The Conferencing Metaphor: Genres for Sharing Online Information

The Conferencing Metaphor presents a compelling logic for groupware. This paper describes how people share information electronically to promote on-line discussions.     

Prejudice Reduction in Schools: the value of inter‐racial contact

This paper is centrally concerned with criticism of inter‐racial contact as a means of improving race relations. It aims, amongst other things, to highlight the damaging implications of the criticism on practices hitherto thought useful in combating racial prejudice. The main focus of the paper is the charge that a reduction in prejudice towards individual members of a group does not transfer to the group as a whole. It is argued that whilst there is much evidence to support this charge, the acquisition of positive attitudes towards an entire racial or ethnic group is not an aim that educationalists should seek to realise.

In the light of this objection, an alternative view of the purpose of inter‐racial contact is proposed such that the value of contact be judged in terms of whether it helps diminish the tendency to indulge in unsupported generalisations. To promote this goal it is urged that wherever practicable, inter‐racial contact, under specified conditions, should form part of a programme that emphasises the nature, and particularly the dangers, of generalisation. It is acknowledged, however, that there are some children and some forms of prejudice that will remain impervious to the potential benefits of any form of contact.     

Reinforcement context and pacemaker rate in the behavioral theory of timing

In the present experiment, an attempt was made to extend the base of evidence for the assumption of the behavioral theory of timing that pacemaker rate is determined by reinforcement rate. Pigeons discriminated the first half from the second half of a 50-sec trial in a free-operant psychophysical procedure. Left-key responding was reinforced at variable intervals during the first 25 sec, and right-key responding was reinforced at variable intervals during the second 25 sec. The rate of “extraneous” reinforcers delivered at variable intervals following responses to a center key was manipulated independently of performance in the temporal discrimination. Quantitative estimates of pacemaker rate were not directly proportional to extraneous rate of reinforcement, whether extraneous reinforcers were available during the intertrial interval, the entire session, or the trial only. Instead, estimates of pacemaker rate were inversely related to the rate of extraneous reinforcement, which suggests that pacemaker rate is determined by the ratio of the rate of reinforcement for the timing response relative to other sources of reinforcement.     

Contributing factors to long‐term citation count in marine and freshwater biology articles

Researchers have investigated factors thought to affect the total number of citations in various academic disciplines, and some general trends have emerged. However, there are still limited data for many fields, including aquatic sciences. Using papers published in 2003–2005 (n = 785), we investigated marine and freshwater biology articles to identify factors that may contribute to the probability of citation and for cumulative citation counts over 10 years. We found no relationships with probability of citation; however, we found evidence that for those that were cited at least once, cumulative citations were related to several factors. Articles cited by books received more citations than those never cited by books, which we hypothesized to be indicative of the impact an article may have in the field. We also found that articles first cited within 2 years of publication received more cumulative citations than those first cited after 2 years. We found no evidence that self‐citation (as the first citation) had a significant effect on total citations. Our findings were compared with previous studies in other disciplines, and it was found that aquatic science citation patterns are comparable to fields in science and technology but less so to humanities and social sciences.     

Early professional concerns of beginning principals

This article reports results from an ongoing study of beginning school principals and is focused on the identification of professional concerns held by the principals during their first six months in office. The study involved two main methods of data collection: (a) site and telephone interviews with small samples of eight and four principals who first took up their principalships in Victorian schools in 1989 and 1990 respectively; and (b) questionnaire surveys of all beginning principals in the two cohorts from which the small samples were drawn. Analysis of the interview data using methods relevant to grounded theory, and comparison of the outcomes with selected data from the questionnaires lead to the identification of seven areas of major professional concern and five other areas of lesser concern. The relationship of the findings to other research on principals, and implications for the preparation and support of beginning principals, are discussed.     

Do bilingual children read words better in lists or in context?

The aim of this study was to determine whether 11-year-old children in Singapore, from English Dominant or English Non-Dominant backgrounds, read better orally when words were presented in list or text. The children read words in passage and in list form presented in counterbalanced order. In a study of good, average and poor readers, Nicholson (1991) found that context was of more benefit to poorer readers and to younger readers. With the English Non-Dominant readers in the present study regarded as less proficient readers of English, these children should be expected to show the greatest gains from passage presentations. Error analyses showed that English Non-Dominant readers performed less well in list readings relative to text readings, while the English Dominant readers produced no difference in performance for these conditions. This indicates that readers with less exposure to English relied more on contextual information than the more experienced readers. Thus, Goodman's (1965) idea of enlightened guessing was again questioned in this study for the case of bilingual readers. Additionally, reading miscues were found to vary in type according to whether the same words were being read in list or in context.     

The Globalization of Higher Education: Some Observations Regarding the Free Market and the National Interest

The globalization of higher education, which is as much an affair of electronic delivery as of franchising and of validation of university awards, has given rise to various concerns. The most well known of these has been the question of quality; however, there are also cultural, economic, and political factors, examples of all of these being given. Some countries, indeed, have made such efforts to regulate transnational higher education offerings on their national territories that they have created less than legitimate barriers to such programmes. The higher education community should respond forcefully to these barriers.     

Perceptions of Inequality: primary school children's discourse on social class

This paper is concerned with the role of education in promoting social justice. It deals specifically with the development of children's understanding of social class, not because this particular form of inequality is considered more important than any other, but because of the inadequacies of extant research. It is argued that unless we know how children think about social class differentiation, we will not be able to engage effectively with their misconceptions. One hundred and sixty‐one children drawn from across the social class spectrum and aged between 6 and 11 were asked various questions and presented with a number of moral dilemmas pertaining to social class inequality. Age‐related trends in their responses are identified and the policy implications discussed.