Move over Rover! An essay/assay of the field of educational management in the UK

UK educational administration scholars have undertaken a survey to redefine the field of knowledge in educational management and/or administration. In responding to the resulting corpus of work, I argue that that this is an exercise in ‘turf talk’. I draw on theorizations of the socio-spatialities of fields of knowledge to consider educational management and/or administration and its border scuffles with policy sociology and the exclusion of debates about knowledge and truth claims that characterize the ‘new humanities’. I suggest that the lack of regard accorded the situated empirical and practical knowledges of practitioners, and the invisibility in the analyses of the active role of head teacher professional associations in the current context, places the academy in an adversarial position vis-á-vis practitioners. As government moves to make research ‘more useful’, and positions academics as training providers and management consultants for head teachers, I propose that educational management and/or administration scholars must move over to share ground and dialogue with the emerging head teacher profession.     

Evaluating the non-academic impact of academic research: design considerations

Evaluation of academic research plays a significant role in government efforts to steer public universities. The scope of such evaluation is now being extended to include the ‘relevance’ or ‘impact’ of academic research outside the academy. We address how evaluation of non-academic research impact can promote more such impact without undermining academic freedom and research excellence. Five questions on evaluation design are considered: (1) What should be the object of measurement? (2) What should be the timeframe? (3) How should non-academic users of research inform evaluation processes? (4) How should controversial impacts be managed? (5) When in funding cycles should impact evaluation occur? We conclude that non-academic impact should be selectively promoted and evaluated. This is how greater gains from research might be best captured without imposing misguided and onerous reporting requirements on individuals and institutions.     

Toward Integration: From Quantitative Biology to Mathbio-Biomath?

In response to the call of BIO2010 for integrating quantitative skills into undergraduate biology education, 30 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Program Directors at the 2006 HHMI Program Directors Meeting established a consortium to investigate, implement, develop, and disseminate best practices resulting from the integration of math and biology. With the assistance of an HHMI-funded mini-grant, led by Karl Joplin of East Tennessee State University, and support in institutional HHMI grants at Emory and University of Delaware, these institutions held a series of summer institutes and workshops to document progress toward and address the challenges of implementing a more quantitative approach to undergraduate biology education. This report summarizes the results of the four summer institutes (2007–2010). The group developed four draft white papers, a wiki site, and a listserv. One major outcome of these meetings is this issue of CBE—Life Sciences Education, which resulted from proposals at our 2008 meeting and a January 2009 planning session. Many of the papers in this issue emerged from or were influenced by these meetings.     

Improving library services for graduate nurse students in New Zealand

BACKGROUND: Graduate students are expected to have basic information literacy skills. Knowing how to access and select relevant information and then utilize that information is a necessary skill in today's knowledge and information-age world. In the health-care sector, the rise in evidence-based medicine has brought into focus the importance of information literacy skills for nurses. In the case described, information literacy skills are embedded in the curriculum and strengthened in collaboration with library staff. AIMS: To identify graduate student nurses' use of the library, and the library's response to findings. METHODS: A case-study approach was used with both quantitative and qualitative data. An anonymous questionnaire was distributed to all nurses enrolled in graduate courses in the second semester of 2002. Interviews were then undertaken with library staff. RESULTS: The university library services were not used by 43% of graduate nursing students and the library responded by developing a number of initiatives. CONCLUSIONS: Finding a deficit in use of the library by graduate nurses, this paper outlines the response by the library to improving awareness of services, access and providing education in a bid to improve literacy skills.     

‘It doesn't matter how they move really,as long as they move.’ Physical education teachers on developing their students’ movement capabilities

Background: Movement is key in physical education, but the educational value of moving is sometimes obscure. In Sweden, recent school reforms have endeavoured to introduce social constructionist concepts of knowledge and learning into physical education, where the movement capabilities of students are in focus. However, this means introducing a host of new and untested concepts to the physical education teacher community.

