From the Majors to the Minors: Playing the Game as the Rules Are Changed

In Australia no library school at either professional or paraprofessional level offers a course to meet the needs of serials librarians. In the absence of such provision, this paper summarizes the findings of research on serials courses in the U.S.A. and Britain. It highlights the dissatisfaction of practitioners with training in this area and the failure of serials training to meet the needs of the profession; it indicates that a survey in Australia would probably produce similar findings. It discusses the content of librarianship courses-both the core curriculum and a specialized serials librarlanship curriculum-with the objective of outlining a professionally relevant serials librarianship course for Australia, drawing on experiences such as those at Loughborough and Columbia Universities. Finally, the paper specifies the aims and objectives of the proposed Australian course in serials librarianship, and outlines the content of thirteen suggested components.     

Training and learning by using the Microwave Office program for designing high frequency and microwave circuits

This paper presents a detailed planning for a high frequency or microwaves laboratory based on microstrip techniques and also on the use of a CAE commercial software. In the second part of the article we justify the use of the so-called Microwave Office software because of its easy handling and learning, which make it, in the authors' opinion, a good tool for correct learning of the circuits with microstrip techniques and, therefore, of the proposed educational programme.     

The Assessment of Pupils with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties

Jim McNicholas, educational consultant, provides an overview of a detailed research enquiry into the practices of teacher assessment of pupils with profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD) set against a background of curriculum theory and curriculum change. The overview approach (with its 'instant practical application') to a major study has not previously been reported in BJSE and the Editor would be grateful for your comments on its relevance to other studies.     

足球教练：玩儿的就是心跳

如果有机会看着20年前的足球比赛录像,会发现和现在的大不一样。比赛规则没变,只是现场好像漏掉了什么。仔细看看,漏掉的是教练。90分钟的录像中,没有一个教练的镜头。电视导演和摄像把全副精力集中在奔跑的球员身上,哪管在场下的教练是不是着急地咆哮,也不关心踢输了教练可能会卷铺盖走人。     

Religious Upbringing: a Rejoinder and Responses

In this symposium Michael Hand presents a rejoinder to criticisms of his ‘Religious Upbringing Reconsidered’ (Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36.4) by Jim Mackenzie, Peter Gardner and Charlene Tan. Defending the idea of the logical possibility of non‐indoctrinatory religious upbringing, he attempts to show that none of their various objections is successful. Mackenzie, Gardner and Tan each offer a response.     

Schools, school quality and achievement growth: Evidence from the Philippines

A broad literature seeks to assess the importance of schools, proxies for school quality, and family background on children's achievement growth using the education production function. Using rich data from the Philippines, we introduce and estimate a model that imposes little structure on the relationship between intake achievement and follow-up achievement and evaluate school performance based on this estimated relationship. Our methods nest typical value-added specifications that use test score gains as the outcome variable and models assuming linearity in the relationship between intake and follow-up scores. We find evidence against the use of value-added models for our data and show that such models give very different assessments of school performance in the Philippines. Using a variety of tests we find that schools matter in the production of student achievement, though variation in performance across schools only explains about 4.4–5.3% of the total (conditional) variation in follow-up achievement. Schools providing basic facilities—in particular schools providing electricity—are found to perform much better in the production of achievement growth.