Matching Educational Television to the Learning Needs of Handicapped Children

This paper discusses the learning needs of handicapped children and how ETV programmes can help to fill these needs. Drawing on research concerning the use of ETV and handicapped children it points out some of the reasons why ETV does not reach its full potential and suggests why these problems keep recurring.     

Beyond records and representations: inbetween writing in educational ethnography

Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field. We call this inbetween writing. By examining our own processes of inbetween writing, and drawing on the work of James Clifford, we have produced a nine-part heuristic of inbetween writing. We argue that the heuristic could be used in research methods education to highlight the importance of writing to ethnographic sense-making and knowledge production.     

Down Syndrome Temperament: The Stereotype at Middle Childhood and Adolescence

MOTHERS AND TEACHERS of 94 children (53 boys) with Down syndrome, between 8 and 14 years of age, rated the children on a temperament scale and provided an overall impression as to whether the child was difficult in comparison with other children. Maternal ratings on the Middle Childhood Questionnaire showed significant differences from standardization scores. Children with Down syndrome were given ratings as less active, more predictable, of more positive mood, less persistent, and more distractible. Some of these dimensions favour the amiable personality stereotype for the syndrome but low persistence was associated with maternal impressions of difficulty. There was little agreement between mothers and teachers regarding the individual children who were rated as being significantly easier or more difficult than other children. Results with a subgroup (n = 32) showed that externalizing behaviours were significantly related to both mother and teacher impressions of difficulty and that mothers also found intense, active, distractible behaviour difficult.     

Uneasy alliances: University,workplace, industry and profession in the education doctorate

The phenomenon of Professional Doctorates in Australia has come at a time of great change in the higher education sector. Such change includes an intensified imperative for universities to establish ‘partnerships’ with industry and the professions. The Professional Doctorate is, in part, a consequence of such changes and is also helping to effect them. However, in its examination of the Education Doctorate, this paper problematises the notion of partnerships and indeed the various policy constructions of the parties involved. Through fictionalised accounts of standpoints of a higher education policy maker, an EdD student, an academic in an EdD program and a member of the education industry, it identifies some of the tensions involved within and between such categories. In so doing it suggests some matters that require research and pedagogical attention.     

Student learning approaches in the UAE: the case for the achieving domain

The deep versus surface learning approach dichotomy has dominated recent research in student learning approach dimensions. However, the achievement dimension may differ in importance in non-Western and vocational tertiary settings. The aim was to assess how Emirati tertiary students could be characterized in terms of their learning approaches. The study looked into emergent learning factors that may be important in Emirati students. The students were Emirati men in a first-year English for academic purposes programme at a tertiary college (N?=?252). The students completed the Revised Two-Factor Study Process Questionnaire (R-SPQ-2F) to determine learning orientation along the deep and surface approach dimensions. A factor analysis was carried out to assess emergent dimensions in the data. The results on the deep and surface dimensions were inconclusive. However, the factor analysis suggested a disposition towards a construct that we characterize as ‘attainment of satisfaction from learning’. In addition, the factor analysis suggested the possibility of the achieving domain emerging as a separate construct from the surface domain in this context, contrasting with previous research employing the R-SPQ-2F. The results suggest that the deep versus surface learning approach model may not sufficiently represent the complexity of student motivations and strategies in the current context. In addition, student affect tied to outcomes is discussed as an important though perhaps overlooked dimension in non-Western contexts. The implications of the results to future research are considered.