Teachers' Voices in the Context of Higher Education Reforms in Armenia

In this article, teachers' sense-making and reasoning about higher education reforms in a post Soviet country, namely Armenia, are examined using an analytical framework with six sensitising concepts: beliefs, emotions, attitudes, change knowledge, attributions and organisational culture. The results of semi-structured interviews with 12 Armenian higher education teachers showed that they mainly felt distrust towards reforms and that the implementation initiatives caused dissatisfaction, frustration and therefore distortion. At a deeper level, the teachers mostly felt excluded from the reform process and that their role was depreciated. One striking feature was the predominant causal attribution of teachers to external, unstable and uncontrollable factors which question the success of the reforms.     

The purposes outdoor education does,could and should serve in Singapore

This paper discusses the purposes that outdoor education does, could and should serve in Singapore. Gert Biesta’s conceptualisation of three functions of education is adapted to frame deliberations on the purposes of outdoor education in Singapore’s socio-political and educational milieu. The author suggests that outdoor education in Singapore could and should give high priority to serving three educational purposes; namely, building resilience, building emotional bonds with the place that constitutes Singapore, and building ecological literacy. In pursuing such purposes, outdoor education in Singapore might lessen the gap between the educational outcomes it currently produces and those it could achieve in the future.     

The significance of discrepancies between the verbal and non-verbal intelligence scores of a group of first year university students

The object of the study was to investigate the significance of the differences between verbal and non-verbal scores on the New South African Group Intelligence Test (NSAGT).The experimental subjects were first year university students. They were subdivided into three groups: one group whose non-verbal scores were higher than their verbal scores, a second group whose verbal scores were higher than their nonverbal scores and a third group, acting as a control group, whose verbal and nonverbal scores were approximately equal.The three groups were compared with regard to such features as visual and auditory acuity, personal adjustment and academic achievement. The raw data were arranged in three-dimensional contingency tables and interrelationships between variables were computed by means of the G² test.A positive correlation was found between temperamental personality features and high non-verbal scores on the NSAGT.This article is based on the MA dissertation of the second author under the supervision of the first author. The study was partly sponsored by a grant from the Human Sciences Research Council. Republic of South Africa, to which body grateful acknowledgement is made. However, the opinions expressed and the conclusions drawn are the absolute responsibility of the authors     

Social routines,pragmatic schemas,and schemes in how children distribute objects between the ages of three and six

Past research on social marking and pragmatic reasoning schemas suggest that cognitive processing modes are first elaborated by children when are carying out regulating social routines in the course of which they learn to produce the responses that satisfy the demand of their environment. The data of five experimental studies with 3–6 year old children, for object distribution tasks, are reported here. The data of the three first experiments show that the social routines evoked by the objects to be processed have a dual effect, influencing both the representation of the partition to be made, as well as the procedures used to make them. The data of the two last experiments seems to attest that, in training situations, the utilization of routine-evoking tasks promotes the construction of more general schemas, by the attribution of an operative meaning to the linguistic expressions used to characterize the states to be attained, and the transformations to be applied in order to attain them.     

Female jockeys in Swedish horse racing 1890–2000: From minority to majority – complex causes

The aim of this paper is to describe and explain the changes in the gender balance of jockeyship in Swedish horse racing in the period 1890–2000. The change in gender coding, and its causes, are both complex. Two distinctive periods of change are argued to have been crucial, the 1940s and 1970s. In the first period women were given permission to ride in amateur races; in the second period they were allowed to become professionals. It is suggested here that the changes in the gender balance are explained by male support, the intersection of gender and social class and gender coding.     

Girls' and boys' reasoning on cultural and religious practices: a human rights education perspective

Human rights play a vital role in citizens' political, religious and cultural life (Wang 2002, 171). Due to the prominence of human rights in the everyday life of citizens, including those of South Africa, human rights education has been included in many school curricula. Human rights education aims to develop responsible citizens who inter alia foster an understanding of gender, ethnical, religious and cultural diversities. This, it is hoped will encourage and maintain peace, as outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Departing from a human rights position, a qualitative study commenced in 2009 to explore how girls and boys reason about the cultural and religious practices of girls in their communities and families. Narratives by girls and boys highlighted their views on girls' positioning in their specific communities. From the findings it became evident that the participants were aware of conforming to particular cultural and religious practices. However, some participants also challenged how they perceived these practices and the roles of girls in their communities. The article highlights the necessity of embarking on a gendered perspective towards human rights education.     

On personal and collective dimensions of agency in doctoral training: medicine and natural science programs

The purpose of the present study was to investigate knowledge-creating agency by examining doctoral students' accounts of their pursuits, using structured interviews. We examined all of the talk apparently related to agency of 13 doctoral students taking part in collective doctoral training in two, highly regarded Finnish research communities (natural science and medicine). The doctoral process involved the participants pursuing article-based theses based on collectively shared research problems and journal articles co-authored with the supervisor and other senior researchers. Based on the qualitative analysis of the interviews, three categories of agentic talk were identified, respectively, for three proposed types of knowledge-creating agency: personal, distributed, and ‘object-related’. Personal agency involved participants' reflection on their academic competence, self-efficacy, and personal strengths and weaknesses. Distributed agency played an important role in assisting these participants overcoming challenges; this includes sharing of expertise, receiving social support, and having a sense of collective efficacy. Object-related agency, in turn, represented integration of a doctoral student's efforts with those of her immediate research community while pursuing shared research objects (e.g., co-authored articles). Apart from issues of agency which, the authors propose, are raised in the interviews, the data provide content-rich accounts of the collective nature of doctoral experiences.     

Effects of a phonological awareness program on English reading and spelling among Hong Kong Chinese ESL children

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme and phoneme levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest when age, general intelligence and the pretest scores were controlled statistically. The findings suggest that phonological awareness instruction embedded in vocabulary learning activities might be beneficial to kindergarteners learning English as a second language.