Communicative Competence and the Improvement of University Teaching: Insights from the field

The arguments in this article have been generated from involvement in a government-funded project designed to improve teaching. The authors reflect on their experience and use Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative competence to argue that initiatives designed to improve university teaching often work against their own intentions by closing down opportunities for open dialogue. They argue that improvement of teaching requires undistorted communication and demonstrate that this is made difficult: by the pressure to be seen to succeed; by over-specifying what constitutes good teaching; and, by divorcing research from development. At the same time, they suggest that academics could seize opportunities to open up dialogue about teaching.     

The optimization of online searches through the labelling of a dynamic, situation-dependent information need: The reference interview and online searching for undergraduates doing a social-science assignment

An important user group in academic libraries is the undergraduate student seeking information for coursework in the social sciences. With the proliferation of electronic databases, a major challenge for reference librarians is to conduct a quick and effective reference interview to determine the undergraduate's information need while also providing instruction on using the information system. The present article proposes a reference-interview strategy that will allow the reference librarian to (1) efficiently assess the information need of the undergraduate, (2) label the information need, and (3) assign the most appropriate search strategy to satisfy this need.     

Staying with the text: the contribution of gender,achievement orientations,and interest to students’ performance on a literacy task

This study addresses concerns about boys’ underperformance on literacy tasks compared to girls, by investigating male and females students’ responses to narrative texts. Participants were 142 Grade 9 and 10 students. Achievement orientations, including goals, self‐efficacy, and self‐handicapping, were measured and approach and avoidance factors identified. Boys scored higher than girls on the avoidance factor. The task presented to participants involved reading sections from two narrative texts representing typically male or typically female reading interests. Interest ratings for the narrative text topics and interest levels while reading the texts were monitored, and students’ answers to multiple‐choice questions on text content recorded. Regression analyses confirmed that the influence of gender, achievement orientation, and on‐task text interest on reading performance varied with different patterns of task interest. The findings suggest that students’ achievement orientations and task interests are both important for understanding gender differences in students’ response to narrative texts.     

The Child Abuse Potential Inventory and pregnancy outcome in expectant adolescent mothers.

OBJECTIVE: The study explores the prenatal Child Abuse Potential (pCAP) scores derived from the Child Abuse Potential Inventory administered to expectant adolescent mothers. The aim of the study was to assess the association of the pCAP scores with maternal negative prenatal behaviors, and evaluate the contribution of the pCAP scores to neonatal morbidity. METHOD: The pCAP scores, demographic data, and self-report on prenatal behaviors were obtained during the second half of the pregnancy in a sample of 45 poor single adolescent mothers. A pediatrician blind to the prenatal data reviewed the neonatal records to assess neonatal morbidity. Maternal prenatal records were reviewed for obstetric risk assessment by an obstetrician who was blind to the rest of the data. The relations among the pCAP scores, prenatal behaviors, and neonatal morbidity were analyzed. RESULTS: In the prenatal period, the pCAP scores were positively correlated with self-reported prenatal smoking and substance use. The multiple linear regression analysis showed that the pCAP scores significantly contributed to neonatal morbidity independently of obstetric risk factors. CONCLUSIONS: The Child Abuse Potential scores obtained during pregnancy in poor single adolescent mothers reflect domains of maternal functioning that are associated with negative prenatal behaviors and appear to be important for predicting neonatal morbidity. Further studies are warranted to validate the prenatal use of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory.     

National science training policy and early scientific careers in France and the United States

The economic health of nations and regions is increasingly coming to rest on the scientific and technical labor force conducting scientific research. As such, enormous social resources are directed to educating and training those who will fire the engines of economic growth. In the first part of this paper, we compare recent investment in the scientific and technical labor forces by two giants of nationally-supported research endeavors: France and the United States. We find that France is more invested in scientific and technical training, but that both nations invest directly and indirectly in the scientific and technical labor force. French policy is more likely to support the individual graduate student directly through a national grant, while graduate students in the US tend to rely indirectly on federal support through research grants to other researchers. We then use duration models on individual data to predict entry into a permanent academic position within three years of completing a Ph.D. We do not find that industrial support of graduate training has any effect on later success in obtaining a position. There is, however, evidence of different academic labor markets operating in each country. In France, entry into a position has not depended on period factors, while in the US more recent cohorts have been more successful in obtaining permanent employment. Furthermore, postdoctoral positions in France delay or deter academic careers, but have no impact on entry in the US: this suggest that two different modes of scientific human resources management operate in France and in the USA. In the USA, Ph.D.s are seen as an essential element in the process of knowledge transfer, and early mobility does not affect entry into permanent academic careers. In France, few incentives are given to encourage mobility, which merely deters the access to permanent jobs. Finally, we found that graduates of the most prestigious undergraduate institutions were systematically advantaged in obtaining permanent academic employment, suggesting that academic stratification occurs very early in the training path in each country.     

The Development of Research Skills in Young Adults with Intellectual Disability in Participatory Research

There is limited information about specific research constructs developed by adults with intellectual disability in undertaking research despite increasing involvement in research with rather than on these individuals. Participatory research was used with three young adults with intellectual disability to collaboratively develop a training programme and investigate the skills used and developed when undertaking the research project. Three research domains—Knowledge, Conceptual understandings and Skills, were identified, within which 18 subsets were categorised. Development in all domains and subsets occurred for all young adults, with variations in gains across subsets and participants. These young adults attained research knowledge, understanding and skills that enabled them to become collaborative researchers within this project.     

Sustainability education: researching practice in primary schools

Many teachers are keen to implement sustainability education in primary schools but are lacking the confidence, skills and knowledge to do so. Teachers report that they do not understand the concept and cannot integrate sustainability into an already overcrowded curriculum. Identifying how teachers successfully integrate sustainability education into their teaching practice can offer important insights into how these perceived problems can be overcome. The paper is based on data from the third year of a longitudinal study about teacher education and teacher professional learning for sustainability in primary education. The third year of the study investigated teachers’ understandings of sustainability and how sustainability education is manifested in eight rural and regional primary schools in Victoria, Australia. Data included photographs of school grounds and sustainability projects, audio recordings of focus groups with teachers and principals, and field notes of meetings with school staff. Sustainability education was found to be an emergent practice necessarily constituted in the relation between teachers, students and community members and the materialities of local places. Partnerships were found to be an essential part of integrated sustainability programmes which extended into communities and places beyond the schools. The processes of learning involved pedagogies of creative problem-solving and inquiry learning that enabled children to lead the way.     

From Verona to Ramallah: Living in a State of Emergency

I have spent much of the last two years working in a school in Ramallah, Palestine, supporting new teachers of English. I worked in the classroom, in partnership, sharing the planning and teaching of lessons. This essay is about exploring what happens to texts in a specific classroom context, about how a particularly English text, Romeo and Juliet, was interrogated and remade by young people in a class I taught with Victoria, a young American in her first year of teaching, and about how the study of this fictive text enabled them to explore fundamental questions of identity and difference. Victoria and I, foreigners in Palestine, taught English and shared a common language with the students. This, and the technology available to us, might seem to promise easy communication but this is an illusion, for these things cannot transcend the differences between us – differences that are part of the human condition and have to be acknowledged and embraced if there is to be any meaningful dialogue between us. The essay is therefore also an exploration of the possibilities for communication between us, largely through the literature we read and about the insights we provide for each other in the course of our talk and activities about the text.