Student teachers' attitudes and beliefs towards using ICT within inclusive education and practice

The areas of education inclusion and digital inclusion have recently received growing interest from the research community while addressing the wider concern of social inclusion, but little research has been carried out exploring the relationship between the two areas. Central to both areas, this paper presents a study that investigated student teachers' attitudes towards using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for equality as part of inclusive education and practice, and explored the extent to which it is important that student teachers are prepared for both education and digital inclusion. The study focused on the attitudes of student teachers who had taken a new reformed course on inclusive education and practice within a Scottish University. Results from the study showed that student teachers' attitudes towards using ICT for teaching and learning were strongly positive, and were also strongly positive towards inclusive education. Their attitudes towards inclusive practice and using ICT for inclusive practice were slightly less positive. This seemed to result in ICT being used less in terms of inclusive education and more from the perspective of accessibility to the curriculum. The study provided evidence that the impact of ICT as part of inclusive practice is not well understood by student teachers and that student teachers' attitudes towards digital equality do not feature highly in inclusive practices. Consequently, greater attention to ways in which ICT is used for inclusive purposes is needed in Initial Teacher Education and in education policies in order to improve student teachers' preparedness for education inclusion.     

An Experimental Study of Functional Learning

The basic problem in correcting a multiple choice test is evaluating a subject’s true knowledge, eliminating the guessing factor. In this paper, we consider some scoring procedures which are functions of the performance of the entire group of examinees. Special cases of the scoring procedures considered here reduce to the ones proposed by Chernoff (2), and Calandra (1).     

THE IMAGE OF TECHNICIAN OCCUPATIONS AMONG SCHOOL‐LEAVERS

Two groups of secondary schoolboys of below average academic ability were studied. The control group received traditional English teaching; the experimental group had experience of SRA Reading Laboratory 2a included in their English lessons. After nine weeks, no differences were shown in the reading performance of the two groups. Caution is advocated in the interpretation of this result.     

Educational Guidance‐‐Technical Education: STUDENT GUIDANCE IN TECHNICAL EDUCATION

It is contended that present assumptions regarding the relationship of creativity to curriculum structure are inadequately supported by both experimental findings and theoretical rationale. There are two main issues requiring further elucidation: the first concerns the influence of school environment on creativity directly: the second comprises an examination of the interrelationships of creativity, intelligence and curriculum structure.

The evidence presented demonstrates that school environments have a perceptible influence upon creativity but the generally held assumption that progressive environments are more favourable is shown to require careful qualification.The findings also suggest that the interrelationships of creativity, intelligence and curriculum structure are highly complex. Structure does not seem to affect creativity‐intelligence correlations to any great extent: the major influences here would appear to be largely dependent upon the average intelligence of the groups and the extent to which the creativity tasks require school learning and especially verbal skills for their performance.     

The National Institutes of Health's AREA Program in Action

The National Institutes of Health Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) program introduces research funding into regional universities and liberal arts colleges where hurdles to successful pursuit of research programs are substantial. Nevertheless, the authors of papers in this issue competed successfully and have benefited undergraduates in their respective institutions, as evidenced both by heightened retention rates and the numbers of student assistants who advance to graduate school. We discuss the role of a summer institute in helping to advance the work of these investigators, and suggest that the network which evolved may be extended as a model for collaborative and interdisciplinary research. We also describe details of the AREA program and where to obtain additional information about it.     

Towards educational inclusion in a transforming society: some lessons from community relations and special needs education in Northern Ireland

This paper focuses on the socially constructed ideas that have come to be given the status of taken‐for‐granted knowledge within not one, but two, fields of professional practice in Northern Irish schools; community relations and special needs education. Dominant discourses were viewed as constructing norms around which educational professionals approached issues to do with difference and social justice—differences of attainment and disability in the case of educational special needs, and, in the case of school‐based community relations work, ethno‐political and religious differences. Our analysis identified some very powerful common discourses that served to maintain the status quo and limit the space for creative and pluralistic struggle. We argue that this process of unravelling or deconstructing professional meaning‐making in relation to education for diversity is a crucial first step towards the development of a more inclusive participative practice. In the final section, we consider some of the implications of our work and speculate about the meaning of educational inclusion within a transforming society.     

Influence of free surface,unsteadiness and viscous effects on oar blade hydrodynamic loads

Abstract

Flow around a rowing blade is a very complex phenomenon, involving unsteady three-dimensional flow with violent motion of the free surface. However, in the literature, forces acting on blades are modelled using extreme and dubious simplifications. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the influence of free surface and unsteadiness (two physical characteristics that are commonly neglected when modelling loads on blades) as well as viscous effects. In fact, quasi-static approaches are often used, with no influence of the free surface effects. To conduct this study, computational fluid dynamics is used, supported by experimental results performed with a dedicated device reproducing a simplified rowing stroke in the towing tank. Comparisons show that both free surface flow and unsteadiness must be considered to capture the whole physics of the phenomenon accurately. In contrast, the viscous effects have a very limited influence.