The role of culture in program improvement

In this article, we draw on work in three Head Start programs over three years to consider how “culture” plays a role in program improvement. Through close attention to discourse we attempt to show how culture takes shape through dynamic interactions in particular contexts, constituting identities, structuring social relations, and privileging particular forms of knowledge. We argue for the importance of illuminating the forces that shape our lives and bringing our own ideologies to conscious awareness, in order to become actors in our social milieus. Articulation between general mandates and local needs and goals would then entail ongoing dialogue in a “culturally situated model of school/program effectiveness” (Fuller & Clarke, 1994, p. 121).     

Observational,physiological, and self-report measures of children's anger: relations to reactive versus proactive aggression

The goal of this study was to examine the relations of reactive versus proactive aggression to children's anger, as assessed using observational, physiological, and self-report measures. Anger was hypothesized to be related to reactive aggression, but not to proactive aggression. Children (N = 272 second-grade boys and girls) participated in a procedure in which they lost a board game and prize to a confederate who cheated. Skin conductance reactivity and heart rate reactivity were measured throughout the procedure. Following the interaction, children viewed a videotape of the game and self-reported on their level of anger after each turn of the game. Observational coding of children's angry facial expressions and angry nonverbal behaviors was conducted. Reactive aggression, but not proactive aggression, was positively related to skin conductance reactivity and angry nonverbal behaviors, both at an aggregated level and in terms of rate of increase over the time span of the game.     

Defining Early Number Sense: A participatory Australian study

Recent publications in Australia focus on “number sense” as an important component of mathematics instruction. The current study attempted to tap into local expert knowledge in the area of early mathematics in an effort to establish a consensus on which skills reflect the number sense typically acquired by school entry. A modified Delphi procedure was employed whereby participants were asked to indicate their level of agreement with a variety of skills as indicators of number sense in young children. The study raised questions about the efficacy of this type of participatory research when used in relation to an ill‐defined construct. It also revealed a lack of consensus among the group of academics who agreed to participate in the study.     

Feasibility study of a university counseling center in Botswana: Innovative response to boundary changing worldwide

In this article, the feasibility of creating a Counseling Center at the University of Botswana as a way of responding to changing boundaries worldwide with the concomitant increase in the treatment of and solution to issues and concerns facing students is examined. The results of student and staff responses to questions on: a) types of counseling services; b) group counseling seminars which should be offered as well as c) the nature and degree of seriousness ofstudent concerns are presented.     

‘Building up speed’, ‘trying to break free’, ‘pushing it through the pipe’: using metaphor to explore early career STEM researchers’ grant writing capability

This study demonstrates the use of metaphor analysis in needs assessment for developmental support and shows how it can be used to critically examine assumptions in the literature about the ways emerging researchers conceptualize their career trajectory. We investigated the professional development needs of a group of science, technology, engineering and mathematics early career researchers, to provide them with better grant writing support. Conceptual metaphor theory was used to explore interview data, in part to identify where training design could be modified. In the case of the group under investigation, close metaphoric analysis presented a richly embodied view of our participants’ research activity and suggested ways to provide a stronger focus on strategic and processual aspects of grant writing in such settings.     

Professional Learning Communities: A Review of the Literature

International evidence suggests that educational reform’s progress depends on teachers’ individual and collective capacity and its link with school-wide capacity for promoting pupils’ learning. Building capacity is therefore critical. Capacity is a complex blend of motivation, skill, positive learning, organisational conditions and culture, and infrastructure of support. Put together, it gives individuals, groups, whole school communities and school systems the power to get involved in and sustain learning over time. Developing professional learning communities appears to hold considerable promise for capacity building for sustainable improvement. As such, it has become a ‘hot topic’ in many countries.     

Performance prediction of data fusion for information retrieval

The data fusion technique has been investigated by many researchers and has been used in implementing several information retrieval systems. However, the results from data fusion vary in different situations. To find out under which condition data fusion may lead to performance improvement is an important issue. In this paper, we present an analysis of the behaviour of several well-known methods such as CombSum and CombMNZ for fusion of multiple information retrieval results. Based on this analysis, we predict the performance of the data fusion methods. Experiments are conducted with three groups of results submitted to TREC 6, TREC 2001, and TREC 2004. The experiments show that the prediction of the performance of data fusion is quite accurate, and it can be used in situations very different from the training examples. Compared with previous work, our result is more accurate and in a better position for applications since various number of component systems can be supported while only two was used previously.