Pedagogy of Validation: Autobiographical Reading and Writing Courses for First-Year,Low-Income Students

Innovative Higher Education - This embedded case study leveraged Rendón’s (1994) validation theory as well as theories connecting self-reflection and transformative learning (e.g.,...     

Children's Attitudes toward Females in Sports: Their Relationship with Sex,Grade, and Sports Participation

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to measure grade school children's attitudes toward female involvement in sports and their relationship with participation, sex, and grade level. A Likert-type questionnaire (CATFIS) was administered to 106 girls and 264 boys in grades 3–6 at the beginning of their participation (P) in a YMCA-sponsored sports program. Similarly, 344 girls and 287 boys in grades 3–9 who did not participate (NP) in this sports program were administered the questionnaire in their school classrooms. Five months later the P group and the NP group (only grades 3–6) were retested to investigate whether attitude change occurred. The results of the study indicated that females at all grade and participation levels had significantly more favorable attitudes than the males. At grades 3 and 4 male P and NP were quite similar in their attitudes, as were female P and NP, but at grades 5 and 6 the attitudes of each sex group diverged. Male NP were more positive than male P, while female NP were less positive than female P. The significant three-way interaction between participation, sex, and grade was explained in terms of a psychological contrast effect and sex roles. Overall, the groups became more positive toward female involvement in sports from the time of the pretest to the posttest.     

Encouraging IT students to get serious about assignment writing: evaluation of a Web-based initiative

Traditionally, students attending university have received support for their assignment writing within a face-to-face framework. Academic writing support delivered via the Internet needs to be rendered in very subject-specific terms for the resource to be perceived as valuable. This paper reports on a project involving writing support staff and a computer science subject leader to develop and evaluate a Web-based academic skills tutorial. The tutorial sought to provide online learning support for interpreting an information technology (IT) assignment topic, extracting information from sources, and integrating the material into a report with the support of online lexical tools. The evaluation sought to determine whether the students found the resource helpful, if improvements were still required, and what implications there were for integrating the resource with subject teaching. Students perceived most value in those sections of the resource that provided them with examples and models, and least in those that required them to engage in interactive activity.     

Making different equal? Fractured state and ruptured policy: The National Qualifications Framework in South Africa

This paper explores the making of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) in South Africa, and asks how a policy that was intended to unite education and training, and build new forms of equality, failed to become hegemonic as the new state established itself. In so doing, it engages, and argues for, theoretical tools that help keep ‘the state’ at the centre of policy analysis. The paper explores a rupture within the NQF between the fields of education and training by examining practices through which the policy developed between 1985 and 2007. Informed by involvement in these events, the author draws on data gathered from documents and interviews with over 70 participants engaged in making the NQF. Using a conceptual vocabulary derived from Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory the paper analyses the way social antagonisms were constructed and political frontiers drawn in changing political conditions [Laclau, E., Mouffe, C., 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso, London]. The paper argues that the emergence, development and rupture in the NQF can be explained in relation to shifting hegemonic practices that sought to organise social relations throughout the transition and within the post-apartheid era. The policy is portrayed as a feature of the political transition, marking the articulation of elements within the fields of education and training by hegemonic formations concerned with securing a democratic economy within a global market. The analysis runs that there has been a failure to maintain hegemony and that a rupture has occurred along a fault line within the South African state between practices building a corporatist state and those constructing a developmental state. The paper argues that the fractures built into the South African NQF point to complex challenges that states ‘at the margins’ face when simultaneously articulating with differing, contradictory globalised practices, whilst also seeking to build equitable national education systems. Local concerns remain significant in struggles to re-make the state, and education and training policy.