The national curriculum vs. the ideal curriculum: acknowledging student learning interests

For many students, school is a place that makes no sense; a place where students’ interests are not reflected in the curriculum. Using mixed methods research, we developed an instrument that identifies student interests. This instrument was applied in a pilot study that considered 10th-grade students from three schools in Santiago, Chile. We compared student interest and national curriculum for different factors and established how well aligned these are. The results reveal that private school students prefer subjects that require greater cognitive development, related to Young’s powerful knowledge. Students from voucher schools, on the other hand, prefer to develop their knowledge of the arts and physical education, both of which are subjects they tend to enjoy. These findings are coherent with Bernstein’s theories. This pattern is also repeated when comparing high-performing students with their low-performing counterparts, regardless of school type. The findings of this study not only help identify which subjects the students want to study, but also to understand the reasons behind their preferences. Understanding these reasons is key for developing a more contextualised curriculum that makes more sense to the students.     

Teaching of Energy Issues: A Debate Proposal for a Global Reorientation

The growing awareness of serious difficulties in the learning of energy issues has produced a great deal of research, most of which is focused on specific conceptual aspects. In our opinion, the difficulties pointed out in the literature are interrelated and connected to other aspects (conceptual as well as procedural and axiological), which are not sufficiently taken into account in previous research. This paper aims to carry out a global analysis in order to avoid the more limited approaches that deal only with individual aspects. From this global analysis we have outlined 24 propositions that are put forward for debate to lay the foundations for a profound reorientation of the teaching of energy topics in upper high school courses, in order to facilitate a better scientific understanding of these topics, avoid many students’ misconceptions and enhance awareness of the current situation of planetary emergency. This paper has been conceived as a contribution to the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, established by the UN General Assembly for the period 2005–2014.     

School improvement trajectories: an empirical typology

This paper is based on a multiple case study of schools which have been identified as improving their performance for about a decade. We proposed different criteria by which to characterize and study these improvement processes and, by applying them to our sample, we elaborated a typology of school improvement trajectories: we identified 4 different trajectories of school improvement. We called the first type restricted improvement because at its center is the management of processes that mainly target academic achievement tests; the second is incipient improvement, which is based on changes that restructure the school processes; the third identified trajectory are cases where school improvement is moving toward institutionalization, while the last are those cases where improvement has been already institutionalized and the schools have achieved high levels of educational effectiveness. We identified challenges that schools face at different stages of school improvement and discussed some related policy issues.     

Mathematical problem posing: Implications for facilitating student inquiry in classrooms

From 1984 through 1988, the authors worked with teachers using an inquiry approach to teach high school geometry courses with the aid of the GEOMETRIC SUPPOSERS. Problems are a critical component of the approach, as they are of any instructional process, because they focus attention and energy and guide students in the application, integration, and extension of knowledge. Inquiry problems differ from traditional, single-answer textbook exercises in that they must leave room for student initiative and creativity. The observations presented in this paper about the delicate balance between specifying too much instruction and too little, which is part of creating and posing inquiry problems, are based on careful examination of students' papers and classroom observations. The paper closes with speculations on whether these observations suggest general lessons for those seeking practical and successful strategies to introduce student inquiry into classrooms, with the hope of stimulating interest in and discussion of such strategies.Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at PME-XI Montreal, 1987, and the 1988 AERA conference in New Orleans.     

Postgraduate student satisfaction: A multilevel analysis of PTES data

Student satisfaction has received growing attention in Higher Education systems in recent years, and are increasingly used for internal and external accountability in the sector. This does leave us with questions on the extent to which variance in student satisfaction can be explained by Higher Education Institution (HEI) and course attended rather than by individual student characteristics; and on what factors may predict student satisfaction. In this study we used the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) to look at these questions in a sample of approximate 70000 UK postgraduate students from 100 HEI's. Firstly, confirmatory factor analyses were used to test the validity of the proposed multidimensional structure of student satisfaction in PTES. Then multilevel models were used to look at variance at three levels (HEI, course and student), and the relationships between institutional and student factors collected in PTES and student satisfaction. Two years of data (2014 and 2015) were used. Findings suggest that over 90% of variance is explained at the student level for all dimensions of student satisfaction in both years, with variance at the HEI level being particularly low. Individual student characteristics explain more variance than institutional characteristics, but only some (such as BME status) are significant, and explained variance is low. These findings suggest using student satisfaction as an accountability measure in HE may be highly problematic.     

Does More Intensive Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Follow-Up Service Result in Better Outcomes? A Cost-Effective Analysis

Little is known about the relative cost-effectiveness of the many different types of early intervention services provided to medically fragile infants and their families. This study compared two intensities of services for such infants and their families: (a) a coordinated and comprehensive system of early intervention services initiated prior to discharge from the NICU and designed to transition infants to community-based services were compared with the effects of services (high intensity); and (b) a more traditional hospital follow-up consisting of medical checkups and referrals following discharge (low intensity). High-intensity services resulted in five times more community-based early intervention hours for families and infants when compared with low-intensity services. Annual costs of the high-intensity group were approximately triple the costs of the low-intensity group ($10,814 versus $3,032 per child per year), but there were only a few statistically significant differences on measures of child and family functioning between the groups at 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24months' corrected age. Implications of these findings for research and practice are given.