Compulsory citizenship for the disenfranchised: benchmarking students,schools, and social and political attitudes before the Citizenship Order

This article reviews the current state of the debate about the political orientation and social attitudes of young people. After cautioning against a pessimistic view of moral decline, the article reports the results from a survey of 1249 young people in Hertfordshire. While showing evidence of low levels of political knowledge, interest, trust and efficacy, the findings do not confirm a lack of engagement with the wider social world. They show that young people contribute to social capital, by volunteering, for example, and that young people have broadly developed moral awareness. We explore students' engagement in citizenship-type activities both within and outside school; the extent to which they have covered the citizenship National Curriculum in school; and the degree to which they are active participants in their school. Our findings are generally positive, identifying reasonably high levels of engagement and integration. In short, there is a base from which to develop curricular reforms to promote political education.     

A Controlled Evaluation of a High School Biomedical Pipeline Program: Design and Methods

Given limited funding for school-based science education, non-school-based programs have been developed at colleges and universities to increase the number of students entering science- and health-related careers and address critical workforce needs. However, few evaluations of such programs have been conducted. We report the design and methods of a controlled trial to evaluate the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program’s Summer Residential Program (SRP), a 25-year-old university-based biomedical pipeline program. This 5-year matched cohort study uses an annual survey to assess educational and career outcomes among four cohorts of students who participate in the SRP and a matched comparison group of applicants who were not chosen to participate in the SRP. Matching on sociodemographic and academic background allows control for potential confounding. This design enables the testing of whether the SRP has an independent effect on educational- and career-related outcomes above and beyond the effects of other factors such as gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, and pre-intervention academic preparation. The results will help determine which curriculum components contribute most to successful outcomes and which students benefit most. After 4 years of follow-up, the results demonstrate high response rates from SRP participants and the comparison group with completion rates near 90 %, similar response rates by gender and ethnicity, and little attrition with each additional year of follow-up. This design and methods can potentially be replicated to evaluate and improve other biomedical pipeline programs, which are increasingly important for equipping more students for science- and health-related careers.     

An assessment model and methods for evaluating distance education programmes

This paper is adapted from a keynote address given to the AUA Annual Conference, held at Warwick 14–16 March 2005     

“Hit and Run Research” with “Hit and Miss” Results in Early Childhood Science Education

Research in Science Education - Constructivism has provided us with a useful pedagogy and a powerful methodological framework for over twenty years. We now know a great deal about children's...     

Effect of pictures on children’s comprehension of written text

Studies have shown that under certain conditions pictures can facilitate young children’s oral prose comprehension. Can pictures also aid comprehension when the information is presented in written form rather than orally? If so, what kinds of pictures, under what conditions? These experimenters analyzed a prose passage into 350 idea units, then interspersed throughout the text pictures depicting either the 179 main ideas or both the main ideas and the 171 nonessential details, or included no pictures. The subjects, fourth and sixth graders, wrote down all they could remember of the story immediately and again 5 days later. Pictures did facilitate both immediate and delayed recall, but only of the main ideas.     

A cross-cultural study of rural Australian Aboriginal children's undertanding of night and day

Traditional stories are told to many Aboriginal children about night and day throughout Australia. Do these stories influence their scientific thinking? Are there other cultural practices which may influence children's undertandings in science? This paper details a pilot study which sought to find out what four-to-eight year old rural Australian Aboriginal children from central New South Wales think about night and day (N=15). The research design was consistent with previous mainstream cross-cultural studies (Thijs &; Van Den Berg, 1995), but more culturally inclusive in its implementation. The findings raise serious questions about the framing of cross-cultural research and the realisation of indigenous data.