Where are we now in the economics of education?

This essay offers a bird's eye view of new directions in the economics of education. An increasing awareness of the socialization function of education, of the screening hypothesis, of the ‘incomplete’ employment contract and of labour market segmentation is leading, it is argued, to a picture of the economic value of schooling which is simply miles removed from the old-fashioned belief that education enhances cognitive knowledge and that employers pay educated people more because they know more. The new way of looking at the economic value of schooling is illustrated by the example of youth training and work experience programmes.     

Vivarium

This contribution is an introduction to an online forum, Vivarium, at the new open¦ed web site. The site will be accessible to an audience of: educationalists, artists, producers, development agencies and funding bodies. The forum will discuss the artist as educator, the culture of art in education, and explicitly Live Art as tool for rendering social issues for exploration in the classrooms of the future. In an era of global ecologies of information, offering users data on everything from hydroponics to Derrida's text The Truth in Painting, fertile knowledge is increasingly accessed through non‐hierarchical networks. In such a terrain, a new post‐pedagogical approach to creativity appears essential if we hope to excite, channel and challenge young people. This paper charts a series of critical issues that readers are invited to develop and discuss online, but perhaps more importantly signifies potential topics that might return in a series of subsequent dialogues commissioned by the Arts Council England for Vivarium. The broader aim of Vivarium is to create a context to frame potential initiatives that might be delivered through Creative Partnerships, the unprecedented Arts Council England initiative, promoting cultural and creative activity for young people.     

A method for personalising the blade size for competitors in flatwater kayaking

The intent of this project was to explore the feasibility of personalising the paddle blade size for individual flatwater kayakers based on their power output profiles. Twelve elite male kayakers performed on a kayak ergometer at the same intensity and resistance that they would normally experience while paddling at race pace for 500 m on the water. The kayak ergometer was instrumented so that power profiles could be determined from the instantaneous force and velocity of the representative centre point of the paddle blade. From the power profile information, the researchers calculated a personalised blade size that was expected to improve performance for those kayakers differing more than 5% from the calculated ‘ideal’ size. For the elite kayakers studied, it was recommended that seven of the paddlers should increase their blade size by approximately 5–10%. For the remaining five paddlers, the results indicated that their current blade sizes were within the expected measurement error of their predicted ideal value and should be retained. It is anticipated that this research will provide the theoretical rationale for elite kayakers to see the need to personalise their blade size based on their own muscle power profiles.     

The perception,management and performance of risk amongst Forest School educators

This article investigates how risk perception amongst teachers within an outdoor educational initiative, Forest School, both shape and are shaped by their understandings of childhood, pedagogy and their own professional identity. Drawing on a social constructionist perspective in theorising risk and childhood, the article argues that contemporary, hyper-sensitised concerns regarding children’s vulnerability emanate from both fears of the modern world, and the proclivity towards over-protection which these fears precipitate. Rather than treating this hyper-sensitivity as irrational or paranoid, the paper draws on socio-cultural theories and qualitative methods to interrogate how risk is perceived, managed and performed by teachers within an initiative which aims to reintroduce risk into children’s lives. The research found that while these teachers’ motivations to participate in Forest School were derived from a desire to expose children to formative risk-taking in the outdoors, the hegemonic cultural and institutional risk aversion which they were attempting to counter, aligned with their contested occupational identity, created tensions in how they managed and performed risk which militated against the full realisation of a Forest School pedagogy.     

American colonial education policy and Filipino labour migration to the US (1900–1935)

Public mass schooling was the major instrument used by the Americans in the performance of their mission to “civilize” Filipinos. Free primary education was implemented right after the islands’ annexation in 1899 and was a critical component (alongside armed force) of the programme for their “pacification”. For the elite, education formed a route into collaborative involvement in the management of the colonial state. By the second decade of colonization, Filipinos were managing the civil service, participating in elected institutions and installed as mayors and governors. Like that of the Spanish, American colonial governance was profoundly reliant on the collaboration of members of the haciendero class, and thus implicated in the maintenance of long-established social and political hierarchies. But what did the maintenance of that status quo imply for ordinary Filipinos, now increasingly educated and literate in the language of the colonial power? Specifically, to what extent did this combination of socio-economic stasis and educational progress contribute to spurring early labour migration? This article investigates how far labour migration was seen to be, or functioned as, a mechanism for maintaining social and political stability in the American colonial period. It examines how this phenomenon was related to the free and English-based mass education programme undertaken out of an urge to fulfil what Kipling – writing of the American colonial enterprise – termed “the White Man’s Burden”.     

