How to support and engage students in alternative forms of education and training? A qualitative study of school staff members in Flanders

This study focuses on how students, who for a variety of reasons struggle in mainstream secondary schools, can be supported and engaged by alternative forms of education and training to attain a (formal) qualification. Interviews and focus groups are carried out with school staff members of distinct types of alternative learning arenas in Flanders (northern part of Belgium): second chance secondary education, part-time apprenticeship track and part-time work-based vocational education. Our analyses reveal that, due to the selectiveness of mainstream secondary education, staff members in alternative learning arenas mainly struggle with the ways to develop inclusive curricula/practices and with the actual content of the curricula of their educational training or programme they are supposed to teach. Staff members struggle with putting into practice the fundamental aim to prepare socially vulnerable students for their future lives. Debates within the school team focus upon the relative importance of transferrable, specialist and social skills and competences. Results of this study are discussed to further enhance the professionalisation of school teams, and can be seen as the starting point to specify and develop the curriculum taught in both alternative learning arenas and mainstream secondary education.     

The Conceptual Bases of Study Strategy Inventories

This article describes the historical origins and development of a series of well-known study strategy inventories and seeks to identify their conceptual bases. The theories and evidence influencing the development of 6 contrasting instruments are considered before examining empirical evidence of similarities and differences between the measurement instruments. This analysis is tackled in three stages, looking first at inventories developed in the 1970s and 1980s that focused mainly on motivation, study methods, and learning processes. The more recent work that brought in mental models, metacognition, and self-regulation is then introduced, leading to a concluding section that discusses the conceptual bases of the whole set of inventories. The trends found in this research area are described and used to explore the current confusion of overlapping terms describing apparently similar aspects of learning and studying in higher education.     

Why is letter-name knowledge such a good predictor of learning to read?

The knowledge of letter names measured just before children enter school has been known for a long time as one of the best longitudinal predictors of learning to read in an alphabetic writing system. After a period during which the comprehensive investigation of this relationship was largely disregarded, there is now a growing interest in attempts to understand the role(s) letter names play in literacy acquisition. This paper reviews these recent studies and emphasizes their main findings regarding the influence of letter-name knowledge in early and formal literacy for three main components of literacy acquisition: first, the emergence of the phonological processing of print; then, the learning of letter-sound correspondences; finally, the development of phonemic sensitivity skills. The final section discusses the status of letter-name knowledge (LNK) in literacy acquisition and suggests possible directions for further research.     

Alternative placements in initial teacher education: An evaluation

The paper evaluates a programme of short alternative placements for final-year B.Ed. students in Northern Ireland, which aims to broaden student teachers’ experience and develop their transferable skills. The alternative placement programme is set first in an international context of evolving pre-service field placements and then set in a local context marked by a surplus of teachers; a Revised Curriculum that emphasises the importance of employability, lifelong learning, and enterprise and entrepreneurship; and the introduction of the Extended Schools programme. The evaluation is based on feedback from the 2007 to 2008 cohort of students whose comments confirm the value of exposing student teachers to non-traditional educational environments.     

Written sentence production error patterns of college writers with learning disabilities

Utilizing a controlled stimulus passage to control for verbosity and topic selection, this research investigated the written syntax of 81 (60 males, 21 females) collegeable individuals demonstrating a specific learning disability. Four models of speech production disturbance (i.e., syntactical, lexical, monitoring, control) were evaluated in light of the errors identified in the rewrite paragraphs of this population. The data from this research supports the control impairment hypothesis, predicting that sentence production errors will be of the same kind as found in the language of writers demonstrating no handicapping conditions. In addition, the study investigated the correlation of specific cognitive and achievement variables to syntactical competence and error type.     

Researching race/ethnicity and educational inequality in the Netherlands: A critical review of the research literature between 1980 and 2008

This article describes and critically analyzes how educational sociologists in the Netherlands have studied the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational inequality between 1980 and 2008. Five major research traditions are identified: (1) political arithmetic; (2) racism and ethnic discrimination; (3) school characteristics; (4) school choice; and (5) family background. The development of particular research traditions is explained by pointing to more general developments in terms of social policy and intellectual climate in the Netherlands. This study builds on a similar, recently published literature review that focuses on the UK context by critically comparing the development and findings from these different bodies of research literature. The conclusions suggest that the Netherlands, like England, developed strong research traditions in this area of research since the 1980s and that both countries can learn from each other and advance future research in this area by developing more comprehensive research agendas. More generally, this review illustrates the usefulness of conducting nationally comparative literature reviews in assessing the development of particular bodies of research and in bringing together knowledge produced in different national settings.     

Phronesis and Phantasia: Teaching with Wisdom and Imagination

Critics of Aristotelian accounts of practical reasoning, in teaching and in other contexts, criticise phronesis for its rigidity and lack of imagination. This paper argues that phantasia , or imagination, helps us to develop a richer account of Aristotle's phronesis . Two senses of phantasia , as producing images and as an interpretive faculty, are proposed here to be importantly involved in phronesis . By producing images that help in the selection of an end goal, and by having an interpretive faculty that helps to compare competing possibilities, phantasia plays a crucial role in the practical reasoning process of phronesis .     

Surpassing Our Own Histories: autobiographical methods for environmental education research

In this article I appraise selected examples of the research on significant life experiences reported and discussed in a recent special issue of this journal by comparing the ways in which these studies use (and justify the use of) retrospective accounts of experience with autobiographical approaches to curriculum inquiry that have been informed by phenomenology and hermeneutics. I argue that the conservative and socially reproductive logic of significant life experiences research invites environmental educators to repeat rather than to improve upon their own histories and that, if we are to use autobiographical methods in environmental education research, we should try to do so in a way that generates new possibilities for educational experience, rather than merely replicates the experiences of a previous generation.     

Daily activities of school psychologists: A national survey

A national survey of 335 school psychologists, asking them to record their activities on a specific school day, found that assessment activities comprised nearly 40% of the work time, and consultative activities another one-third of the day. Data were collected on a number of other work activities, as well as characteristics of the respondents: age, ethnic status, graduate degrees held, languages spoken, and characteristics of district served.