The Impact of Pre‐school Children's Intelligence and Adjustment on their Parents’ Long‐term Educational Expectations

The present study set out to examine the role played by preschool children's intellectual and behavioural characteristics in their parents’ expectations for school performance. Preschool children who were expected by their parents to attend university were compared with those who were expected to leave school at the earliest opportunity. Children whose parents had lower expectations came from lower social classes and tended to be boys. The two groups differed in a number of other ways. The high expectations group tended to be more intelligent and less overactive. When the associations between expectations, sex and SES were controlled for, these differences persisted. The findings show that there is already an association between high educational expectations and educational advantage before children enter school. Educationalists should be cautious when developing policy on the basis of the assumption that the reported association between parental expectations and school achievement reflects the impact of expectations rather than the persistence of early acquired competence.     

The International Standard Text Code: Call to Action, or Distraction?

Book publishers now have more products to keep track of than ever before: books, eBooks, apps, online products, and the list goes on. Traditionally publishers have used the ISBN to track products in the supply chain. But with as many as 24 ISBNs now associated with a bestselling title, the publishing industry looks to a new identifier, the International Standard Text Code (ISTC), to keep ISBNs in check. In a sea of data, will the ISTC help keep publishers afloat, or weigh them down?     

Webometric research with the Bing Search API 2.0

In May 2011 the Bing Search API 2.0 had become the only major international web search engine data source available for automatic offline processing for webometric research. This article describes its key features, contrasting them with previous web search data sources, and discussing implications for webometric research. Overall, it seems that large-scale quantitative web research is possible with the Bing Search API 2.0, including query splitting, but that legal issues require the redesign of webometric software to ensure that all results obtained from Bing are displayed directly to the user.     

Incorporating technologies into a flexible teaching space

Higher education institutions are increasingly exploring how they can use emerging technologies to develop and enhance the learning experiences offered to students. These activities have mainly focused on developing student‐centred facilities. The University of Warwick has taken the next step by developing a space (the Teaching Grid) specifically designed to meet the needs of teaching staff across the institution. This paper describes how the Teaching Grid supports teachers by providing a flexible experimental space together with a rich collection of established and new technologies, and with comprehensive staff support. We analysed the use of the facility during the first 30 months of operation, using data collected from 119 case studies, in order to present a perspective on how they have used the technologies and how this has impacted on their teaching practice. We present a taxonomy that provides a concrete framework to support future analysis of and comparisons between such spaces.     

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: Designing Open Badges for a Technology Integration Course

This paper describes the design, development, and implementation of Open Badges into a secondary education preservice course on instructional technology. Open Badges provide a new way of issuing credentials to individuals who demonstrate knowledge, skill, or ability in a particular domain. Badges provide a simple system for communicating a skill along with specific information about the evidence connected with earning the badge. In this paper, we describe the course in detail along with the several iterations of design that resulted in the development of the badge system, along with the challenges faced and lessons learned for future design and use of Open Badges.