Teachers' beliefs about student motivation: similarities and differences across cultures

The opinions of 108 teachers, about what influenced adolescent students' motivation and de-motivation, were sought through interview, at sites in each of the UK, the USA and Russia. Teachers' opinions in all three milieux were found to concur—on the positive effects of: parental interest and involvement and parental dissatisfaction; partnership with parents; teacher-student relations; symbolic and material rewards; grades and marks; success in learning—and on the negative effects of some leisure pursuits and of potential post-school unemployment. However, the meaning to be attached to such concurrence is problematised by contextualising apparent agreement within significantly differing local arrangements for, and expectations of: partnership with parents; continuity and duration of teacher-student-parent relations; the development of teachers' professional learning from experience; the deployment of praise and criticism; the pedagogical use of assessment; and the deployment of out-of-school time. Amplifying effects of peer and community subcultures, on the influence of potential unemployment, were also found to differ between contexts. It is concluded that whilst points of concurrence in teachers' opinions are of undoubted interest for any general theory of motivation to learn in school, methods which explore the conceptual system and semantic structure of the background beliefs which inform the expressed opinions that respondents express are urgently needed. The paper argues that we need to be able to model the underlying expectations and constraints which lend structure and priority to the lived experience of being schooled.     

Student voice: using qualitative feedback from students to enhance their university experience

Many performance indicators in Australian higher education are based on the quantitative data from student feedback surveys, while the qualitative data usually generated by these surveys receive relatively limited attention. This paper argues that these data, if collected and analysed in a systematic way, can be used as an effective and robust institutional performance indicator and can assist in the enhancement of the student experience. The paper describes a comparative analysis of qualitative data generated at a large metropolitan multi-campus university by the annual Course Experience Questionnaire during 2001–2011. In total, approximately 78,800 student open-ended comments have been analysed via CEQuery – a software tool that facilitates analysis of the written comments. The results compared across the years allow the university to identify key trends in student experience and areas that warrant an improvement focus. The paper provides examples on how the university uses the data. It concludes that to be successful, universities should include a focus on what students have to say in their own words and incorporate such feedback into their priorities.     

Peer Coaching of At-Risk Students in a Remedial Mathematics Course

Remedial mathematics at the college level has evidenced strikingly low retention and passing rates. It has been shown that at least 25% of the variation in student performance is explained by students’ affective variables such as attitudes, study skills, and mathematics anxiety. This study endeavored to address affective variables by: (a) incorporating the teaching of study skills into an elementary algebra course; and (b) identifying at-risk students and assigning these students “coaches,” who functioned both as tutors and counselors, providing regular personalized assistance. The results showed that the attrition rate was significantly lower in the treatment groups, and the overall passing rate for coached students was significantly higher.     

Motivation in the Junior Years: International perspectives on children's attitudes,expectations and behaviour and their relationship to educational achievement

This paper reports findings from a large-scale international investigation of a number of factors that are considered to impact upon educational motivation and achievement. Following on from an earlier investigation of adolescent attitudes, the present study involved a detailed survey of nearly 3,000 children, aged 9-10 from districts in England, Russia and the USA, together with teacher reports and the employment of a test of basic mathematical computation. The Russian sample scored significantly more highly on the computation test and showed no large tail of underachievers, as was the case with the other groups. Findings from the survey indicate that many of the differences found in the earlier adolescent study are equally true for younger children. The Russian children were less likely to express satisfaction with their abilities or workrates, were more positive towards school, more likely to see education as intrinsically valuable and tended to spend significantly more time on homework tasks. Data obtained also suggest that the Russian sample experienced classrooms with far less disruption and stronger prosocial peer influences than did the English and American children. Teacher understandings of what is considered to be acceptable behaviour appeared to differ, however. The paper notes that the Western samples overestimated their teachers' views of their ability while the Russian children provided underestimates. Possible reasons for, and implications of, these differential teacher messages are discussed. The paper concludes by examining the implications of the findings from the study for increasing motivation and achievement in countries with very different sociocultural contexts.     

Lehrerbildung fur den Unterricht Behinderter Kinder in der UdSSR

This article is presented as an interim report on an inquiry which is being conducted at the German Institute for International Educational Research at Frankfurt/Main. The authors being by outlining the organisational structure of special school teacher training at the Faculties of Defectology which have been established at a good number of Colleges of Education. However, the emphasis is laid on identifying current curricular innovations with special regard to the experiments at the Lenin College of Education in Moscow. In the following section specific attention is paid to the function of correspondence studies in the initial and in‐service training of special school teachers. The article is concluded by some remarks about the social status that teachers enjoy in the Soviet Union and by some basic comparison with trends in special teacher education in both Germanies.     

Benchmarking open government: An open data perspective

This paper presents a benchmark proposal for the Open Government and its application from the open data perspective using data available on the U.S. government's open data portal (data.gov). The benchmark is developed over the adopted Open Government conceptual model, which describes Open Government through data openness, transparency, participation and collaboration. Resulting in two measures, that is, one known as the e-government openness index (eGovOI) and the other Maturity, the benchmark indicates the progress of government over time, the efficiency of recognizing and implementing new concepts and the willingness of the government to recognize and embrace innovative ideas.     

Stability notions and Lyapunov functions for sliding mode control systems

The paper surveys mathematical tools required for stability and convergence analysis of modern sliding mode control systems. Elements of Filippov theory of differential equations with discontinuous right-hand sides and its recent extensions are discussed. Stability notions (from Lyapunov stability (1982) to fixed-time stability (2012)) are observed. Concepts of generalized derivatives and non-smooth Lyapunov functions are considered. The generalized Lyapunov theorems for stability analysis and convergence time estimation are presented and supported by examples from sliding mode control theory.