Surveying unstructured time of adults with mental retardation living in two community settings: A search for normalization

Abstract

We designed a survey to assess whether 40 randomly selected individuals, equally divided across two settings (ICF/MR, minigroup home), differed in the amounts of time spent in the community, the people with whom unstructured activities were performed, and the choice maker of unstructured activities performed in the community or in homes. Time spent in unstructured activities was divided into four subsets: performed by self, with a peer, with staff, and with family. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that individuals living in ICF/MR homes spent more time in the community with staff and made fewer choices of their unstructured activities than those living in minigroup homes. The analyses also indicated that for those retaining their own legal guardianship and living in ICF/MR homes continued to spend less time in activities they chose themselves. Of those variables reaching statistical significance, we questioned meaningful interpretations based on alternative interpretations of the raw data.     

ROUSSEAU'S IMAGINARY FRIEND: CHILDHOOD,PLAY, AND SUSPICION OF THE IMAGINATION IN EMILE

In this essay Amy Shuffelton considers Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's suspicion of imagination, which is, paradoxically, offered in the context of an imaginative construction of a child's upbringing. First, Shuffelton articulates Rousseau's reasons for opposing children's development of imagination and their engagement in the sort of imaginative play that is nowadays considered a hallmark of early and middle childhood. Second, she weighs the merits of Rousseau's opposition, which runs against the consensus of contemporary social science research on childhood imaginative play. Ultimately, Shuffelton argues that Rousseau's work offers an important cautionary note to enthusiasts of children's imaginative play, due to the potentially disruptive influence of consumer capitalism, though she also notes that imagination may play a more redemptive role than Rousseau granted it.     

Building a Beowulf: Leveraging Research and Department Needs for Student Enrichment via Project Based Learning

In the fall 2000 a need for an inexpensive cutting edge computation facility provided an opportunity to explore the use of department needs as a real world problem in a classroom settings. The results of the class would benefit the department's research goals. Provide a practical student experience with a cutting edge real world problem, and an educational opportunity for the instructor. The successes and pitfalls of our two semester adventure of placing the students in real world scenario to design, buy, and build a Beowulf cluster from scratch is described. Teaching techniques such as project based learning as well as tips for Beowulf construction are detailed.     

Managing Reform: Lessons from Urban High Schools

ABSTRACT

American high schools present an extremely difficult, nearly intractable setting for serious educational reform efforts. Yet such efforts can succeed. This article reports results from a survey of 179 urban comprehensive high schools that were successfully implementing change programs based on effective schools principles.

All schools encountered problems of implementation. Larger‐scale, instructionally‐oriented, and longer‐lasting programs induced more problems. Problems were only moderated, not eliminated, by good‐quality planning.

Given the problem‐richness of change efforts, the major determinant of successful implementation was good problem‐coping. It was made more likely by the presence of consensus (shared vision), support of key stakeholders in and out of the school, planning quality, external assistance, and administrative time spent. Case studies showed that the presence of an empowered change management group aided all these critical factors.

Schools with the most impact (defined as student outcomes, teacher improvement, and organizational improvement) had focused on teacher or organizational changes to begin with, coped with the inevitable problems well, had internal and external constituencies supporting the change effort, and sustained the work for a longer period of time (typically 4‐5 years).

The key variables appear to form a coherent causal network. Implications for change management are drawn.     

Three Decades of Non‐reform

Abstract

Since the publication of the Crowther Report in 1959 there have been seven major proposals for reducing the degree of specialisation in England and Wales and postponing its onset. This article examines the history and nature of these proposals and the reasons for their failure. Its main contentions are that the historical opposition to any central or local control of the school curriculum has made it very difficult to determine what actually was happening in the schools or what external forces controlled the pattern of studies: and that in the absence of any authority controlling the pattern of the curriculum, it was almost impossible that any proposals for change would be implemented.     

SPREAD: A Distributed Simulation Toolkit

This article describes “SPREAD”, a simulation toolkit, and its use in building “Virtual Robots”, a simulation of multiple mobile robot vehicles used in the teaching of computer science at university level. A novel aspect of the simulator is the use of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) to achieve high performance at low cost by using spare CPU cycles on large numbers of networked workstations.