Spatializing a global education phenomenon: private tutoring and mobility theory in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

Along with the dramatic expansion of private tutoring around the world, a significant body of literature has been produced to understand this phenomenon. While many studies consider the issue of geographic location, the spatial dimension tends not to be a central focus of private tutoring studies. In contrast, the present essay applies mobility theory to research from Cambodia, where private tutoring is essential to student success. It does so in order to place private tutoring provision into a broader perspective that includes but moves beyond the economic dimensions of supply and demand and the sociological dimensions of economic, cultural, and social capital to include consideration of how private tutoring provision is constrained by a multidimensional spatial field of possibilities and how private tutoring participation is enabled by one’s position and abilities in relation to that field. The paper argues for increased attention to ‘spatial capital’ in studies of private tutoring and education generally.     

The role of scaling up research in designing for and evaluating robustness

One of the great strengths of Jim Kaput’s research program was his relentless drive towards scaling up his innovative approach to teaching the mathematics of change and variation. The SimCalc mission, “democratizing access to the mathematics of change,” was enacted by deliberate efforts to reach an increasing number of teachers and students each year. Further, Kaput asked: What can we learn from research at the next level of scale (e.g., beyond a few classrooms at a time) that we cannot learn from other sources? In this article, we develop an argument that scaling up research can contribute important new knowledge by focusing researchers’ attention on the robustness of an innovation when used by varied students, teachers, classrooms, schools, and regions. The concept of robustness requires additional discipline both in the design process and in the conduct of valid research. By examining a progression of three studies in the Scaling Up SimCalc program, we articulate how scaling up research can contribute to designing for and evaluating robustness.     

Teachers’ perceptions of assessments of their mathematical knowledge in a professional development course

The purpose of the project reported in this article was to evaluate how assessing teachers’ mathematical knowledge within a professional development course impacted from the teachers’ perspective their learning and their experience with the course. The professional development course consisted of a 2-week summer institute and the content focus was geometry. We had decided to assess the mathematical learning of the teachers during this professional development course for various accountability reasons, but were concerned about possible negative by-products of this decision on the teachers and their participation. Thus, we worked to design assessment in ways that we hoped would minimize negative impacts and maintain a supportive learning environment. In addition, we undertook this evaluation to examine the impacts of the assessment, which included homework, quizzes, various projects, and an examination for program evaluation. Seventeen grade 5–9 teachers enrolled in the course participated in the study by completing written reflections and by describing their experiences in interviews. We learned that while our original intent was “to do no harm,” the teachers reported that their learning was enhanced by the assessment. The article concludes by describing the various properties of the assessments that the teachers identified as contributing to their learning of the geometry content, many of which align with current recommendations for assessing and evaluating grade K-16 mathematics students.

Amerikanische „Elitehochschulen“

The system of higher education in the USA comprises the undergraduate programs of the colleges and the graduate programs in research universities. This distinction has no equivalent in Germany. The idea of elite education is connected exclusively with the colleges. Its meaning and functions are demonstrated with an analysis of the criteria which are used for the ranking of higher education institutions. The ranking of the colleges is addressed to the students and is based on indicators, which give expression above all to the educational priorities of the students and the alumni. The ranking of the graduate programs focuses on specific academic programs and is addressed to the members of the various academic fields and to their prospective students. A few rankings cover whole educational institutions and serve to inform the higher educational management. We use these data to identity the specifics of outstanding research universities and their role in American higher education.     

Expectancies as mediators in the differential-reward conditional discrimination performance of pigeons

In a series of within-subject experiments employing a two-choice delayed conditional discrimination task, pigeons chose correctly more often when kind of correct choice and kind of reinforcer were perfectly correlated than when uncorrelated. Correct choice behavior fell to chance levels when the correlation was reversed or when it was removed by using only one kind of reinforcer. Implications for mediation theories are discussed, with the conclusion being that, although the possibility that instrumental mediators are present in this situation cannot be dismissed, the overall pattern of results indicates that classical mediators are of principal importance in this type of task.