Policy and the Practice of Environmental Education in England: a dilemma for teachers

Environmental education in schools in England is subject to conflicting pressures from the policies of central government concerning the environment and education. Schools are considered to be important vehicles for improving environmental responsibility and within this ‘values education’ makes a significant contribution. Recent reform of the education system has been directed towards raising standards, with an emphasis on knowledge and skills. Aspects of affective education, including beliefs, values and attitudes receive less emphasis. Results of a study into how environmentally‐aware teachers in secondary schools see their role in relation to their own attitudes to the environment, the relationship between local and global concerns and their understanding of the nature of environmental education and its contribution to the curriculum are reported and discussed in the context of policy mismatch.     

Year 12 students’ attainment of scientific investigation skills

One of the main goals of science education is the development of scientific investigation skills (Bryce & Robertson, 1985; Woolnough & Allsop, 1985). This paper describes a practical test instrument developed to assess students’ attainment of skills associated with problem analysis and planning experiments, collecting information, organizing and interpreting information, and concluding. During administration of the test, students verbalized their thoughts as they worked on the task and their performance was videotaped for analysis. Preliminary results reveal important areas of student weakness and lead to recommendations for curriculum reform. Specializations: Science teacher education, development of problem-solving expertise, concept development and conceptual change, assessment of laboratory work. Specializations: Chemistry education, concept development and conceptual change, role of laboratory work.     

“Blips of Meaning”: The Transformation of Reader and History Text

The study focused on the interpretations of eight “good” or effective Secondary One teachers. It suggests that the teachers interpreted the “text” (consisting of 12 elements) on the basis of their practical knowledge. The teachers tended to describe the literal meaning of the content. This, however, is a rather restricted form of interpretation which ignores the role of both the reader and the plurality of meanings in the message(s) of the text. To be receptive to the text, the teachers need to reflect on their often taken-for-granted knowledge and practices. The repertory grid was used to elicit such tacit knowledge. Like a mirror, the grid reflected to the teacher his or her own frame of reference for his or her consideration. This is a vital first step in the transformation of both the teacher and his or her interpretation of the text.     

The design of tasks in support of teachers’ development of coherent mathematical meanings

We examine the role of tasks that have the intended effect of teachers re-conceiving the mathematics they teach as comprising a coherent body of meaningful ideas. We ground our discussion in ideas of trigonometry and modular functions and draw from a professional development research project to illustrate our approach. In this project, many teachers experienced dissonance that was rooted in their commitments to their curricular knowledge of trigonometry. Teachers who built new meanings into a coherent whole were those who coordinated them at a micro level. Teachers who saw implications of their own reasoning for student learning were also successful at expressing that reasoning in natural language. We saw a similar pattern in the case of teachers' creation of meanings for action and process conceptions of mod(f(x),g(x)). Teachers who gained insight into implications of their own activities for student learning were the teachers who reasoned at a micro level in regard to the meaning of mod, who coordinated that meaning with a covariational perspective on the behavior of functions, and who expressed that coordination in natural language. We conclude that a primary feature of tasks that promote teachers' construction of coherent mathematical meanings is that they support an overall effort to have teachers engage in the coordination of meanings in the context of explaining significant ideas and relationships.     

Rotational stress influences sensitized,but not habituated,exploratory behaviors in the woodlouse, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Porcellio scaber</Emphasis>

Terrestrial isopods (or woodlice), like the members of the other arthropod taxa, have a sophisticated nervous system that makes them sensitive to specific environmental factors. They can search for survival-related opportunities (e.g., approaching food sources or avoiding sunny areas). Two experiments examined how rotational stress could influence the propensity of common woodlice, Porcellio scaber to exhibit survival-related behaviors such as traveling and rearing up in a hostile environment. Experiment 1 assessed the behaviors of stressed and nonstressed woodlice exposed to a familiar or a novel environment without rewards. Experiment 2 assessed the effects of stress in woodlice given a free choice between a familiar and a novel environment without rewards. In the nonstressed individuals, the results showed a decrease in locomotor activity (habituation) and an increase in the time spent rearing up (sensitization) on the arena’s walls over time. In the stressed individuals, repeated rotation had a detrimental effect on the time spent rearing up, but locomotion was decreased only in the stressed individuals that were not preexposed to the test environment beforehand. In addition, immobilization periods—as a plausible indicator of stress—were longer in the absence of preexposure. It is suggested that preexposure had some antistress protective effects on habituated but not on sensitized, exploratory behaviors in woodlice.     

Training School Counselors as Developmental Advocates

Counselor educators continue to debate the persistent questions of the role and function of the school counselor. School counselor education faculty can address the issue of the school counselor's role by using contemporary developmental research to train counseling students to serve as developmental advocates. The primary role of a developmental advocate is to promote positive student developmental outcomes and the research‐identified types of environments that nurture those outcomes (J. Galassi & P. Akos, in press‐a). The authors present a training philosophy, a summary of selected developmental research, and curricular examples that demonstrate a programmatic focus on Developmental Advocacy.     

Measuring the earnings returns to lifelong learning in the UK

This paper examines the earnings returns to learning that takes place following the conventional ‘school-to-work’ stage of the life-course. We operationalise such ‘lifelong learning’ as the attainment of certified qualifications in adulthood, following the completion of the first period of continuous full-time education. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for the period 1991–2006, our approach and findings represent an important addition to the existing evidence base. By using annual data, we are able to employ the fixed effects estimator, which eliminates the problem of time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. Our dynamic specification uses a lag structure to consider how earnings returns evolve in the medium and longer run, whilst also controlling for wage trends which were evident prior to qualification attainment. Our results show a medium-run return for women of 10% on hourly wages. For men, initial suggestions of a similar positive return are eliminated once pre-qualification trends are taken into account. This suggests that adult learning has a causal effect on women's subsequent earnings but, for men, any apparent gain is due to selection.     

Preparing School Counselors to Promote Academic Development

Reform in school counseling over the last decade has focused on how school counselors can contribute to the academic development of K–12 students. Consensus in this matter has yet to be achieved, and recommendations about how best to prepare preservice K–12 school counselors for this objective have been incomplete. The authors describe content and supervised experiences from a preservice course designed to prepare school counselors to promote student academic development.