Metropolitan College: Building Community Value Through Education–Business Partnerships

Metropolitan College is a distinctive and innovative business–education partnership that provides educational opportunities to many Kentucky residents who would otherwise be unable to attend college. The program also provides significant, tangible benefits to the business and education partners, as well as to the local and statewide community. This article outlines the structure of the Metropolitan College, chronicles some measures of program impact, and briefly describes the values on which the program was founded and continues to operate.     

Distance Teaching by Cyclops: an educational evaluation of the Open University's telewriting system

The trend towards courses with low, widely scattered student populations in the Open University makes the provision of face-to-face tutorials difficult. Telephone tuition is being used as an alternative. One major drawback of this is the lack of a graphics facility for communicating writing and drawings.
To help overcome this the Open University has developed a graphics telewriting terminal called Cyclops which allows for the live transmission of writing and drawing by telephone.
This paper describes the Cyclops telewriting system and explains how it has been used in a two-year trial project, funded by British Telecom, for tutoring Open University students in the East Midlands region of England. Preliminary findings from the evaluation of the trials are discussed and suggestions for setting up similar distance-teaching systems are offered.
The two-year trial of Cyclops is proving that telewriting tutorials are both educationally effective and acceptable to a large number of students and tutors.     

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.     

Connected Chemistry—Incorporating Interactive Simulations into the Chemistry Classroom

The aim of this paper is to describe a novel modeling and simulation package, connected chemistry, and assess its impact on students' understanding of chemistry. Connected chemistry was implemented inside the NetLogo modeling environment. Its design goal is to present a variety of chemistry concepts from the perspective of emergent phenomena—that is, how macro-level patterns in chemistry result from the interactions of many molecules on a submicro-level. The connected chemistry modeling environment provides students with the opportunity to observe and explore these interactions in a simulated environment that enables them to develop a deeper understanding of chemistry concepts and processes in both the classroom and laboratory. Here, we present the conceptual foundations of instruction using connected chemistry and the results of a small study that explored its potential benefits. A three-part, 90-min interview was administered to six undergraduate science majors regarding the concept of chemical equilibrium. Several commonly reported misconceptions about chemical equilibrium arose during the interview. Prior to their interaction with connected chemistry, students relied on memorized facts to explain chemical equilibrium and rigid procedures to solve chemical equilibrium problems. Using connected chemistry students employed problem-solving techniques characterized by stronger attempts at conceptual understanding and logical reasoning.     

The Complementary roles of the Headteacher,the Mentor and the Advisory Teacher in Induction and School‐based Teacher Training

This article reports on the findings of a two year research project on the management of new teacher induction in five LEAs (Turner, 1992). Headteachers, mentors and newly qualified teachers in twelve schools were interviewed as were LEA officers, Inspectors and advisory teachers. The analysis showed the key roles of headteacher, mentor and advisory teacher to be different but complementary. The conclusions are drawn from a detailed analysis of some 180 interviews.     

News and views

This is a new section of the journal which will appear once a year, or more often if there is a clear demand for it. The intention is to provide a place for short (no more than 1000‐word) contributions from readers who would like to inform others of particular developments or issues, or who would like to present brief position statements on specific curricular themes.

We hope, particularly, that the local groups of the Curriculum Association, our overseas corresponding editors and members of our advisory board will use the opportunity this provides to draw colleagues’ attention to trends, developments and issues of which we ought to be aware at this time of rapid change. The need to stay in touch has never been greater.