The NAAEE Workshop on Developing Guidelines for Qualitative Research in Environmental Education: An analysis of premises,processes and products

This article comments on the draft research guidelines prepared by Smith-Sebasto arising from the 1997 Annual Conference of the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE). It critically reviews premises regarding: (a) the viability of one set of guidelines for all qualitative research approaches; (b) the viability of one set of guidelines for designing, conducting and reporting research; and (c) the uniqueness of EE research. It also reviews the workshop setting as a venue for addressing research training needs and for developing research guidelines. Then, it reviews the draft guidelines for organization,scope, inclusiveness, bias, and attention to evolving practice. It closes with a recommendation that these guidelines be more carefully reviewed and refined.     

Open Learning in ICI

Tom Foggo works in the Manpower Planning and Development Croup in the Agricultural Division of Imperial Chemical Industries. Here he explains ICI's decision to investigate the potential effectiveness of Open Learning as an approach to industrial training. This is a major experimental project mounted in collaboration with the Open Tech Unit, at a total cost of some £3m, and examining the suitability of Open Learning in various geographical locations, different target populations, and subject areas, and using a range of distance teaching media and Open Learning techniques. The author is the ICI project Manager.     

The Enduring Effects of Early-Learned Ideas and Local Folklore on Children’s Astronomy Knowledge

Research in Science Education - The research described here examined the sources of knowledge of astronomy of children (age 3–18) in China and New Zealand, together with the development of...     

The Guernica Children's Peace Mural Project

This is an exploration of the international Guernica Children's Peace Mural Project, particularly in terms of its theoretical underpinnings and possible impact as a paradigm for ‘real life’ art education.     

Resources allocation in Chinese universities: hierarchy,academic excellence,or both?

Scholars are aware that the higher education sector in China is highly affected by its administrative system, but the questions of how and to what extent the Chinese administrative system impacts academic resources allocation have yet to be answered. By examining the empirical data from 2003 to 2010 of China’s National Excellent Doctoral Dissertations Award, this article finds that the hierarchical position of doctoral advisors who hold a university or college post will have an important influence on academic resources allocation, although these advisors are professors with high academic ability. This article also finds an interaction effect between advisors’ hierarchical position and students’ academic abilities in influencing the decisions on the award. Overall, the Chinese case digs rather deep into the increasing hierarchisation of academic life and science.     

Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes: The DEEP Project to reform the mechanical engineering curriculum

The goal of the Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes project is to revise the mechanical engineering undergraduate curriculum to make the discipline more able to attract and retain a diverse community of students. The project seeks to reduce and reorder the prerequisite structure linking courses to offer greater flexibility for students. This paper describes the methods used to study the prerequisites and the resulting proposed curriculum revision. The process involved dissecting each course into topics at roughly the level of a line in a syllabus, editing the list of topics, associating prerequisites and successors to each topic and then using a genetic algorithm to produce clusters of topics. The new curriculum, which consists of 12 clusters, each of which could be a full year course, is quite different from the traditional curriculum.     

Solving graphics tasks: Gender differences in middle-school students

The capacity to solve tasks that contain high concentrations of visual-spatial information, including graphs, maps and diagrams, is becoming increasingly important in educational contexts as well as everyday life. This research examined gender differences in the performance of students solving graphics tasks from the Graphical Languages in Mathematics (GLIM) instrument that included number lines, graphs, maps and diagrams. The participants were 317 Australian students (169 males and 148 females) aged 9-12 years. Boys outperformed girls on graphical languages that required the interpretation of information represented on an axis and graphical languages that required movement between two- and three-dimensional representations (generally Map language).