Aspects of Educational Delivery within Sino-Foreign Educational Alliances: Is This the Real Key to Success?

The topic of educational alliances undertaken between Sino-foreign universities remains a contentious and much debated matter. This is an area of considerable and often very busy activity with a high rate of failure and frustration—yet, also one of reward, mutual satisfaction, and achievement. This paper evaluates a key aspect of these alliances often overlooked in research: educational delivery activities and projects that form the heart and core of alliances. The paper notes that the development and delivery of a range of programs beyond just degree or part degree courses but of research, seminar, and ancillary activities, lies at the very core of a successful alliances, particularly if these activities can be undertaken in a manner that melds two very different cultural and educational worlds, and in a way that can contribute to the Chinese students' sense of well-being and ability to take part in the globalization of the emerging Chinese market economy.     

Student science teachers’ conceptions of sustainable development: an empirical study of three postgraduate training cohorts

Conceptions of sustainable development were elicited using a questionnaire completed by three cohorts of postgraduate students starting a secondary science teacher‐training course (N = 123). Qualitative responses were analysed in three ways: (i) development of categories to capture features of sustainable development; (ii) scrutiny of individual responses for the presence or absence of key features; and (iii) in contrast to these grounded approaches, examination of the responses in light of a framework proposed by the UK Panel for Education for Sustainable Development. Notable findings were: substantial numbers recognised the centrality of environmental (72%), economic (53%) and social (31%) factors—but just 15% highlighted all three; when compared with the pre‐specified framework, the aspects of sustainable development largely missing were to do with citizenship, with preservation of diversity, and with uncertainty and precaution in action. The findings are related to contemporary literature in the field and some implications for trainees’ learning are considered.     

Turning Heads: changes in the preferred learning styles of school leaders and managers in the 1990s

The study focuses upon the learning style preferences of 310 school leaders and managers collected, on the basis of opportunity sampling, over the last 3 years (1991–94), and identifies a trend towards the activist learning style preference, and away from the reflector, theorist, and pragmatist preferences described by Honey & Mumford. It suggests that the trend is significant, and relates at least in part to the subjects’ responses to legislative, societal and cultural changes since the Education Reform Act, 1988. The paper concludes that there are increased pressures upon school leaders and managers to act, to act decisively, to act quickly, and to act in concert as whole school management teams, that such action has overall priority, and that this leads to a decrease in the perception that analysis, synthesis and planning are relevant and necessary functions in the leadership and management of schools.     

Supporting behaviour support: developing a model for leading and managing a unit for teenagers excluded from mainstream school

In the UK, mainstream schools can decide to exclude students because of their behaviour. Students are then placed in pupil referral units (PRUs, sometimes known as short-stay schools) until their needs can be more thoroughly assessed so that they can then be placed appropriately. This article outlines the development of one particular approach to leading and managing a PRU for students aged 11–14. Beginning with the idea that staff and students all have a range of needs to be met, the approach draws on psychoanalytic ideas of containment, holding and attachment, as well as recent neuro-developmental research, to demonstrate how students' needs can be best met through meeting the professional needs of staff. A range of interventions and areas of practice are then described to illustrate how containment, management and support are operationalised in day-to-day practice. Specific areas of impact of these interventions for students and their families are then highlighted.     

Enhancing resilience in youth through a 10-day developmental voyage

The present study sought to examine the potential for resilience to be enhanced in a group of youth participating in a developmental voyage, and to identify the factors that contribute to increased resilience following the voyage. Two studies are reported. Study 1 revealed that voyage participants experienced increased resilience over the course of the voyage. Study 2 sought to replicate and extend these findings by assessing the extent to which increased resilience was maintained five months following the voyage and was associated with other psychosocial variables (i.e. self-esteem, social effectiveness, self-efficacy, belonging, social support and perceived weather). The findings revealed that increased resilience was maintained five months following the voyage. A regression revealed that the predictors explained 37% of the variance in increased resilience. Increased social effectiveness, self-efficacy and less positive perceptions of the weather were the only variables to make unique contributions.     

Understanding Person Perceptions: Comparing Four Common Statistical Approaches to Third-Person Research

This article addresses whether current methods of measurement are sufficient to reflect all nuances of the third-person effect. We do so by content analyzing all major third-person effect (3PE) articles, assessing measurement and analysis approaches employed by 3PE researchers. We revisit data from two published studies, comparing analytical models that emerged as commonly used by 3PE researchers (i.e., the standard subtractive measure, Whitt's Diamond model, first- and third-person estimates entered separately, and the subtractive measure with self-estimates as a control). Ultimately our analysis helps us understand past research and makes suggestions for research approaches in the future. First, researchers need to more carefully explore the role of first- and third-person perceptions in the behavioral hypothesis. Second, using only one analytical model does not tell the complete story. To that end, we propose a multimodel approach to analyses in third-person research be applied to extant and future work in this area.     

Search markets and search results: The case of Bing

Bing and Google customize their results to target people with different geographic locations and languages but, despite the importance of search engines for web users and webometric research, the extent and nature of these differences are unknown. This study compares the results of seventeen random queries submitted automatically to Bing for thirteen different English geographic search markets at monthly intervals. Search market choice alters a small majority of the top 10 results but less than a third of the complete sets of results. Variation in the top 10 results over a month was about the same as variation between search markets but variation over time was greater for the complete results sets. Most worryingly for users, there were almost no ubiquitous authoritative results: only one URL was always returned in the top 10 for all search markets and points in time, and Wikipedia was almost completely absent from the most common top 10 results. Most importantly for webometrics, results from at least three different search markets should be combined to give more reliable and comprehensive results, even for queries that return fewer than the maximum number of URLs.     

Testing the persuasiveness of evidence: Combining narrative and statistical forms

This study provides an experimental test for the conclusions of the Allen and Preiss (1997) meta‐analysis that statistical evidence is more persuasive than narrative evidence. This investigation extends that finding to consider the case where a message combines statistical and narrative evidence to determine if a combination of evidence is more effective than a single form of support. This investigation using 15 messages and 1,270 participants finds that a message combining narrative and statistical evidence is more persuasive than a message using either narrative or statistical evidence alone.     

Alphabetization and the skewing of first authorship towards last names early in the alphabet

The practice of listing co-author surnames in alphabetical order, irrespective of their contribution, can make it difficult to effectively allocate research credit to authors. This article compares the percentages of articles with co-authors in alphabetical order (alphabetization) for two-author, three-author and four-author articles in eighteen social sciences in 1995 and 2010 to assess how widespread this practice is. There is some degree of alphabetization in all disciplines except one but the level varies substantially between disciplines. This level is increasing slightly over time, on average, but it has increased substantially in a few disciplines and decreased in others, showing that the practice of alphabetization is not fading away. A high correlation between alphabetical order and the proportion of first authors near the beginning of the alphabet confirms that high percentages of alphabetical order could affect the appropriate allocation of research credit. Similar patterns were found for science and the humanities. Finally, since some degree of alphabetization is almost universal in social science disciplines, this practice may be affecting careers throughout the social sciences and hence seems indefensible.     

An Evaluation of the Use of Peer Assessment in Higher Education: a case study in the School of Music,Kingston University

The following paper outlines and evaluates the implementation of the use of peer assessment in higher education (HE), using the BA in music course at Kingston University as a case study. The rationale of the peer assessment systems introduced into two curriculum areas is examined, and the operation of the scheme is evaluated, by the use of lecturer interviews, attitudinal questionnaires completed by the participating students, and the assessments and feedback produced. Conclusions drawn are that the introduction of peer assessment seems to improve students’ critical faculties and gives them a greater ownership of the whole assessment process.