Using developmental evaluation as a design thinking tool for curriculum innovation in professional higher education

This paper argues for the use of ‘developmental’ evaluation as a design-based research tool for sustainable curriculum innovation in professional higher education. Professional education is multi-faceted and complex with diverse views from researchers, professional practitioners, employers and the world of politics leaving little consensus about the nature of educational ‘problems’, let alone educational ‘solutions’. Developmental evaluation is an emerging approach to evaluating innovations and/or organisations that are in a continuous state of change; it asks the evaluators to not simply appraise a final design, but to work with designers through processes of rapid reconnaissance, mapping the territory and emergent modelling. This paper provides an account of how the adoption of the dispositions and approaches of developmental evaluation increased the trustworthiness of decision-making in the design of a new post-graduate teacher education degree in Australia. The principles of developmental evaluation as a design thinking approach have application in other complex curriculum settings.     

Effects of food primes on the operant behavior of nondeprived rats

After rats had been trained to press a lever for food reward, experimenter-initiated food “primes” increased the likelihood of subsequent responding during periods in which the subjects were nondeprived. No such priming effects were found after presentation of a stimulus that had previously been paired with food. In other experiments, nonreinforced leverpresses, as well as subthreshold components of the leverpress response (e.g., forepaw raising), were also found to be enhanced by food primes. Taken together with other reports in the literature, the present findings are consistent with a “motivational aftereffects” interpretation of priming, and also with the notion that all stimuli which possess reinforcing properties possess priming properties as well.     

Multicultural Children’s Literature as a Context for Teaching Mathematics for Cultural Relevance in Urban Schools

This article reports on a teacher-research study that used multicultural texts as a context for teaching mathematics for cultural relevance during an elementary mathematics methods course. The results of the study reveal that 28 % (5 out of 18) of the teacher candidates (TCs) chose books that were culturally contextual or culturally amenable. However, 89 % (16 out of 18) of the TCs chose texts that were mathematically robust or mathematically peripheral. Four focal TCs were selected to examine how they used the texts with children to teach mathematics concepts. Math lessons fostered academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. Overall, the results of the study are mixed. We conclude that some TCs’ choice of texts may reflect indifference, passive resistance, low self-efficacy, school culture, and mixed messages from the teacher–researcher. Additional studies that include follow-up interviews and classroom observations are needed to determine the factors that influence TCs’ selections of multicultural texts and their implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy with students.     

Executive Branch (and Library of Congress)

WALT DISNEY'S FANTASIA by John Culhane (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983---$35.00)

The Wisconsin/Warner Brothers Screenplay series has produced two new volumes this year (both University of Wisconsin Press, 1983 for $17.50/6.95)

THREE SCREEN COMEDIES by Samson Raphaelson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983---$19.95)

FILM PLOTS by Leonard J. Leff (Ann Arbor: Pierian Press, 1983---no price given)

NAPOLEON: ABEL GANCE'S CLASSIC FILM by Kevin Brownlow (New York: Knopf, 1983---$14.95)

FIFTY YEARS OF SERIAL THRILLS by Roy Kinnard (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983---$15.00)

FILM AND RADIO PROPAGANDA IN WORLD WAR II edited by K.R.M. Short (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983---$23.95)

STRANGERS IN PARADISE: THE HOLLYWOOD EMIGRES, 1933-1950 by John Russell Taylor (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983---$16.95)

THE JAMES BOND FILMS: A BEHIND THE SCE/413S HISTORY by Steven Jay Rubin (New York: Crown Books, 1983---$9.95)

THE UNIVERSAL STORY by Clive Hirschorn (New York: Crown, 1983---$35.00)

STAR MYTHS: SHOW-BUSINESS BIOGRAPHIES ON FILM by Robert Milton Miller (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1983---$27.50)

REDISCOVERING FRENCH FILM edited by Mary Lea Bandy (distributed by New York Graphic Society Books through Little, Brown of Boston, 1983---$15.00 paper)     

Recruitment rhetoric in brochures advertising the all volunteer force

Solutions to Army personnel problems are of critical importance. Personnel issues continue to be problematic in a number of areas including: recruit intelligence level, careerist motivation of recruits, and the maintenance of trained, quality careerists in the all volunteer force (AVF). High attrition of skilled personnel is not related only to pay scale; pride in service, as well as intrinsic rewards may also relate to the retention and attraction of career‐motivated soldiers. This study analyzed the inducements offered and demands made of potential volunteers in brochures advertising the AVF. Most of the appeals in such brochures focused on instrumental rewards available to potential recruits, while few appeals featured traditional intrinsic satisfactions of military service as a motive for joining the AVF. The advertising strategy presently used in AVF brochures may explain in part why poor retention of skilled careerists continues to be one of its most severe problems. Recommendations for structuring future appeals are offered based on the findings.     

The (mis)use of SATs to examine gender and achievement at Key Stage 2

ABSTRACT

This article discusses some of the issues raised in the early stages of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) study. ¹ 1 Gender and Learning: A Study of Underachievement in Junior Schools, Economic and Social Research Council R000237346. Project directors: Harry Daniels, Valerie Hey, Diana Leonard and Marjorie Smith. The first phase of the project involved an analysis of end of Key Stage 2 (children aged 10–11) Standard Assessment Test (SAT) data within a Midlands and a London local education authority (LEA(M) and LEA(L) respectively). The LEAs were identified according to the quality and accessibility of the data and their socio‐economic and socio‐cultural diversity. The analysis was used as an instrument for selecting schools in each LEA that displayed specific but con‐ sistent patterns of high, low and average achievement which were cross cut by large differences between boys' and girls' achievement in all three SAT subjects (English, maths and science). On one level, this article discusses the difficulties we encountered in identifying schools with consistent patterns of gendered achievement as well as signposting the ‘political’ significance of these difficulties for present and future edu‐ cation policies. On another level, it is a vehicle for the development of the theoretical lenses of learner identity and post‐Vygotskian analysis that have shaped our under‐ standing of gendered achievement which we use to ‘speak’ to and influence the development of the test procedures highlighted in this article.

     

A Self-Guiding Communities Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the leadership characteristics of effective Colorado Outward Bound school instructors and develop criteria which might be useful in their selection. A biographical inventory questionnaire was developed and administered, along with the FIRO-B personality test, to 130 instructors and assistant instructors at the Colorado Outward Bound school. Profiles of instructors and assistant instructors rated “most effective” and “least effective” were compared to determine if statistically significant differences between the two groups existed. Statistical evidence was found relating a limited number of biographical characteristics to leadership effectiveness. There was no statistical evidence linking personality characteristics and leadership effectiveness.     

Transforming Doctoral Studies: Competencies and Artistry

This article examines the effects of recent attempts, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, to make doctoral studies in the United Kingdom more efficient and effective and to produce the sorts of skilled researchers the economy is thought to need. It draws on the literature about the transformational effects of current state managerialism on the public services and on the nature of education for the professions to look specifically at the situation of the greatly increased numbers of research students. It also uses insights from feminist scholarship on the ''projects of masculinity'' embedded in late-modernist thinking to suggest that a general repositioning of the academic profession is occurring, and of women academics specifically, and that there are deleterious consequences for intellectual creativity from over-stressing certain ''masculine values''.