AN INVESTIGATION OF MAINSTREAM STAFF PERCEPTIONS OF ON‐SITE EBD UNITS

In this article Sue Sherbourne establishes the policy issues underpinning the development of On‐Site Units and investigates staff perceptions of their role and function.     

Parents resourcing children’s early development and learning

Parents deal with a complex web of choices when seeking and using knowledge and resources related to their young children’s literacy development. Information concerning children’s learning and development comes in many forms and is produced by an increasingly diverse range of players including governments, non‐government organisations and commercial businesses. This study used a survey, interview and artefact collection to investigate mothers’ and fathers’ reported activities in seeking, accessing, producing and circulating information and resources related to children’s learning and development. Differences were found relating to parent gender and level of education. Parents’ resourcing activities are also shaped by their particular goals for their children.     

Students' understandings about animal skeletons

Surprisingly few studies have looked at people's understanding of skeletons. Most of the work in this field that has been done has only involved children's understanding of human skeletons. This study looks at students' understandings of the structure of animal (including human) skeletons. A crosssectional approach was used involving a total of 175 students in England from six different age groups (ranging from 4 year olds to 20 year olds). Students were presented, on separate occasions, with specimens of a brown rat, a starling and a herring and asked to draw what they thought was inside each specimen. On a final occasion, they were also asked to draw what they thought was inside themselves. Repeated inspections of the completed drawings allowed us to construct a seven point scale of 'skeletal understanding'. Our analysis shows the extent to which student understanding increases with age and the degree to which pupils know more about human than other skeletons. The findings are interpreted with reference to current trends in English science curricula and pedagogy. We comment in particular on the current inability of most students to see the skeleton as a functional, integrated whole.     

Reviews

Vivienne Gross, Hackney Child and Family Consultation Service, Child Abuse and the School's Response: A Workshop for Professionals Involved with Ghildren/Young People from Nursery to Further Education by Eve Brock. Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1992. 22pp. ISBN 0 58210060 7, £25.00

Louise O'Connor, Roehampton Institute, Social Education and Personal Development Studies in Primary Education by Delwyn and Eva Tattum. London: David Fulton, 1992. 194pp. pb ISBN 185346 110 5, £12.99

Sue Smedley, Froebel Institute College, Stress in Teaching by Jack Dunham. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 200pp. hb ISBN 0 415 06634 4, £35, pb ISBN 0 415 06635 2, £12.99

David Thomas, Department of Education University of Liverpool, Learning Support for Young People in Transition: Leaving School for Further Education and Work by Jean McGinfy and John Fish. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. 116pp. pb ISBN 0 335 09765 0, n.p.     

Learned society members and open access

The individual members of 35 UK learned societies were surveyed on their attitudes to open access (OA); 1,368 responses were received. Most respondents said they knew what OA was, and supported the idea of OA journals. However, although 60% said that they read OA journals and 25% that they published in them, in both cases around one‐third of the journals named were not OA. While many were in favour of increased access through OA journals, concerns were expressed about the cost to authors, possible reduction in quality, and negative impact on existing journals, publishers, and societies. By contrast, less than half knew what self‐archiving was; 36% thought it was a good idea and 50% were unsure. Just under half said they used repositories of self‐archived articles, but 13% of references were not in fact to self‐archiving repositories. 29% said they self‐archived their own articles, but 10% of references were not to publicly accessible sites of any kind. The access and convenience of self‐archiving repositories were seen as positive, but there were concerns about quality control, workload for authors and institutions, chaotic proliferation of versions, and potential damage to existing journals, publishers, and societies.     

The gown and the korowai: Māori doctoral students and the spatial organisation of academic knowledge

This paper draws on 38 student interviews carried out in the course of the team research project ‘Teaching and Learning in the Supervision of Māori Doctoral Students’. Māori doctoral thesis work takes place in the intersections between the Māori (tribal) world of identifications and obligations, the organisational and epistemological configurations of academia and the bureaucratic requirements of funding or employing bureaucracies. To explore how students accommodate cultural, academic and bureaucratic demands, we develop analytical tools combining three intellectual traditions: Māori educational theory, Bernstein’s sociology of the academy and Lefebvre’s conceptual trilogy of perceived, conceived and lived space. The paper falls into six parts. Section 1 is an overview of the research and is followed in Section 2 by identification of intersecting ‘locations’ in which Māori students’ theses are produced. In Section 3, Henri Lefebvre’s spatial analysis highlights connections between students’ multiple allegiances and affinities. Drawing on Bernstein, Section 4 relates the theses to the organisation of ‘Western’ academic disciplines. Section 5 addresses students’ cultural locations beyond the reach of ‘Western’ disciplines. We conclude with implications for supervision.