Participation as policy in local cultural governance

ABSTRACT

This article takes on participation not as taking part in cultural activities per se but in cultural policy-making, by studying the transformation and institutionalisation of participatory processes. Focusing on Switzerland, a federalist country where local and private actors play key roles in cultural policy, several processes by which different actors participate in local cultural policy-making are explored. Top-down procedures, such as formalised mandatory consultation procedures or the inclusion of cultural actors in administrative expert committees, coexist with bottom-up grassroots initiatives that can complement or even supplant traditional participatory processes. Furthermore, certain alternative modes and concepts of participation, such as the “cultural council”, circulate between different cases, across levels of state and in time. Participatory processes in cultural policy-making need to be seen as public policies in their own right, which can aim to depoliticise policies and procedures. Furthermore, actors need certain resources in order to participate, and venues aimed at opening participation do so in a restrained framework, focusing mostly on artistic and cultural elites rather than encourage larger citizen participation.     

Standardized test outcomes for students engaged in inquiry‐based science curricula in the context of urban reform

Considerable effort has been made over the past decade to address the needs of learners in large urban districts through scaleable reform initiatives. We examine the effects of a multifaceted scaling reform that focuses on supporting standards based science teaching in urban middle schools. The effort was one component of a systemic reform effort in the Detroit Public Schools, and was centered on highly specified and developed project‐based inquiry science units supported by aligned professional development and learning technologies. Two cohorts of 7th and 8th graders that participated in the project units are compared with the remainder of the district population, using results from the high‐stakes state standardized test in science. Both the initial and scaled up cohorts show increases in science content understanding and process skills over their peers, and significantly higher pass rates on the statewide test. The relative gains occur up to a year and a half after participation in the curriculum, and show little attenuation with in the second cohort when scaling occurred and the number of teachers involved increased. The effect of participation in units at different grade levels is independent and cumulative, with higher levels of participation associated with similarly higher achievement scores. Examination of results by gender reveals that the curriculum effort succeeds in reducing the gender gap in achievement experienced by urban African‐American boys. These findings demonstrate that standards‐based, inquiry science curriculum can lead to standardized achievement test gains in historically underserved urban students, when the curriculum is highly specified, developed, and aligned with professional development and administrative support. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 922–939, 2008     

Exploring science teaching in interaction at the instructional core

Recent instructional reforms in science education aim to change the way students engage in learning in the discipline, as they describe that students are to engage with disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and the practices of science to make sense of phenomena (NRC, 2012). For such sensemaking to become a reality, there is a need to understand the ways in which students' thinking can be maintained throughout the trajectory of science lessons. Past research in this area tends to foreground either the curriculum or teachers' practices. We propose a more comprehensive view of science instruction, one that requires attention to teachers' practice, the instructional task, and students' engagement. In this study, by examining the implementation of the same lesson across three different classrooms, our analysis of classroom videos and artifacts of students' work revealed how the interaction of teachers' practices, students' intellectual engagement, and a cognitively demanding task together support rigorous instruction. Our analyses shed light on their interaction that shapes opportunities for students' thinking and sensemaking throughout the trajectory of a science lesson. The findings provide implications for ways to promote rigorous opportunities for students' learning in science classrooms.     

Protective Factors for School Readiness Among Children in Poverty

The economic status of families and their children's learning outcomes are closely related. For example, children living in poverty tend to score worse on measures of reading and math performance than their more affluent peers, and this achievement gap is present by kindergarten. In this study, we identified protective factors associated with school readiness among an Arizona sample of children living at or below the federal poverty line (N = 230). Using multiple linear regression, we examined the association between assessments of school readiness, health status, childcare hours, home language, parent engagement, and parent education. We found that increased weekly childcare hours and better health were associated with higher proficiency in math, literacy, and approaches to learning, and may serve as resilience factors for children in poverty that may contribute to closing the achievement gap.     

Teachers' use of rubrics to score non‐traditional tasks: factors related to discrepancies in scoring

This study considered middle school mathematics teachers’ use of rubrics to score non‐traditional tasks. A group of eighth‐grade teachers attended a two‐day workshop where they evaluated assessment tasks and discussed the use an associated scoring rubric. Scored samples of student work submitted by the teachers indicated that they had difficulty using the rubrics for scoring. When compared to expert ratings, all except one teacher had discrepancies in scoring and some discrepancies indicated major problems. These discrepancies appear to be related to whether the task contained familiar or unfamiliar content and the mix of procedure and explanation the task required. Several other factors related to discrepancies, such as leniency errors, teacher knowledge, and the halo effect are also discussed. With the expanded use of rubrics in many arenas, these results show the need for more professional development related to rubric use.