Amidst exclusion,promise, and violence: rural normal school students in Mexico and the disappearance of 43

ABSTRACT

On 26 and 27 September 2014, 43 students from the “Profesor Isidro Burgos” Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico, disappeared, and six people died. In this article, I analyse the event as the result of long-term historical processes, from the perspective of the social mobilisation that caused the students’ disappearance on the one hand, and from the history of rural normal schools on the other. The starting point is to relocate political history within the history of education in order to understand the agency of political actors in the definition of educational processes, and the questioning of the reciprocal relations of school and state. The study is based on widely diverse sources: official documents from schools, statistics, news items from newspapers and social networks, and observations of the mobilisations of 2014. The disappearance of the 43 rural normal students is the result of a long process of abandonment in the countryside, of discrimination against young people of rural origin and Indians, all in the framework of a process of state dismantling which places teachers and normal students in positions of severe vulnerability.     

A longitudinal study of state government homepage accessibility in Maryland and the role of web page templates for improving accessibility

It is well documented that government agencies, at all levels, continue to have problems ensuring that government web sites follow laws related to web accessibility for people with disabilities. Although there are a number of published studies on government web accessibility that are point-in-time, there are no published studies consisting of a longitudinal analysis of state-level government web site accessibility. This paper contributes to the research literature in three ways: 1) an accessibility inspection of 25 Maryland state government homepages in 2012 which involved 150 human inspections of web pages, 2) a comparison of the results from 2012 to a similar accessibility evaluation in 2009, and 3) a discussion of the role of a web page template, which was introduced in Maryland state government shortly after the 2009 evaluation. The data from this longitudinal evaluation leads to the conclusion that web page templates do tend to result in more accessible sites within state government.     

Celebrating the Past,Creating the Future: 50 Years of Community College Research

The Council for the Study of Community Colleges (CSCC) celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008. This article summarizes the establishment of the Council and sets it in the context of the development of the community college movement. Highlights of research conducted by CSCC members to address contemporary issues facing community colleges are described. A summary of insights offered by members during a 2008 plenary session, research presented at the 50th annual conference, and key community college leaders are described in the context of the historical evolution of community college research and future directions.     

Using desktop publishing in an editing class—the lessons learned and students' assessments

This article—based on personal observations, a survey, and modified Nominal Group Techniques—reports students' perceptions of learning desktop publishing systems (DTP). Students learned the foundations of DTP in less than 60 hours of hands‐on experience; the incremental introduction of DTP functions and practice sessions before the assignments were more effective than alternative teaching strategies tried; and the use of DTP encouraged non‐artistic students to use artwork to enhance their publications.     

Teacher interactions and effects on group triple problem solving space

ABSTRACT

Research shows that collaborative work promotes student learning and improves social skills, but teachers are still exploring how to best support problem-solving in a small group context, particularly in the science classroom. This study builds on prior research to characterise teacher interactions with small groups in secondary science and analyses how those interactions affect a collectively constructed space – the triple problem solving space (TPSS) – in which group members collectively understand a task (content/cognitive dimension), manage social interactions (social/relational dimension), and co-construct the emotional life of the group (affective dimension). Results of two biology teachers’ interactions with students in small groups working on inquiry and engineering design activities show that most interactions were administrative and had little influence on the group’s TPSS. Teacher interactions that engaged students in monitoring their problem-solving process, however, did have the capacity to increase cognitive work of the group, which subsequently impacted the students’ group affect and social dimension. These findings suggest that interactions focused on cognitive processes have the potential to support all aspects of a group’s TPSS. Though this research is only a first step in understanding the impact of teacher interactions on small group work, implications for teaching practices are discussed.     

The impact of the MARS curriculum on students' ability to coordinate theory and evidence

The Model-Assisted Reasoning in Science (MARS) project seeks to promote model-centered instruction as a means of improving middle-school science education. As part of the evaluation of the sixth-grade curriculum, performance of MARS and non-MARS students was compared on a curriculum-neutral task. Fourteen students participated in structured interviews in which they experimented with a balance apparatus that provided three manipulable variables (two affected balance, one was a non-causal distractor variable). Although both groups were equally able to identify and test variables, all MARS students discovered a quantitative rule to describe the operation of the balance, whereas only one non-MARS student did so. MARS students discovered this numerical relationship through experimentation, regardless of their scientific reasoning profile (i.e. theory-generating, theory-modifying, or theory-preserving). The critical components of MARS instruction that may foster the ability to flexibly coordinate theory and evidence include multiple opportunities to draw conclusions from data and an emphasis on the successive refinement of models.     

Two Generalizations of the Item Discrimination Index to Multi-Score Items

Two general item analysis indices which apply to multi-score items are developed as generalizations of a popular index applicable to dichotomous items. The indices of discrimination are of two types: one based on differential difficulty and the other on net number of positive discriminations. The usefulness and limitations of each are discussed.     

Effect of Two Selected Item-Writing Practices on Test Difficulty,Discrimination, and Reliability

In order to investigate the effect of two item-writing practices on test characteristics, examinations were chosen for study in two undergraduate courses (N = 71 and 210) . About one-fourth of the items on each examination included a practice generally regarded as undesirable in measurement textbooks and alleged to make test items more difficult. Alternate forms which eliminated the undesirable practice were developed and administered at the same time as the original form. Rewriting item stems so that they formed a complete sentence or question resulted in about 6 percent more students answering items correctly. Eliminating unnecessary material in item stems, however, had little effect on difficulty. KR₂₀ values were not appreciably different for the two versions of either test. Neither flaw was found to affect item discrimination indices noticeably. The absence of any substantial practice-by-achievement level interactions suggested little effect of the practices on the validity of the tests.