A Quality Math Curriculum in Support of Effective Teaching For Elementary Schools

This paper presents a curriculum, textbook and test result analysis for the new (to California) elementary school “Key Standard” mathematics curriculum, transplanted in 1998 from it's foreign roots in Asia and Europe, locations with far different cultural and economic backgrounds. Based on topic analysis methods developed by Michigan State University, this curriculum is a “quality” curriculum, since it is closely aligned with the curriculum of the six leading TIMSS math countries. Five-year test results are presented for two cohorts totaling over 13,000 students, all from four “early adoption” urban districts where 68% of the students were economically disadvantaged. Included are two cohorts of English learning immigrants totaling over 4,400 students. Performance was found to be statistically superior to similar (control) districts which continued with the old 1991 curriculum and textbooks (0.003 < p < 0.015). The focus of this paper is on the transition from far-below to above average learning performance of these students over the 1998–2002 period.     

Quality assurance of joint degree programs from the perspective of quality assurance agencies: experience in East Asia

Joint degree programs have gained popularity in East Asia, due to the growth of transnational higher education in the region since 2000. However, the external quality assurance (QA) and accreditation of joint degree programs is a challenge for QA agencies, as it normally involves the engagement of several institutions and multiple national accreditation procedures. The purpose of this study is to explore current QA approaches to joint degree programs in Europe and East Asia from the perspectives of QA agencies. There are four major findings from the study. First, East Asian countries tend to stipulate national regulations for a joint degree program. Second, an external QA mechanism for joint degree programs has not yet been developed in East Asian nations. Third, the adoption of international accreditation as the popular approach for joint degree programs in business fields in Asia raises the serious issue of national jurisdiction over higher education. Fourth, the European Consortium for Education's (ECA) single accreditation mode is highly recommended by QA agencies.     

Sacrificial girls: a case study of the impact of streaming and setting on gender reform

This article reports on research funded by the Australian Research Council to investigate school responses to gender equity. It addresses the efforts of a disadvantaged school to tackle what they perceived to be gender inequalities, but in the process of constructing a top‐set and bottom‐set/stream class they are developing new forms of old inequalities and new forms of inequalities. This research indicates that despite popular assertions that girls' education has become the priority of schools and education systems, girls are being further disadvantaged through attempts to implement market strategies coupled with gender reform agendas grounded in liberal notions of equity and relying on unsophisticated notions of affirmative action. In addition, this study highlights the extent to which a media‐driven debate about boys' education has influenced the constitution of boys as the ‘new disadvantaged’ with the capacity to determine the nature of gender reform agendas and programmes in schools.     

The relationship of school‐wide Positive Behavior Support to academic achievement in an urban middle school

An emerging literature on school‐wide Positive Behavior Support (PBS) in urban settings suggests the utility of PBS in addressing student social development while decreasing the need for disciplinary actions (i.e., office disciplinary referrals [ODRs]). This research represents a significant addition to, and expansion of, this literature by examining the relationship of school‐wide PBS‐induced reductions in out‐of‐class referrals to student academic achievement. School‐wide PBS was implemented in an urban, inner‐city middle school in the Midwest over a 3‐year period. Data on ODRs, suspensions, standardized test scores, and treatment fidelity were gathered and analyzed. Results demonstrated significant reductions in ODRs and suspensions and increases in standardized math and reading scores. Additionally, regression analyses suggested a significant relationship between student problem behavior and academic performance. Treatment adherence to PBS procedures was significantly correlated with reductions in problem behavior. These findings are discussed in terms of helping urban schools address challenging behavior. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 43: 701–712, 2006.     

Contesting continuing professional development: reflections from England

This paper argues the competing ways in which continuing professional development (CPD) is currently practised in schooling settings in England is a product of the complex social conditions within which teachers work and learn, and teachers’ efforts to make sense of these conditions. Specifically, the paper draws upon research into the teacher learning practices, and conditions of practice, of a group of 18 teachers from one inner-city comprehensive secondary school in the British Midlands. To make sense of competing approaches to CPD within the school, the paper analyses these teachers’ experiences in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social practices as contested. The research reveals competing approaches to teacher CPD in relation to the management of teachers’ CPD, the focus upon improving test scores and the modes of learning in which teachers participate. The paper shows how conflicting pressures and demands in the context within which teachers work, and teachers’ responses to these demands, contribute to contested practices in and across these domains, both arising from and resulting in what is described as a ‘hybridised’ habitus. The research gestures towards the need to cultivate conditions conducive to more educationally oriented, critical, situated and collaborative CPD.     

Martin Buber's concept of inclusion as a critique of special education

Martin Buber offers an account of a tendency towards polarisation in responses to the perplexing question of inclusion in education. On the one hand, the educator can be identified as one who includes what is present and becoming within individual young people in isolation from the world. On the other hand, the educator can be recognised as one whose life is dedicated to including young people into the world who have been moulded to conform to established ideals. The influence of these two, divergent but equally flawed, ways of viewing the educator's responsibility to include the young into education is detectable in much current policy and theory that promotes the case for special education. In his rejection of both these views of the educator, Buber envisions a relationship in education that is established neither solely for the sake of the newness of child nor entirely for the preservation of the world. Instead, Buber addresses the living responsibility of an educator who attends to the young and responds to the vastness of creation they represent. The depths of Buber's concept of inclusion are examined and presented as a corrective to the technicalism of special education policy and theory, in which relationships between educators and the young are demarcated by the scope of pre-established and categorised needs.     

The functions or the committees of the central states speech association

The author reviews the uses of hypnosis in the speech clinic as a diagnostic and therapeutic device in terms of the time required to induce the somnambulistic trance and the skill required to maintain it, general susceptibility to hypnosis, and prognosis of therapeutic results. He discusses several dangers in the use of hypnosis and some pseudoscientific notions generally current in our culture. He concludes that hypnosis is not a panacea for stuttering.     

The effect of a counterplan upon the burden of proof

A deficiency in the theory of argumentation is the lack of a clear, consistent analysis of the effect of a counterplan upon the burden of proof in academic debate. Legal theory provides an instructive analogy leading to two principles applicable when a counterplan is used and when the two teams debate with seemingly equal skill.     

A comparison of award‐winning radio commercials and their day‐to‐day counterparts

Children's programming

Children and the Faces of Television: Teaching, Violence. Selling, Edited by Edward L. Palmer and Aimée Dorr (New York: Academic Press, 1980).

Teaching Television: How to Use TV to Your Children's Advantage, Dorothy G. Singer, Jerome L. Singer and Diana M. Zuckerman (New York: The Dial Press, 1981).

Audio In Media, Stanley R. Alten (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1981).

Thirty Seconds, Michael Arlen (New York: Farrar, Straus &; Giroux, 1980).

To Serve the Public Interest: Educational Broadcasting in the United States, Robert J. Blakely (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1979).