School tracking and educational inequality: a comparison of 12 education systems in Switzerland

Using data from the super-sample of the ‘PISA Suisse’ 2003 assessment, this article examines the relationship between the characteristics of education systems (made up of homogeneous or heterogeneous tracks) and their consequences in terms of effectiveness and equity. Our results indicate that it is not so much the official structure of tracks as the ways in which tracking is really organised – and, in particular, the degree of segregation that tracking methods involve – which make it possible to explain inequalities among students. They also show that some education systems are more inegalitarian than others and that the factors leading to inequalities can vary significantly from one Swiss canton to another. Finally, through multilevel analyses, we demonstrate that when the individual and aggregate characteristics of students are taken into account, the type of track a student attends is of only limited significance for explaining inequalities, which suggests that the effects of tracking are in fact linked to the nature of the population educated in the tracks.     

Engineering a General Education Program: Designing Mechanical Engineering General Education Courses

The Department of Mechanical Engineering at our institution created two engineering courses for the General Education Program that count towards second level general science credit (traditional science courses are first level). The courses were designed for the general student population based upon the requirements of our General Education Program and engineering concepts. We explain the results and impact of the classes so as to expand the conceptualization of general education courses and to enable engineering curricula to reach a larger audience as well as to broaden student understanding of the forces shaping their world.     

Global,Social, and Economic Influences on the Access Policies of South African Higher Education

The access policies of South African universities are influenced by sets of global, social, and economic factors. Although the second and third sets are predominantly local (South African), they are influenced by the first factor that gives rises to a fourth imperative, the economic factor. The latter, which is of increasing importance and is affected by the fact that students can ''vote'' for higher education institutions and programmes with their feet, is tricky. For if institutions sacrifice their core values to market imperatives, they will lose much of their utility as education institutions.     

Variability in the age of schooling contributes to the link between literacy and numeracy in Côte d'Ivoire

Literacy and numeracy are correlated throughout development, however, our understanding of this relation is limited. We explored the predictors of literacy and numeracy covariance (i.e., shared fluency between literacy and numeracy) in children (N = 1167, girls = 563) in rural Côte d'Ivoire, with specific focus on how developmental timing of instruction may relate to covariance. Many Ivorian children experience late enrollment and grade repetition, leading to variation in age-for-grade; participants were between grades 1 to 6, but their ages ranged from 5 to 15 (M = 9.19, SD = 2.07). Phonological awareness, numerical magnitude, ordinality, working memory, and inhibitory control were cognitive predictors of covariance. Age-for-grade was negatively related to covariance suggesting that covariance is related to timing of instruction.