The role of goal orientations for adolescent mathematics achievement

This study examines the association between personal goal orientations and mathematics achievement within the trichotomous goal framework. Participants comprised approximately 2000 seventh and eighth grade White, Hispanic, and Vietnamese students in a low-income urban school district in California. Regression analysis with classroom fixed effects minimized biases arising from non-random assignment of teachers and students to schools and classrooms. While all three achievement goal orientations were correlated with mathematics achievement, only a mastery goal orientation consistently predicted achievement when a full set of prior achievement and demographic controls were included. Performance-approach and performance-avoidance goal orientations did not predict achievement in the full model.     

International Communications

THE SOVIET PROPAGANDA MACHINE by Martin Ebon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987—$22.95)

CLANDESTINE RADIO BROADCASTING: A STUDY OF REVOLUTIONARY AND COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION by Lawrence C. Soley and John S. Nichols (New York: Praeger, 1987—$47.95)

ASSIGNED TO LISTEN: THE EVESHAM EXPERIENCE, 1939–43 by Olive Renier and Vladimir Rubinstein (London: BBC External Services, 1986—L3.95, paper, plus 25% more to cover postage and packing outside of the U.K.)

INDEPENDENCE, LIBERATION, REVOLUTION: AN APPROACH TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE THIRD WORLD by Tran Van Dinh (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987—$37.50)

FOLLOWING THE FOOTPRINTS: PROTECTING FILM AND TV RIGHTS IN THE WORLD SATELLITE MARKETPLACE edited by Charles Firestone and Daniel Brenner (Communications Law Program, UCLA School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles 90024—price not given, paper)     

Narrating Lives,Narrating Faith: “Organic Hybridity” for Contemporary Christian Religious Education

This article proposes that Christian Religious Education (CRE) today requires the practice of “organic hybridity” in fluid and shifting “diasporic spaces,” the prerequisite for which is the recognition that “hybrid subjectivities” is characteristic of our current postmodern, postcolonial, transnational, globalized world. Toward this aim, CRE must strive to understand how contemporary hybrid subjects negotiate identities and faith in the way they narrate situationally, improvisationally, and organically about the inter-activity between human and Divine for everyday living.     

Using group projects as a strategy to increase cooperation among low- and high-achieving students

This study aimed to investigate the perceptions, interactions and behaviours of different-ability college students when they worked on different types of assessments. Two classes of 145 Vietnamese college students participated in this three-month study. The students were assigned to mixed-ability groups, each of which consisted of five students. The results show that assessment designed as a group project helped close the gap in communication and interactions between different-ability students within groups. When the students engaged with assessment as a group project, all levels of performers increased productive learning behaviours and provided more relevant verbal help and assistance to each other. Importantly, this type of assessment created various opportunities for the low performers to participate in, and make a contribution to, group tasks. As a result, all group members became interested in working with others. They perceived cooperative learning groups as being enjoyable and fun.     

Language and learning advisors as a valuable but under-recognised workforce in higher education: a Bourdieuian analysis of their professional development in international education

Language and learning advisors (LLAs) play a vital role in supporting the academic development of a fast-growing population of international students. This paper tackles the professional development practices for LLAs and barriers to their professional development. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus, the paper addresses the mutual interactions between the work environment and LLAs’ thinking and actions regarding providing language and learning advice to international students. The analysis of 44 semi-structured interviews with LLAs from 18 institutions shows that there was a scarcity of targeted professional development opportunities for LLAs to improve their expertise directly related to international students and internationalisation of education. Financial shortage, time constraints, casualisation conditions, managerial issues, academic to professional employment re-classification for LLAs and the ongoing marginalisation of LLAs have created unfavourable contexts for LLAs’ professional development. The paper points out the critical need to create better work conditions for LLAs, to ensure more investment in creating targeted opportunities for LLAs’ professional development and to provide more resources and attention to support their enactment of agency and development of professional capacities.     

Transfer of visual and haptic maze learning in rats

Cross-modal transfer of learning between black/white and rough/smooth discrimination tasks was studied in a two-choice maze procedure in which the stimuli for both discriminations were located on the floor of the maze. Rats were trained initially with cues of one modality and then given transfer training with cues of the second modality. The amount of transfer produced by two criteria of learning, 9 correct responses in 10 trials and 18 correct responses in 20 trials, was also studied. Bidirectional cross-modal transfer of learning was demonstrated more clearly with the more stringent learning criteria. These positive transfer effects appeared primarily to be the result of general transfer processes.     

“It is complicated!”: Practices and challenges of generic skills assessment in Vietnamese universities

Contributing to a lack of studies related to generic skills (GS) assessment, especially in non-Western university contexts, this article reports a study that explored practices and challenges of assessing students’ GS in the Business Administration programmes in six Vietnamese universities. Content analysis of interviews with 41 teachers of skills subjects and specialised subjects revealed that teachers were organising different formative and summative GS-assessment activities. Unfortunately, the analysis indicated that their GS-assessment practices were fragmented across subjects in the curriculum. Teachers’ beliefs regarding their roles in the university, teachers’ expertise and several contextual factors were found to influence their assessment practices. The article argues that leadership should be exercised more effectively in order to remove obstacles and engage teachers with assessing GS, which will yield washback effect on students’ learning of these skills.