School engagement and parental involvement: the case of cross-border students in Singapore

The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the mutual relationship between school engagement of cross-border students (CBS) from Malaysia in Singapore and parental involvement in education. Focus-group interviews were conducted with school personnel, CBS and their non-local counterparts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the situation. The cross-border student group comprises diverse ethnicity and most of them are highly competitive and successful in engaging in the whole educational selection process from the beginning to their exit point. This paper argues that education for the CBS represents both a unique socio-cultural phenomenon in the two Asian societies and a manifestation of a widely shared pragmatic value of educational returns. The findings reveal that the nature of CBS engagement with schools is characterized by voluntary assimilation and is rewarded by the meritocratic system of Singapore.     

A hierarchical approach to Students’ Assessments of Instruction

A teacher evaluation system can be threatening to faculty, especially if used for summative decisions. Therefore, it is important to obtain valid and pertinent information. Since students are extensively exposed to course elements, students’ evaluation of instruction should be one of several components in the teacher evaluation system. Since traditional methods, such as Cronbach’s alpha and ordinary least squares regression, do not address the hierarchical data of the classroom, the current study used the statistical techniques of confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical linear modelling in order to properly investigate the reliability and validity of the Students’ Assessment of Instruction (SAI) instrument. Use of hierarchical linear modelling to analyse teacher evaluation instruments could not be found in the literature, although it has been used in educational settings. This study will illustrate its usefulness in determining what measures are related, either as evidence of validity or as a bias, to instructional effectiveness. Student responses were also compared with faculty self-evaluations, one indicator of effective teaching, in order to determine if the SAI does measure instructional effectiveness. Overall, the SAI was found to have good reliability and validity with relatively few biases and could be used to extract five distinguishable traits of instructional effectiveness.     

Student Progress in Distance Education: Kember's model re-visited

This investigation replicates Kember's [(1995) Open Learning Courses for Adults: a model of student progress (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Education Technology)] model of student progress, using students enrolled on four business courses at the Open University of the United Kingdom. Kember's model identified four key constructs: social integration, academic integration, external attribution, and academic incompatibility. Kember built these constructs, together with background characteristics, into a causal model of student progress and then tested it using path analysis. He concluded that the model was robust, accounting for 80% of the variance in adult student persistence. However, the empirical findings from the present study showed little internal consistency in the sub-scales for the key constructs in Kember's model. Furthermore, few of the causal relationships achieved statistical significance. These results suggest that Kember's path model did not fit the data derived from the present sample. While Kember's recommendations for reducing student dropout have intuitive appeal, their empirical foundations are questionable.     

Changing spaces of education: new perspectives on the nature of learning

This case study relates to distance learning students on open access courses. It demonstrates the use of predictive analytics to generate a model of the probabilities of success and retention at different points, or milestones, in a student journey. A core set of explanatory variables has been established and their varying relative importance at different milestones identified. The explanatory variables, milestones and reference points when the model is run will be different at other institutions but the approach may be generalised to distance learning institutions and, more broadly, to any HE institution. Institutions, and especially distance education institutions which do not have the advantages of frequently seeing students, need to make full use of any recorded information they hold to try and identify students who are, or become, at potential risk of leaving. The importance of different factors, at different milestones, may help tailor student support to individual students and therefore improve low retention in open access distance education.     

Breaking the Policy Log-jam: Comparative perspectives on policy formulation and development for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties

Many education systems continue to express concerns about an apparently inexorable increase in the number of pupils displaying difficult behaviour in schools and classrooms. Within the English context the government has tried to address and respond to these concerns by undertaking a variety of initiatives and offering guidance and training to schools on the management of behaviour problems. However, we argue that there is a significant danger that by focusing too narrowly on the needs of those pupils with the most obvious and pressing behavioural difficulties the needs of those with emotional problems are overlooked. We highlight the existence of a 'gap' in much of the policy and guidance in England regarding pupils with emotional problems and offer explanations of why this situation has occurred. In support of this we draw from the extensive literature that already exists and also from a recent large-scale survey undertaken in Greece. This survey of teachers' attitudes provides an important comparative dimension in understanding the dangers that exist for policy makers, professionals and teachers in both 'developing' and developed contexts in the face of increasing disruption in schools. The paper concludes with suggestions for policy makers on how this gap might be avoided.     

New Labour and higher education

The essay does not seek to add to the scholarly literature on UK higher education, so much as to give a sympathetic account of the dilemmas confronting a progressive government of almost any political stripe and especially one that faces the constraints of New Labour. It begins paradoxically by pointing out that serious investment in higher education requires an extension of Sure Start rather than Foundation Degrees, accepts that no government can wait 16 years for its plans to come to fruition, and examines some familiar issues about funding, quality management and the nature of ‘mass’ as opposed to ‘élite’ systems of higher education. Like some recent writers (Alison Wolf and Ewart Keep and Ken Mayhew most notably), the author is sceptical of the claimed productivity benefits of an expansion of higher education and even more doubtful than they whether in the long run degree‐level qualifications will retain their value even as a positional good.     

“Troops to Teachers”: implications for the coalition government’s approach to education policy and pedagogical beliefs and practice

On taking power the coalition government embarked on what many commentators believe is a radical programme of public policy reform. Under Michael Gove, education policy has become totemic to those arguing that Britain’s classrooms are mired in academic mediocrity and behavioural failure. One policy response by the government has been to propose fast-tracking ex-armed services personnel into schools in England as teachers, especially in inner-city areas. This paper examines the educational and pedagogical merits of this proposal and the underlying beliefs that underpin it. Based on a critical evaluation of the literature, it argues that rather than representing a genuinely radical and innovative attempt to tackle educational underachievement, the Troops to Teachers initiative is deeply reactionary. One, based on discredited pedagogical philosophies which fail to address what the educational community believes a “good” education is, devalues teaching as a profession and ignores the socio-economic factors that primarily determine academic performance.     

Analysis of Covariance and Randomized Block Design with Heterogeneous Slopes

The authors compared the Type I error rate and the power to detect differences in slopes and additive treatment effects of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and randomized block (RB) designs with a Monte Carlo simulation. For testing differences in slopes, 3 methods were compared: the test of slopes from ANCOVA, the omnibus Block × Treatment interaction, and the linear component of the Block × Treatment interaction of RB. In the test for adjusted means, 2 variations of both ANCOVA and RB were used. The power of the omnibus test of the interaction decreased dramatically as the number of blocks used increased and was always considerably smaller than the specific test of differences in slopes found in ANCOVA. Tests for means when there were concomitant differences in slopes showed that only ANCOVA uniformly controlled Type I error under all configurations of design variables. The most powerful option in almost all simulations for tests of both slopes and means was ANCOVA.     

Australia's Public Library System: Its Needs and Potential

This document is the Introduction to the 8^th annual Directory of Australian Public Libraries. It provides a good overview of the dictionary of library information compiled system by system. The second document (Appendix A) is the survey form sent out to all of Australia's public libraries in order to gather the data which is assembled in the 8^th annual Directory. This document shows the questions that elicit a range of individual library system data. Many readers will want to compare this document with the U.S. equivalent.     

The Effect of Perceived Teacher Burnout on Credibility

This study investigated the effect of perceived teacher burnout on perceived teacher credibility. One hundred eighty-two college students were randomly exposed to a written scenario manipulating the level of perceived teacher burnout (high or low) and responded to a scale measuring perceived teacher credibility in reference to the scenario. Results of one-way multivariate analyses of variance indicated that perceived teacher burnout has a negative impact on perceived teacher competence, caring, and trustworthiness. Low-burnout teachers are perceived as more credible than high-burnout teachers.