Purpose. The purpose of this article is to explore how Swedish physical education teachers reason about helping their students develop movement capability.

Participants, setting and research design. The data are taken from a research project conducted in eight Swedish secondary schools called ‘Physical education and health – a subject for learning?’ in which students and teachers were interviewed and physical education lessons were video-recorded. This article draws on data from interviews with the eight participating teachers, five men and three women. The teachers were interviewed partly using a stimulated recall technique where the teachers were asked to comment on video clips from physical education lessons where they themselves act as teachers.

Data analysis. A discourse analysis was conducted with a particular focus on the ensemble of more or less regulated, deliberate and finalised ways of doing things that characterise the eight teachers’ approach to helping the students develop their movement capabilities.

Findings. The interviews indicate that an activation discourse (‘trying out’ and ‘being active’) dominates the teachers’ ways of reasoning about their task (a focal discourse). When the teachers were specifically asked about how they can help the students improve their movement capacities, a sport discourse (a referential discourse) was expressed. This discourse, which is based on the standards of excellence of different sports, conditions what the teachers see as (im)possible to do due to time limitations and a wish not to criticise the students publicly. The mandated holistic social constructionist discourse about knowledge and learning becomes obscure (an intruder discourse) in the sense that the teachers interpret it from the point of view of a dualist discourse, where ‘knowledge’ (theory) and ‘skill’ (practice) are divided.

Conclusions. Physical education teachers recoil from the task of developing the students’ movement capabilities due to certain conditions of impossibility related to the discursive terrain they are moving in. The teachers see as their primary objective the promotion of physical activity – now and in the future; they conceptualise movement capability in such a way that emphasising the latter would jeopardise their possibilities of realising the primary objective. Should the aim be to reinforce the social constructionist national curriculum, where capability to move is suggested to be an attempt at formulating a concept of knowledge that includes both propositional and procedural aspects and which is not based on the standards of excellence of either sport techniques or motor ability, then teachers will need support to interpret the national curriculum from a social constructionist perspective. Further, alternative standards of excellence as well as a vocabulary for articulating these will have to be developed.     

Continuing Research by PhD Graduates

A survey of Australian PhD graduates has revealed that they do not necessarily fit traditional stereotypes in terms of age, previous or concurrent work experience nor, perhaps most importantly, a prospective career in research. Two years after graduating with PhD, just 36 per cent of those who found employment in the non-academic workforce continued to be 'xtensively' involved in research, while only 56 per cent of those in academic employment (other than those with postdoctoral fellowships) were so involved. Many of those trained in research are frustrated in not being able to implement and extend that training through appropriate employment, others who have the opportunity do not have the desire. Factors predictive of and related to continuing involvement in research are examined, with some surprising results and policy implications regarding postgraduate research degrees.     

Impairment of teacher efficiency during extended sessions of test correction

SUMMARY The relationship between monotonous work, mental fatigue, and reduction in efficiency has been discussed at length in the literature. This paper examines a theory, based on the interactions revealed in those studies, that uninterrupted examination of a large number of tests over an extended period of time, leads to inconsistency in grading. Three specialists judged typed compositions of seventh-grade pupils, and independently awarded the grade of 80% to 31 papers. These compositions were submitted to 60 female teachers. Each teacher received all 31 papers, stacked in one of three different, randomly arranged sequences. The subjects, unaware of the earlier review, were asked to read the compositions in one sitting and in the order in which they were stacked, and to assign a grade. There was no communication between teachers in the project with regard to the task. The variable found to contribute significantly to the grading pattern was the order in which the essays were arranged. The first tests received lower grades, on average, than those awarded by the specialists. As the teachers worked their way through the stack, the grades gradually rose, and eventually exceeded those given by the specialists. The discrepancy between the mean evaluation of the first papers and last papers in the pile was approximately 10%. Teacher seniority and other variables tested did not contribute significantly to the process.