Telecommunications

Rufus P. Turner's The Illustrated Dictionary of Electronics (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB Books, 1980---$19.95/14.95)

Sam Fedida and Rex Malik's The Viewdata Revolution (New York: John Wiley, 1980--- $34.95)

The latest from the Harvard Program on Information Resources Policy (200 Aiken, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 02138)     

Tensions in Community Health Improvement Initiatives: Communication and Collaboration in a Managed Care Environment

Between the years 1993 and 2000, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation sponsored the Comprehensive Community Health Models (CCHMs) Initiative in three Michigan counties. CCHMs was comprised of three closely related community initiatives carried out in the midst of a failed national health care reform effort and the continued penetration of managed care arrangements into many health care systems. This experimental initiative set out to test the hypothesis that traditional healthcare system animosities and exclusionary practices could be overcome by stakeholder participation in an ongoing, structured, collaborative dialogue about improving access to health services. In the process of collecting data through surveys, interviews, content analysis, and observation, we were struck by the occurrence of several overarching tensions that we perceive to exist in our data. The present article elucidates five such tensions and suggests how third parties such as communication researchers, evaluators, and practitioners can facilitate community health improvement initiatives and better their own data interpretation by acknowledging and understanding these tensions.     

IMPACTS OF 2‐YEAR AND 4‐YEAR COLLEGES ON LEARNING ORIENTATIONS: A PRELIMINARY STUDY

This investigation compared the impacts of 2‐year and 4‐year colleges on learning orientations. Controlling for precollege learning orientations, academic aptitude, age, work, place of residence, and enrollment status, this study found no significant differences between 2‐ and 4‐year students in freshman‐year effects on enjoyment of diversity and intellectual challenge, learning for self‐understanding, internal locus of attribution for academic success, and preference for higher order cognitive activities. The findings are consistent with other recent evidence casting doubt on major differences in the net educational effects of 2‐ and 4‐year colleges.     

Countering and exceeding ‘capital’: a ‘funds of knowledge’ approach to re-imagining community

This article discusses how the ‘funds of knowledge’ approach (FoK) offers a socially just alternative to the logics of capital, by drawing on knowledge assets from students’ family and community lifeworlds to build engaging and rigorous learning, supporting school–community interactions that build capacities. We explain how we applied FoK in an action research project – Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN) – to design curriculum and pedagogy in schools of a high-poverty region. With reference to RPiN, we also observe how high-poverty regions, and their schools, appear to be undergoing complex unsettlements, as effects of globalisation, which raise problematic questions about who/what is ‘the local community’. We argue that this calls for new thinking, both sociological and ethical, which can refine the FoK approach to take fuller account of the diverse and complex spaces of social-historical life in new times. We conclude by considering a pedagogical approach through which learners in such regions can re-imagine hopeful forms of community.     

School Improvement Efforts: Qualitative and Quantitative Data from Four Naturally Occurring Experiments in Phases III and IV of the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study

Abstract

Phase III of the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study (LSES‐III) was designed to provide rich, qualitative and quantitative data on the characteristics of more and less effective schools. Data were gathered on eight matched outlier pairs of schools. Unbeknownst to the authors at the beginning of LSES‐III, four of the eight historically ineffective schools were engaged in school improvement efforts. None of these efforts was guided from the state or district. This serendipity provided an opportunity to observe improvement efforts which were of the “naturally occurring” ‐‐ as opposed to externally developed, mandated or otherwise offered ‐‐ variety. The four projects are described, complete with five year follow‐up data. The efforts are seen as falling along two dimensions: technical changes designed to raise achievement test scores; and efforts focused on a point along a continuum ranging from orderliness to excellence, and designed to raise students’ academic achievement. Comparisons are made to more formally planned school improvement efforts.     

Equity and marketisation: emerging policies and practices in Australian education

The conjunction of equity and market logics in contemporary education has created new and different conditions of possibility for equity, both as conceived in policy discourses and as a related set of educational practices. In this editorial introduction, we examine how equity is being drawn into new policy assemblages and how, in the context of marketisation, equity is evolving and being enacted in new ways across education sectors. Different conceptions of equity are considered, including the increasingly influential human capital perspective promoted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We argue that, separate from critiques of neoliberalism and its deleterious effects on equity in education, it is necessary to analyse carefully the increasing rationalisation of equity agendas in economic terms, the associated effects on education governance and policy-making, as well as on the work of educational institutions and educators. Providing an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue, we direct particular attention to the multiple, complex and often contradictory effects of the current education reform agenda in Australia, which has prioritised equity objectives and intensified performance measurement, comparison and accountability as means to drive educational improvement and reduce disadvantage.     

An Evaluation of a Residential PSE Course for an Academic A-Level Class

In England, the presence of an established church places its adherents within the social mainstream. Other religious groups have been tolerated though suffering social and educational disadvantages. With the passage of time through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, minority religious groups such as Irish Catholics have been assimilated into the host culture, and allowed to have their own schools.

However, it would appear that contemporary movements of people to the United Kingdom have retained loyalties not only to their own religion, but, in some instances to their own language, which they perceive as a vital element of their own culture and identity. Demands for schools, within the state-funded system, for minority religious groups have not lessened. As faith schools in England increase in number, their role in a multicultural society becomes increasingly problematic. Lessons about changing models of assimilation and identity can be learnt from a brief review of the historic Irish Catholic experience that, in turn, can illuminate the current experience of a Greek Orthodox school in south London.     

Referral and placement recommendations of teachers toward gifted handicapped children

Three male students between 10 and 13 years of age, who possessed WISC‐R Full Scale IQ's of greater than 120 and documented problems in decoding skills were assessed with respect to cognitive processing abilities (Cognitive Assessment System) and found to have marked deficits in successive coding. A process based remedial program, combining global training on tasks requiring successive processing with tasks involving the application of successive processing to decoding in reading, was implemented within approximately six weeks (15 hours) of training. The remedial program included guided practice and verbal mediation to assist students to internalize and generalize the cognitive strategies. Improvements following remediation were manifested uniquely for each of the students. The differences appeared to be related to the entry skill levels and preferred strategies of each student, as well as to the dimensions of attention and motivation. Results offer an extension of cognitive theory regarding the functioning of students, and may also provide an assessment option allowing earlier identification and remediation for such students.