Creating a Quality Assurance System for Croatian Higher Education

This article presents an action plan for establishing a system of quality assurance for Croatian higher education. The action plan is forward‐looking rather than retrospective and draws on experiences with adopting continuous improvement practices in Australia, Turkey, and the United States. Numerous authors have explored the challenges facing Croatian higher education, so we do not duplicate that task. We propose to adopt a continuous improvement system which will help modernize the system of education in Croatia.     

Teacher enquiry as a tool for professional development: Investigating pupils’ effective Talk While Learning

The Learning to Learn in Schools Phase 3 Evaluation was a four year project across England exploring the concept of Learning to Learn in 33 primary and secondary schools. The project was funded through the UK based Campaign for Learning. One of the key aims of the project was to ensure that the locus of control in terms of development remains with the schools, who decided on the focus of innovation relevant to them under the umbrella heading of Learning to Learn. A team from the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching at Newcastle University then supported and facilitated the teachers in the systematic evaluation of their experiences. As a result we believe that this process supported meaningful professional development about teaching and learning. This paper exemplifies this process through two professional enquiries into pupil talk in the classroom and how it supported learning. The projects were carried out by teachers in two schools, one secondary (11–18 years) and one primary (4–11 years). Both schools decided that encouraging pupil talk about learning best fit with their priorities and the project aims of exploring Learning to Learn. The paper describes the different research methods and findings of the teachers’ research, focusing on the decision making which occurred and how the process of the research has impacted on their professional development. Conclusions are drawn about how the philosophy of Learning to Learn can be as easily applied to the process of professional enquiry through action research and teachers’ learning, as to the more traditional domain of students’ learning and how this might contribute to the development of a successful Learning to Learn school culture.     

Impacts of a university-elementary school partnership designed to support technology integration

Although administrators are scrambling to bring technology into their schools, the introduction of computers into individual classrooms has created challenges for both experienced and inexperienced teachers. Recognizing that teachers' use of technology is likely to increase when support is more readily available, a university-elementary school partnership was formed to provide ongoing professional, instructional, and technical support to teachers at one elementary school. Professional support was provided through monthly meetings and ongoing interactions initiated by teachers' changing technology needs. Instructional support was provided through two teacher inservice workshops that emphasized practical ideas for infusion. Technical support was provided, at least in part, by training 18 third- to fifth-grade students to serve as technology experts for the school. Survey and interview data from teachers, students, the principal, and the library media specialist were used to examine the impact of these efforts. Findings describe perceived increases in teachers' levels of instructional and professional uses, and in students' confidence, self-esteem, and computer skills. Although participants described changes in the school's overall approach to technology use, use of student-trainers was limited.Special thanks to other team members who contributed to this project: Justin Ahn, Brooke Banta, Kathy Cennamo, Tristan Johnson, Wade Oliver, Feng-Qi Lai, Scott Ringer, and Jamie Turpin, as well as the students, teachers, library media specialist, and principal from Midland School.     

Fifty-one families with computers: A study of children's academic uses of microcomputers at home

This paper examines the extent to which children in a 51-family, qualitative study used their home microcomputers for learning school subjects such as reading, mathematics, science, and social studies. Logs and analytic documents gathered over two years were content analyzed. This analysis revealed that most of the children who used their home microcomputers were not using them for academic learning. The absence of home academic microcomputing by children was found to be associated with a set of factors which included the lack of parental pressure and support for home academic microcomputing, the schools' emphasis on programming and computer literacy, the unreceptivity of the children and their peers to home academic microcomputing, and the dearth of academic software in the homes. The implications of these findings for the fostering of home academic microcomputing are discussed.     

Reliability of the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts for Hispanic and nonHispanic kindergarten pupils

The internal consistency reliability of the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts (BTBC) was examined for 40 Hispanic and 40 non Hispanic kindergarten pupils in the Southwest. Subscale and total scale reliabilities appeared to be comparable. This evidence supported the reliability of the BTBC for Hispanic and non Hispanic kindergarten pupils.     

Strategic enrolment management (SEM) in self-financed higher education of Hong Kong: evaluation and measurement

The purpose of this study is to examine how the dimensions of strategic enrolment management (SEM) tie to the success metrics in the area of enrolment, retention and graduation from senior and programme management perspectives of a self-financed institution in Hong Kong. The literature on SEM has demonstrated that managing enrolment is a global concern and requires institution-wide effort. For successful SEM, it has to be a performance-based, outcome-oriented system which requires significant data to determine its effectiveness, success or failure, growth or decline. Though the focus of most SEM research is about the implementation of SEM in achieving enrolment and retention goals, there are far fewer studies that look critically at the perceptions of success tying SEM to success metrics. This study fills the research gap regarding the perceptions of tying SEM to the success. Thus, success metrics are vital in assessing the achievement of enrolment, retention and graduation goals. This study employs a combination of survey results and a formal content analysis methodology from a series of in-depth face-to-face interviews with both senior and programme managers at a self-financed institution in Hong Kong. The research identifies the perceived importance of different components related to enrolment, retention and graduation successes and examines differences in these perceptions between senior management and programme management. New success metrics (availability of an Honours degree programme, the employability ratio and student learning outcomes) are found in both enrolment and graduation stages which are quantified as perceived SEM success in a self-financed institution in Hong Kong.     

The array representation and primary children’s understanding and reasoning in multiplication

We examine whether the array representation can support children’s understanding and reasoning in multiplication. To begin, we define what we mean by understanding and reasoning. We adopt a ‘representational-reasoning’ model of understanding, where understanding is seen as connections being made between mental representations of concepts, with reasoning linking together the different parts of the understanding. We examine in detail the implications of this model, drawing upon the wider literature on assessing understanding, multiple representations, self explanations and key developmental understandings. Having also established theoretically why the array representation might support children’s understanding and reasoning, we describe the results of a study which looked at children using the array for multiplication calculations. Children worked in pairs on laptop computers, using Flash Macromedia programs with the array representation to carry out multiplication calculations. In using this approach, we were able to record all the actions carried out by children on the computer, using a recording program called Camtasia. The analysis of the obtained audiovisual data identified ways in which the array representation helped children, and also problems that children had with using the array. Based on these results, implications for using the array in the classroom are considered.