Professional re-accreditation: constructing educational policy for career-long teacher professional learning

Competence as a measure of ‘fitness to practice’ and its evaluation through mechanisms of personal performance review, has led to the introduction of systems in a number of professions which link appraisal to the maintenance of professional registration (variously referred to as re-validation, re-certification, re-accreditation, etc.). This shift towards the requirement to actively maintain registration is becoming increasingly common in the teaching profession in many countries too. This paper presents an examination of the enactment of this global policy trend towards teacher re-accreditation at a national level. Here, we analyse the policy discourse and rhetoric around the introduction of professional re-accreditation of teachers in Scotland, where it is referred to as ‘Professional Update’, and track this through to the preparation of those carrying out interviews for re-accreditation in one of the three local authorities involved in piloting the initiative. In doing this we aim to show the ways in which policy serves to construct teacher subjectivities though processes of appraisal and how policy actors positions themselves and are positioned within these policy-making processes.     

Designing a library: everyone on the same page?

Excerpts are presented from an interview by the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association buildings projects editor with four academic health sciences library directors: one who had recently completed a major library building project and three who were involved in various stages of new building projects. They share their experiences planning for and implementing library-building programs. The interview explores driving forces leading to new library buildings, identifies who should be involved, recalls the most difficult and exciting moments of the building projects, relates what they wished they had known before starting the project, assesses the impact of new library facilities on clients and services, reviews what they would change, and describes forces impacting libraries today and attributes of the twenty-first century library.     

Expansion and effectiveness of private tutoring

Private paid tutoring is one of the most common approaches of remedial instruction to improve school performance of poorly performing pupils. The expansion of private tutoring was affirmed in a study with 904 pupils in Luxembourg. 23% of the participants reported that they receive tutoring at present, mainly in the subject matter of Mathematics. Theoretical considerations suggest the effectiveness of private tutoring in promoting school performance by an improvement in cognitive and motivational variables and a higher amount of time spent on task. However, appropriate evaluation studies are lacking. In an empirical study the effectiveness of tutoring is evaluated in a prepost-control-group-design. One group (N=122) received private tutoring over a period of nine months and was compared to a non-tutoring control group (N=122). These results indicate that receiving tutoring leads to a larger improvement in school performance and motivational variables. Directions for further research and practical implications are discussed.     

Elemental versus configural perception in a people-present/people-absent discrimination task by pigeons

In the present experiment, we investigated whether pigeons rely exclusively on elemental information or whether they are also able to exploit configural information in apeople-present/people-absent discrimination task. Six pigeons were trained in a go/no-go procedure to discriminate between 800 color photographs characterized by the presence or absence of people. Thepeople-present stimuli were designated as positive, and thepeople-absent stimuli were designated as negative. After training and a subsequent generalization test, the pigeons were presented with both familiar and novel people-present stimuli containing human figures that were distorted in one of seven different ways. All the pigeons learned the initial discrimination and also showed generalization to novel stimuli. In the subsequent test, performance on all types of distorted stimuli was diminished in comparison with that on the intact original pictures from which they had been derived. At the same time, however, peck rates clearly exceeded the level of responding found for regular people-absent stimuli. This result strongly suggests that responding was controlled by both the constituting target components and their spatial relations and, therefore, points to the dual importance of elemental and configural information.     

Target-defining features in a “people-present/people-absent” discrimination task by pigeons

Aust and Huber (2001) demonstrated that in apeople-present/people-absentdiscrimination task, pigeons actually attended to properties of the target (i.e., the human figure). The aim of the present effort was to specify what sort of information contained in the target was used for classification, as well as to investigate whether and in what way the target-defining features interacted. Six pigeons were trained in a go/no-go procedure to discriminate between color photographs characterized by the presence or absence of people. They were then presented with various types of test stimuli that contained some category-relevant features but lacked others. The results showed that properties related to target size and internal structure played an important role and that human silhouettes were insufficient for eliciting a people-present response. Furthermore, some properties of the human figure (e.g., hands/arms) made good predictors of the people-present category, whereas others (e.g., feet/legs or skin color) did not. Responses to test stimuli that belonged to the people-absent category but nevertheless contained some features normally typical for humans (e.g., nonhuman primates) provided evidence that various category-relevant features contributed to classification in an additive way. Taken together, the results suggest that the pigeons made use of a polymorphous class rule involving collections of differently weighted target features.     

Hemoglobin Hasharon and hemoglobin NYU in subjects of German origin

Determination of HbA1c values with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) occasionally reveals hemoglobin anomalies with no or minimal clinical evidence. We coincidentally detected two cases of Hb Hasharon, an alpha globin gene mutation, in two heterozygous patients and one case of Hb NYU, a delta globin gene mutation, in another patient. Both anomalies have not been described in subjects of German origin to date. Characterization was carried out with HPLC, hemoglobin electrophoresis, capillary zone electrophoresis, DNA sequencing, complete blood count and clinical chemical analysis.     

Psychological Benefits of Participation in Three-dimensional Virtual Worlds for Individuals with Real-world Disabilities

One hundred and ninety-six individuals with real-world disabilities were administered a battery of psychological adjustment measures soon after joining the three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life^®. After three months, 61 participants who continued to be actively involved in Second Life were re-administered the adjustment measures and completed a survey about their virtual and real-life experiences during the interval between assessments. Participants’ scores significantly improved on measures of affective states (depression, anxiety, positive emotion, life satisfaction, and feelings of loneliness) and self-evaluation (self-esteem). An index of overall change was associated with the number of virtual friends and group affiliations in Second Life, as well as feelings about the self as a result of involvement in the virtual world. The current study provides initial empirical support that three-dimensional virtual worlds can serve as a psychologically beneficial context for individuals with real-life disabilities.     

How do teachers perceive cheating students? Beliefs about cues to deception and detection accuracy in the educational field

The present study explores how well teacher trainees can detect liars. Moreover, a new method was applied to investigate beliefs that teacher trainees hold about liars. The results indicate that, overall, teacher trainees were not better than chance in detecting true and invented stories. Generally, participants reported to have used only a few cues for their credibility judgment, where most of these self-reported cues are stereotypical and invalid deception cues (e.g., gaze aversion). Further analyses with a Brunswikian lens model showed that the self-reported cues were good predictors of their credibility judgment but only poorly predictive for the objective truth/lie status of the statement. Practical implications of the results are discussed.