GiveMe Shelter: a people-centred design process for promoting independent inquiry-led learning in engineering

It has become increasingly common for tasks traditionally carried out by engineers to be undertaken by technicians and technologist with access to sophisticated computers and software that can often perform complex calculations that were previously the responsibility of engineers. Not surprisingly, this development raises serious questions about the future role of engineers and the education needed to address these changes in technology as well as emerging priorities from societal to environmental challenges. In response to these challenges, a new design module was created for undergraduate engineering students to design and build temporary shelters for a wide variety of end users from refugees, to the homeless and children. Even though the module provided guidance on principles of design thinking and methods for observing users needs through field studies, the students found it difficult to respond to needs of specific end users but instead focused more on purely technical issues.     

Mothers’ Implicit and Explicit Attitudes and Attributions in Relation to Self-Reported Parenting Behavior

Objective. Parenting behavior is presumed to be related to the thoughts about child behavior that parents report in a controlled and explicit manner and to more implicit parent cognitions that occur outside of conscious awareness and are less accessible to verbal report. Design. We examined mothers’ attitudes toward their children as correlates of self-reported parenting behavior. We used a combination of a self-report questionnaire and a reaction-time method (the Implicit Association Test) to assess explicit and implicit attitudes, respectively. We also assessed mothers’ implicit and explicit attributions for child misbehavior in relation to parenting, using a questionnaire measure of attributions completed under high-cognitive load (implicit attributions) or under low-cognitive load (explicit attributions). Mothers of 124, 6- to 10-year-olds (52% male) participated. Results. Attitudes assessed by self-report questionnaire and the Implicit Association Test were uniquely associated with negative parenting. The cognitive load manipulation moderated associations between attributions and parenting, such that child-blaming attributions were inversely associated with positive parenting only under conditions of high-cognitive load. Conclusions. Compared to traditional self-report questionnaires, methods such as the Implicit Association Test or cognitive load manipulations may more effectively assess implicit parent cognitions.     

Violent computer games,empathy, and cosmopolitanism

Many philosophical and public discussions of the ethical aspects of violent computer games typically centre on the relation between playing violent videogames and its supposed direct consequences on violent behaviour. But such an approach rests on a controversial empirical claim, is often one-sided in the range of moral theories used, and remains on a general level with its focus on content alone. In response to these problems, I pick up Matt McCormick’s thesis that potential harm from playing computer games is best construed as harm to one’s character, and propose to redirect our attention to the question how violent computer games influence the moral character of players. Inspired by the work of Martha Nussbaum, I sketch a positive account of how computer games can stimulate an empathetic and cosmopolitan moral development. Moreover, rather than making a general argument applicable to a wide spectrum of media, my concern is with specific features of violent computer games that make them especially morally problematic in terms of empathy and cosmopolitanism, features that have to do with the connections between content and medium, and between virtuality and reality. I also discuss some remaining problems. In this way I hope contribute to a less polarised discussion about computer games that does justice to the complexity of their moral dimension, and to offer an account that is helpful to designers, parents, and other stakeholders. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ACLA 2006 conference in Princeton, 25 March 2006.     

Using the Attribute Hierarchy Method to Make Diagnostic Inferences about Examinees’ Cognitive Skills in Critical Reading

The purpose of this study is to apply the attribute hierarchy method (AHM) to a subset of SAT critical reading items and illustrate how the method can be used to promote cognitive diagnostic inferences. The AHM is a psychometric procedure for classifying examinees’ test item responses into a set of attribute mastery patterns associated with different components from a cognitive model. The study was conducted in two steps. In step 1, three cognitive models were developed by reviewing selected literature in reading comprehension as well as research related to SAT Critical Reading. Then, the cognitive models were validated by having a sample of students think aloud as they solved each item. In step 2, psychometric analyses were conducted on the SAT critical reading cognitive models by evaluating the model‐data fit between the expected and observed response patterns produced from two random samples of 2,000 examinees who wrote the items. The model that provided best data‐model fit was then used to calculate attribute probabilities for 15 examinees to illustrate our diagnostic testing procedure.