International Comparisons of the Relationships among Educational Effectiveness, Evaluation and Improvement Variables: An Overview

This special issue of the Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education presents information from five countries related to the following constructs and/or literatures: teacher effectiveness research, school effectiveness research, teacher evaluation, staff development, teacher improvement, and school improvement. This overview article presents brief summaries of five major issues that are addressed throughout the issue. A conceptual framework is introduced that presents links among the aforementioned constructs/literatures. While these links are theoretically viable, their actual existence varies widely by country, with several countries lacking many of the links. Implications of these missing links are discussed, as well as strategies for more tightly joining these literatures/constructs. Original research from each of the countries is also introduced.     

A programme-wide training framework to facilitate scientific communication skills development amongst biological sciences Masters students

In this article we describe the effectiveness of a programme-wide communication skills training framework incorporated within a one-year biological sciences taught Masters course designed to enhance the competency of students in communicating scientific research principally to a scientific audience. In one class we analysed the numerical marks achieved by students (N 61) for specific communication assignments completed at the start and at the end of the course. This was complemented by questionnaires administered to students at the beginning and at the end of the course to self-assess their competency and to elicit their views on the usefulness of the training received. We considered three questions: did students’ communication skills improve during the course; did the outcomes depend on the place of previous education (UK or non-UK); and how useful did students consider the learning and teaching activities to be? We show that the training improved students’ self-reported competency in most of the communication skills considered. Coursework marks for writing literature reviews improved during the course (p < 0.001). Those marks were marginally associated (that is, approaching statistical significance after Bonferroni correction) with the place of previous education (relatively high in UK students; p = 0.005). Coursework marks for writing research proposals did not change during the course (p = 0.361) but did depend on place of previous education (relatively high for UK students (p = 0.001). Although this small study’s intriguing results merit further investigation, our initial data supports the use of a programme-wide framework of the type presented here to facilitate communications skills development amongst biological science graduate students.     

Difficulties facing mathematics teachers in developing countries—A case study of Nigeria

In the series Change in Mathematics Eduation Since the Late 1950's-Ideas and Realisation which appeared in Education Studies in Mathematics, Vol. 9, Ohuche (1978) surveyed the achievements, trials and tribulations of school mathematics in Nigeria for the period 1957 to 1977. Here we complement his paper by considering the current problems of school and university mathematics as they relate to teachers.     

Getting Comfortable with Discomfort: Preparing Counselor Trainees to Broach Racial,Ethnic, and Cultural Factors with Clients during Counseling

Counselors’ considerations of racial and cultural factors in the lives and experiences of clients enhances counseling outcomes. Acknowledgement of cultural factors enhances counselor credibility, client satisfaction, and the depth of client disclosure. This article opens with an overview of the Continuum of Broaching Behavior (Day-Vines et al. 2007), continues with a case illustration that enumerates categories along the continuum, provides empirical support for the continuum, and closes with a set of instructional strategies for counselor educators to infuse within a multicultural counseling course.     

Preventing violent extremism: Resourcing,stakeholder strategies and fostering belonging and connection in Australian schools

Countering violent extremism (CVE) continues to be a topic of national and international concern as well as media interest. In the field of CVE, educational institutions have an important role to play, but precisely how educators and policymakers should best respond to extremism within schools remains unclear. This article draws on interviews with multiple stakeholders implementing a small-scale nationally funded grant in Australian schools to guard against behaviours leading to violent extremism through developing restorative justice (RJ) practices. In foregrounding their accounts, we draw attention to the complexity of negotiating the CVE space by resisting dominant narratives that could be considered ‘exaggerations’ regarding both the manifestations of and motivations behind violent or extreme student behaviour. To conclude, we highlight how—in important ways—the money and resourcing allocated for CVE in local settings simply recycles what are already established to be best practices for fostering belonging and connection in schools, particularly in socio-economically disadvantaged communities.     

Infant Attention Is Dynamically Modulated With Changing Arousal Levels

Traditional accounts of developing attention and cognition emphasize static individual differences in information encoding; however, work from Aston‐Jones et al. suggests that looking behavior may be dynamically influenced by autonomic arousal. To test this model, a 20‐min testing battery constituting mixed photos and cartoon clips was shown to 53 typical 12‐month‐olds. Look duration was recorded to index attention, and continuous changes in arousal were tracked by measuring heart rate, electrodermal activity, and movement levels. Across three analyses, we found that continuous changes in arousal tracked simultaneous changes in attention measures, as predicted by the Aston‐Jones model. It was also found that changes in arousal tended to precede (occur before) subsequent changes in attention. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

A tale of two topologies: Woodward-Hoffmann rules at your fingertips!

A simple procedure for determining whether a pericyclic reaction is thermally allowed is described. The focus is on the potential aromaticity of the transition state of the process, which is inferred from the topological features of the interacting orbitals and the number of electrons involved.