Conflicting issues in the Design of Safety Courses in Technology Partnership Schemes

The very short time now available in higher education institutions for the coverage of subject‐specific content in PGCE courses gives problems in ensuring adequate time for effective workshop safety training, especially for those students who will be responsible for the management of pupils in resistant materials workshops. The schedule prescribed by the National Association of Advisers and Inspectors in Design and Technology (NAAIDT) provides a recognised base for the content of such courses. This paper examines the theoretical issues involved, weighs conflicting demands and describes one solution found workable under the current NAAIDT scheme.     

10 School decentralization and empowerment

School results for children of poverty ‐ those forced by that poverty to live in inner‐city neighbourhoods ‐generally indicate educational failure at a much higher rate than is seen for students nurtured by wealthier school districts. This failure in school severely limits chances of social and economic upward mobility, which translates into a waste of human capital for the nation's business‐industrial‐political complex, and dashed hopes, dreams and self‐esteem for the individual. Parents and concerned citizens from across socio‐economic strata, long aware of the general inadequacy of schools in poor communities, have demanded improvement, often seeking it through legal and political means. Important strategies among the various federal, state and local school reform efforts to make schooling a meaningful process for all students, and particularly the minority poor, are decentralization and citizen/parent empowerment, the focus of this chapter. The movement to decentralize school governance ‐ an effort to place control into the hands of the people being served ‐ has gained momentum and exists in some form in most large‐city school districts today. An extension of administrative decentralization, citizen/parent empowerment is seen as one of several factors, including teacher and administrator preparation, curriculum renewal, school financing, and school restructuring, vital in the improvement of schools. A look at the meaning and scope of decentralization, operationalized through citizen/parent empowerment, and its probable effectiveness in improving school outcomes indicates that, alone, it is insufficient to ensure positive academic and social performance in school.     

Developing an Integrated Theory of Recall of Spot News Stories

In this article, a theory of the recall of spot news stories is developed from a large literature on psychological attention sets, principles of perception, cognitive processing, and patterns of distortion in recall and retelling. The theory consists of a set of 6 linked assumptions and a final inferred proposition. It describes the general nature of patterns of recall to be expected among individuals who attend to and retell a typical spot news story: Stories will be shortened, central and dramatic details will be retained, and in some cases, extraneous information will be incorporated. Previously unreported findings from an earlier experimental study of news recall are reviewed and offer support for the theory.     

Uses of history in present-day qualitative studies of schools: The case of the junior high school

This paper addresses the process of creating a historical context for a qualitative, micro-level study, focusing specifically on the case of the junior high middle school. The author reviews three qualitative junior high middle school studies and evaluates the usefulness and adequacy of the historical contexts the authors created to support their interpretations. In two cases, they relied primarily on historical accounts written by education professors in textbooks about the junior high school, which provided a limited point of view. A survey of historians' treatments of the junior high school provides more varied, complex, and theoretical interpretations. In the third case, the author conducted an original historical study to support his present-day qualitative work and his theoretical framework. However, this kind of effort to create an historical context may not be practical in all qualitative studies. Finally, the paper makes recommendations for the construction of adequate and meaningful historical contexts for qualitative studies.