Parenting priorities and pressures: furthering understanding of ‘concerted cultivation’

This paper re-examines the purposes of a planned and intentional parenting style – ‘concerted cultivation’ – for different middle-class groups, highlighting that social class fraction, ethnicity, and also individual family disposition, guides understandings of the purposes of enrolling children in particular enrichment activities. We examine how parents and their children engage in extra-curricular activities for instrumental reasons with a view to securing skills, qualities and distinction for the future. Additionally, however, enrichment activities are understood as offering present-day values such as enjoyment, social bonding and purposeful activity. The paper also highlights that current policy and broader commercial discourses call for the increased responsibilisation and intensification of parenting, which means that ‘good’ parents are required to ‘buy into’ extra-curricular activities for their children, with concomitant implications for those whose access to activities is limited by economic circumstance.     

DOES THE SCHOOL COMPOSITION EFFECT MATTER? EVIDENCE FROM BELGIAN DATA

ABSTRACT:  Even if the literature on the effects of pupil composition has been extensive, no clear consensus has been reached concerning the significance and magnitude of this effect. The first objective of this article is to estimate the magnitude of the school composition effect in primary schools (6th grade) in French-speaking Belgium. Different indicators of school composition are used: academic, socio-cultural, 'language' and sex composition. Except for sex composition, the results show that the school composition effect explains significant amount of between schools variance even after controlling for pupils' initial performance, socio-cultural background, and non-cognitive dispositions. The second objective is to examine covariance between school composition and several organisational variables and their joint effect on school performance. The second set of analyses is intended to question the conceptual nature of the school composition effect, establishing whether it is direct or indirect.     

Improving students’ help-seeking skills using metacognitive feedback in an intelligent tutoring system

The present research investigated whether immediate metacognitive feedback on students’ help-seeking errors can help students acquire better help-seeking skills. The Help Tutor, an intelligent tutor agent for help seeking, was integrated into a commercial tutoring system for geometry, the Geometry Cognitive Tutor. Study 1, with 58 students, found that the real-time assessment of students’ help-seeking behavior correlated with other independent measures of help seeking, and that the Help Tutor improved students’ help-seeking behavior while learning Geometry with the Geometry Cognitive Tutor. Study 2, with 67 students, evaluated more elaborated support that included, in addition to the Help Tutor, also help-seeking instruction and support for self-assessment. The study replicated the effect found in Study 1. It was also found that the improved help-seeking skills transferred to learning new domain-level content during the month following the intervention, while the help-seeking support was no longer in effect. Implications for metacognitive tutoring are discussed.     

Public‐Private Substitution in Higher Education: Has Cost‐Sharing Gone Too Far?

This paper looks at the current challenge facing higher education by exploring the historical relationship between higher education funding and long economic cycles in the UK, USA and France. It examines the consequence of the transformation of public‐private income in higher education that followed the 1970s downturn, questioning whether the rise of private resources acted as additional or substitutive resources for public spending. The paper suggests that there is a risk that the cost‐sharing strategy could be turned into a policy of public‐private substitution of funding and provision, leading to a transfer rather than an increase of resources with strong implications on quality and equity. However, the Kondratiev cycle suggests an alternative route by designating the impact of the 1970s economic downturn on education as unique. Previous economic crises were contemporary of accelerations of public funding towards education which in fact contributed to economic recovery. The current crisis could represent an opportunity to revive counter‐cyclical policy by looking not only at efficient public spending but also at developing fairer taxation. A revival of public funding complemented by an additional rather than substitutive diversification of income would rebalance the public‐private structure of funding and drive a sustainable higher education system capable of playing a key part in these counter‐cyclical transformations.     

Testing the effectiveness of handwriting interventions: introduction to the special issue

This special issue was born within the COST Action IS1401ELN—Strengthening Europeans’ Capabilities by Establishing the European Literacy Network, with the major goal of disseminating evidence-based practices to promote handwriting and motivate researchers to move this research field forward. This issue includes five articles testing a different range of interventions to promote handwriting in students with and without disabilities from kindergarten to middle grades, across multiple contexts (viz., United States, Switzerland, Belgium, and Portugal). A final commentary paper closes the special issue with a discussion on the importance of acquiring fluent and legible handwriting along with the contributions and limitations of the investigations presented in the special issue.     

Theory of Employee Survival

ABSTRACT This paper presents the Theory of Employee Survival, which states that an applicant's initial attraction and selection into an organization, and an employee's retention and promotion within the organization are dependent on an authoritarianism congruence between the applicant and/or employee, and the employer.