Abilities and affordances: factors influencing successful child–tablet communication

Using Luhmann’s communication theory and affordance theories, we develop a framework to examine how kindergarten-grade 2 students interact with tablet computers. We assessed whether cognitive ability and device configuration influence how successfully children use tablet computers. We found that children’s limited ability to direct their cognitive resources affects child–tablet communication (i.e., sending and receiving information to and from the device). While it may appear that children simply know how to use this technology, they are actually engaged in a systematic assessment of the device governed by their level of attentional maturity. Interestingly, tablet computers designed for adults result in a higher frequency of successful communication but prolonged communication was most likely to take place on child-focused tablet computers. It seems that communication success and user engagement are independent.     

The regulation of teaching as symbolic politics: rituals of order,blame and redemption

This article explores the school inspection as a political ritual for the management of tensions between competition and equality inherent in neo-liberal educational regulatory regimes. At the centre of the article is a case study of how teachers in an allegedly failing working-class English primary school coped with issues of social class, educational success-and-failure and an Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED) inspection and related accountability measures. National educational policy – relative performance data and inspection – generated a crisis within the school, and intervened in teacher discourse about the role of social class in pupil attainment. Whereas previous scholarship on OFSTED and inspections has emphasised their harmful effects on teachers and teaching practice, the current article broadens the focus from regulatory to political issues, from specific schools to the stability of the educational order more generally. Based on this case study, situated within a broader analysis of shifting discourses about social class and education in English educational policy, I argue that (1) the current regulatory regime makes ‘failure’ inevitable, thereby posing a symbolic problem for policy-makers and politicians; (2) by identifying failure and allocating blame, the inspection ritual fulfils an important symbolic function; which (3) serves to buttress the legitimacy of the neo-liberal educational order.     

Selling ‘impact’: peer reviewer projections of what is needed and what counts in REF impact case studies. A retrospective analysis

Abstract

The intensification of an audit culture in higher education is made no more apparent than with the growing prevalence of performance-based research funding systems like the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the introduction of new measures of assessment like ‘impact’ or more specifically, the economic and societal impacts of research. Detractors of this regulatory intervention, however, question the legitimacy and credibility of such a system for, and focus within, the evaluation of research performance. Within this study, we specifically sought to understand the process of evaluating the impact of research by gaining unique access as observers of a simulated impact evaluation exercise populated by aproximately n = 90 senior academic peer reviewers and user assessors, undertaken within one UK research-intensive university prior to and in preparation of its submission to REF2014. Over an intensive two-day period, we observed how peer reviewers and user assessors grouped into four overarching disciplinary panels went about deliberating and scoring impact, presented in the form of narrative-based case studies. Among other findings, our observations revealed that in their efforts to evaluate impact, peer reviewers were indirectly promoting a kind of impact mercantilism, where case studies that best sold impact were those rewarded with the highest evaluative scores.     

Scottish higher education, 1987–2001: expansion through diversion

A pressing question about the expansion of higher education is whether it tends to be inclusive, in the sense of bringing in larger proportions of persons from disadvantaged backgrounds, or diversifying, in that higher education tends to differentiate as it expands, or both, by bringing more persons into an increasingly stratified system of higher education. This paper addresses the question with evidence on higher education expansion in Scotland. Data are drawn from six waves of the Scottish School Leavers Survey from the late 1980s to the start of the new millennium. Binary and multinomial logit models are estimated to examine changes in inequality during this period, which was characterised by substantial expansion in both secondary qualifications and postsecondary enrolment. The results show that, in contrast to the general pattern of stable inequality observed in most nations, overall social inequalities in Scottish higher education enrolment declined over time. However, this decline did not occur in all sectors but was limited to the lowest-status institutions. These findings illustrate how expansion can serve both inclusive and diversifying ends.