Change Through Empowerment Processes: Women's stories from South Asia and Latin America

Using two case studies, one of a woman in South Asia, the other, a Latin American woman now living in the USA, the paper identifies both obstacles and facilitators that have shaped their lives and their paths to empowerment. The authors present a model for understanding the processes of empowerment and change, especially change facilitating gender equity. This model recognises a dialectic process involving people's subjective perspectives and the ideologies, policies, structures and institutions in their public environments. It extends and problematises discussion of empowerment and change that can create more gender equity. Data for the two case studies were gathered through qualitative strategies, informed by critical feminist theory, as part of two broader research projects.     

Pressure Points: Intersections of Homophobia,Heterosexism, and Schooling

I examine pre-service elementary school teachers’ process of defining diversity as part of a state-mandated, high-stakes, teacher education portfolio benchmark; metaphors’ roles in their defining process; the evaluation mechanism, and the literal and metaphorical bench-mark boundary these pre-service teachers must reach to enter the profession. Using Foucault's analysis of the relation among words, things, and truth and Ogden and Richards’ definition theory as lenses, I analyze the dilemmas, ambiguities, negations, and contradictions these pre-service teachers encounter during the definition-writing process and their attempt to match their definitions of diversity to what they believe to be a concrete, absolute object, entity, or thing called diversity. Their belief that diversity is a concrete, fixed, discoverable Truth bumps against the possibility that diversity is ambiguous, negating, contradictory, and gigantic in scale. Institutionalized diversity promotes political and economic, institutional well being; discourse exposes itself as political power medium and source of subject formation. Ultimately, diversity explodes the epistemic underpinnings that lead to the expectation that one can reify diversity, wedge it “solidly in a space of visible reference points” (Foucault 1983, 17), and imprison it within institutional boundaries.     

Reducing Aggressive Behavior and Increasing Motivation in School: The Evolution of an Intervention to Strengthen School Adjustment

The pervasive links between problem behaviors and school adjustment suggest that effective intervention programs to enhance school adjustment must focus both on decreasing the motivation to aggress and increasing the motivation to achieve. We describe a program of intervention research to improve social behavior and academic motivation in elementary school students organized around principles of attribution theory. Our intervention curriculum initially focused on reducing children's aggression and was then expanded to include enhancing personal responsibility. A series of efficacy and effectiveness studies have demonstrated that children's attributions in both the social and academic domains can be changed with cost-effective, educational strategies. These changes in children's cognitions have reliably produced positive changes in behavior. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our work for the design of effective interventions.     

GRADE LEVEL,SEX, AND SELECTED ASPECTS OF TEST-WISENESS1

Measures of four selected aspects of test-wiseness (TW) were constructed for use in grades 5 through 11, and administered to students in two school systems. In each case the grade effects were significant at the .05 level, with a linear trend indicated. There was no evidence of sex, or sex by grade interaction effects.     

Gender-Aware Supervision in Marriage and Family Counseling and Therapy: How Far Have We Actually Come?

A systemic cognitive-developmental framework is used to critique how the field of marriage and family counseling and therapy supervision currently integrates issues of gender.     

International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement Science Assessment in Developing Countries

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has been active now for more than 30 years. In that time the IEA has planned and co-ordinated several international surveys of pupil performance, particularly in mathematics, science and language. Pupil test data have in every case been supplemented with information regarding pupil, school, curriculum and system features, gathered through questionnaire enquiries and other means. Despite the relatively high costs of participation, and the complex logistics associated with pupil testing on the scale required, a number of developing countries have collaborated in one or other of the surveys, most particularly in those in mathematics and science. Some of the motivations for survey participation are equally relevant for both developed and developing countries, principal among them the desire to evaluate national educational system effectiveness through international comparison. A particular motivation driving some developing countries into this form of international collaboration is the opportunity it offers for skills transfer in the general areas of curriculum development and test construction. The paper overviews the IEA's three international science surveys, notes levels of developing country involvement in these, highlights some selected survey findings, and reflects on the potential value of survey participation to developing countries in particular.     

Meeting English Language Needs in Teacher Education: a flexible support model for non-English speaking background students

The English language needs of students in teacher education programmes have become an issue of concern. There has been an increase in the numbers of local and international students, the range of their backgrounds and the diversity of their language needs. This paper explores the question of what constitutes effective English language support for students, focusing on the development of provision for a group of 110 overseas-trained teachers undertaking teacher education at the University of Sydney between 1999 and 2002. Data are drawn from focus group interviews, semi-structured interviews with students and staff and student learning journals. The paper proposes an integrated and flexible model of English language support involving content-based units, tutoring/mentoring programmes and self-directed study. Such a model may be useful for English language support for different groups of English as a second language (ESL) students in other contexts at tertiary and secondary levels.     

An Affective Sexual Awareness Program for Counselors

Most counseling students and counselor educators lack adequate preparation for working with clients who have sexual problems. The authors developed a program to facilitate increased awareness of one's own sexuality as a basis for aiding others in that area. The program emphasizes small group participation in order to provide security to explore sexuality and its effects on interpersonal relationships. The program uses brief videotape vignettes of affective-sexual behaviors of individuals and pairs (heterosexual and same-sexed pairs), followed by group discussion. Interpersonal interaction exercises are used to aid participants in relating to their own sexuality. Overall response to the six presentations reported here has been favorable.     

EVALUATING AND PREDICTING SURVEY EFFICIENCY USING GENERALIZABILITY THEORY

A long-term science performance monitoring program began in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1980 with the first in an initial series of annual national sample surveys of the science performances of II-, 13- and 15-year-old pupils. The assessment framework underlying this program is process-oriented, consisting of a number of subcategories of science activity, some of which are assessed in practical mode. Pupils are randomly selected for testing according to a complex sampling scheme. Questions are also selected randomly to represent the various subcategories.
From the start of this program, it was intended to appeal to generalizability theory for a suitable estimation paradigm, and in this paper some preliminary applications of G-theory are described. The results of these applications would suggest that computerized question-banking, domain-sampling of questions, and G-theory together provide a useful new technology for this kind of performance monitoring exercise. The issue of interpretability might still remain a problem, however, unless the question domains can be clearly defined, and can be reflected in the question pools with consistency over time.