Chinese Family Groups' Museum Visit Motivations: A Comparative Study of Beijing and Vancouver

This comparative study explored Chinese family groups' dominant visit motivations in science museums and aquariums in order to understand the perceptions of these audiences, who are an under‐represented cultural demographic in the literature. In this study, 503 Chinese participants—131 in the China Science and Technology Museum, Beijing; 127 in the Beijing Aquarium, Beijing; 136 in Science World British Columbia, Vancouver; and 109 in the Vancouver Aquarium, Vancouver—completed a Family Group Visit Motivation Questionnaire. The results report four dominant visit motivations for these Chinese family groups. Significant differences in a fifth motivation, social interaction, were detected in comparing the Beijing and Vancouver Chinese family samples. Also, Chinese family groups were more likely to perceive science museums to be settings that can satisfy their educational and personal interest needs, compared to aquariums. This study provides insights for science museums and aquarium practitioners to better understand this audience demographic.     

Accuracy and Precision

Within the framework of a two-hour interactive lecture, we explore the related ideas of accuracy and precision in calculation. The aim is to show that numerical data must be understood as numbers in a context.     

Exploring The Island: Mapping the Shifting Sands in the Landscape of English Classroom Culture and Pedagogy

I begin with an account of my own observation of an English lesson taught by one of my student teachers using a teaching resource, The Island, that I used myself as a new teacher more than 20 years ago and of my own responses on finding it transformed by two decades of change in educational policy and practice. It has become almost a given in academic articles on English teaching, to refer, in a sentence or two, to the reduction of the English curriculum, the narrowing of pedagogy and the loss of teacher agency due to the dominance of a high stakes assessment regime. The policy changes that have given rise to this change have been clearly analysed elsewhere, but part of my purpose here is just to look again at how it might be experienced by a particular pupil in a particular class. I am interested in analysing some of the features of The Island’s incarnation then and now, from three different angles: as it is inscribed in the project book, as I remember teaching it and as I observed it recently in a London classroom. I draw on theories of literacy and of the teaching of writing in particular in trying to account for some of the differences but beyond that, I argue that it is essential to link such theories to wider political debates about culture and to reflect back from this to the purposes of the English curriculum and culture of the English classroom.     

Romanticism and Pessimism: Community Education and Women

This article considers a variety of recent research projects attempting to explain the differences in examination outcomes between boys and girls, and describes some of the policies that have been introduced to overcome the 'problem'. When viewed in the light of recent findings that change the accepted picture of what, and where, these gender gaps in attainment actually are, the article discovers that there are, as yet, no totally convincing explanations of the phenomenon, and therefore little hope of an effective strategy to deal with it. This conclusion has important implications for the conduct of research, and for the links between research and evidence-based policy, and therefore for school leaders and managers.