Talk

The publication and subsequent distribution and dissemination of Birth to Three Matters, A Framework to Support Children in their Earliest Years (DfES, 2002) marks a significant breakthrough in government recognition of the importance of the years from birth to three in shaping children's later learning. However, the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, published the previous year, focuses upon the years from three to five. In this paper, Lesley Abbott and Ann Langston challenge the view that the Foundation Stage begins as children reach their third birthday, but rather that children are competent learners from birth, and it is at this very early stage that true foundations are laid.     

Choosing in schools: locating the benefits of specialisation

Recent policy in England has suggested that educational outcomes will be raised if schools specialise in particular subjects. In contrast, calls for the reform of 16–19 education have suggested that these outcomes will be improved if students become less specialised in their studies. At present, there is a limited evidence base from which to judge these arguments. In particular, we do not know the extent to which students’ achievements in 16–19 education are higher when they choose subjects which play to their perceived strengths. We also do not know whether students are more likely to choose to study subjects taught by more effective departments. That is, outcomes may be affected by the relative strengths of students or departments in circumstances where there is freedom to choose. In this paper we provide evidence of the existence and strength of these relationships. This evidence suggests that reducing the scope within schools for specialisation or competition will reduce average student attainment and these effects ought to be taken into account when evaluating alternative curriculum policies.     

The learning alliance: ethics in doctoral supervision

This paper is concerned with the ethics of relationships in doctoral supervision. We give an overview of four paradigms of doctoral supervision that have endured over the past 25 years and elucidate some of their strengths and limitations, contextualise them historically and consider their implications for doctoral supervision in the contemporary university. Two common threads across the four paradigms are a view of doctoral supervision as pedagogical practice and that supervisors have primary responsibility for the supervision of doctoral students. We challenge these assumptions. In their place, we propose that the goal of doctoral supervision is praxis and that this involves a learning alliance between multiple institutional agents grounded in a relational ethics of mutual responsibility.     

Response to Grace’s reflections on Allen and West’s paper

Since the 1970s, school effectiveness research has looked for process-variables filling the black box between mainly structural school features and cognitive outcomes in students. Two concepts came to the fore: school climate and school culture. Both concepts are currently used interchangeably, although it is open to debate whether both are actually the same thing. Because of the way culture and climate are defined and subsequently measured, we propose school culture is a better frame from which to study school effectiveness. This article goes through the premises of perceptual measurement usually overlooked in climate research, and we demonstrate empirically by means of very basic and simple methods and techniques that perceptual measurement and measurement based on assumptions are different approaches and might yield totally different results on an aggregated level. We conclude by demonstrating how culture can be probed and integrated in the models traditionally used in school effectiveness research in an advantageous and theoretically sound way.     

Strategic capacity building for Australian educational research: creating spaces for action

This paper provides some background information about the Strategic Capacity Building for Australian Educational Research initiative: a joint program of work sponsored by the Australian Association for Research in Education and the Australian Council of Deans of Education. In addition, it offers some broader analysis of the contexts within which Australian Educational Research is being framed and judged, and argues that leaders of educational research need to become more adept at finding and creating spaces in which important policy battles can be won.     

Integrative Geragogy: Part 1: Theory and Practice of a Basic Model

ABSTRACT

Geragogy as a part of gerontology seems to be established in aging societies. Also, geragogy as a form of education for elderly people, learning in the third age, is nowadays an integrated part of agogy. On the other hand, the increase in the number of people of the fourth age, the oldest of the old, handicapped elderly people in nursing homes, is hardly considered in the geragogical discussion. Integrative geragogy in the field of care facilities is given only marginal consideration. In this article we want to present integrative geragogy as a basic part of educational gerontology. We present it as interacting closely with therapeutic education and social work, dealing especially with potentials of the oldest of the old and mentally handicapped elderly people. An outline of the international discussion and the history of geragogy in Germany shows the state-of-the-art in geragogy today. A specific theory and praxeology of integrative geragogy is also presented.     

Promoting secondary school students’ evaluation of source features of multiple documents

The current research examined whether instructional activities centering on contrasting cases promoted secondary school students’ evaluations of source features present in a multiple-documents inquiry context. Two hypothetical students’ document evaluation strategy protocols were designed: One featured more sophisticated strategies commonly enacted by experts and better college students and a second featured less sophisticated strategies commonly enacted by secondary school students. A series of classroom-based activities required that students compare/contrast the two protocols to decide which were the best strategies when analyzing multiple scientific documents and why. The findings demonstrated that students who previously participated in the intervention activities included more scientific concepts from more useful documents when generating essay responses from memory, displayed better rankings of the usefulness of the set of multiple documents, and offered more principled justifications based on source feature evaluations of trustworthiness compared to students who instead received typical classroom instruction. We discuss the instructional implications of a contrasting-cases approach in facilitating secondary school students’ usage of source features within multiple-documents inquiry contexts.     

中国北方偏远地区农户作物的选择

遗传多样性保护对于全球农业发展至关重要,而有效的保护与农民对不同作物的种植选择关系密切.目前在中国北方偏远地区,农民仍以种植小杂粮为主,所采用品种多为具有广泛遗传多样性的地方品种.通过对该地区农民对不同品种小杂粮选择种植的调查,基于我们的作物选择模型,得出市场不完全和收入水平低是农民种植小杂粮作物的重要原因.建议政府在遗传多样性保护中发挥更重要的作用.