast, the use of the IRT-based GPA indicated no significant underprediction for men or women. A single regression equation worked best in predicting both men's and women's IRT-based GPA. In addition, the IRT-based GPA was substantially more predictable from preadmissions measures than the cumulative GPA.