The law and the outlaw: is legal prohibition a viable solution to the contract cheating problem?

Abstract

Contract cheating happens when students commission someone else to do assessed work for them. While it is already illegal in 18 jurisdictions, others are considering making the provision of contract cheating services illegal. To date, legal approaches to addressing contract cheating have faced little scrutiny in the peer reviewed literature. This article outlines some challenges with the legal approach to combating contract cheating. To this end it examines a segment of the contract cheating market to determine if contractors operate in localities where contract cheating services have been made illegal. The results suggest that contractors operate in plain sight, offering services to and from localities where services are prohibited by law. On the basis of the current challenges with enforcement of legal rules, this article recommends some alternative strategies for addressing contract cheating.     

Standards of practice to standards of evidence: developing assessment capable teachers

Abstract

Teacher education is a hotly debated policy area in higher education and schooling portfolios, with increasing emphasis on standards and accountability. It is in this environment that The Standards Project (2013–2015) presented in this article began. It has at its core a three-part commitment: first, to undertake a comprehensive audit and analysis of all teacher education programmes in the state of Queensland, Australia, to establish the approaches and practices Universities relied on to preparing beginning teachers as assessment capable; second, to take account of multiple perspectives and approaches in initial teacher education to integrating data into how beginning teachers are prepared to source and use evidence for improving learning and teaching; and further, to develop new principles, policy and practices for reviewing and moderating teacher education programmes against professional standards. The paper proposes a move beyond the discourse of professional standards of practice towards a complementary discourse of standards of evidence. In our collaboration we drew on two fields, namely the writing on teacher education including reviews, and the field of assessment, both considered within broader sociocultural theory applied to assessment.     

Childhood sexual abuse history and role reversal in parenting

OBJECTIVE: This study explored the main and interactive effects of sexual abuse history and relationship satisfaction on self-reported parenting, controlling for histories of physical abuse and parental alcoholism. METHOD: The community sample consisted of 90 mothers of 5- to 8-year-old children. The sample was limited to those mothers currently in an intimate relationship, 19 of whom reported a history of childhood sexual abuse. Participants completed the Child Behavior Checklist, the Parenting Stress Inventory, the Family Cohesion Index, and questions assessing parent-child role reversal, history of abuse and parental alcoholism, and current relationship satisfaction. RESULTS: Results of analyses and multivariate analyses of covariance suggested that sexual abuse survivors with an unsatisfactory intimate relationship were more likely than either sexual abuse survivors with a satisfactory relationship or nonabused women to endorse items on a questionnaire of role reversal (defined as emotional overdependence upon one's child). Role reversal was not significantly predicted by histories of physical abuse or parental alcoholism or child's gender. While parenting stress was inversely predicted by the significant main effect of relationship satisfaction, neither parenting stress nor child behavior problems were predicted by the main effect of sexual abuse history or by the interaction between sexual abuse history and relationship satisfaction. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest the unique relevance of sexual abuse history and relationship satisfaction in the prediction of a specific type of parent-child role reversal--namely, a mother's emotional overdependence upon her child.     

Conceptions of students as partners

Engaging students as partners (SaP) in teaching and learning is an emerging yet contested topic in higher education. This study interviewed 16 students and staff working in partnership across 11 Australian universities to understand how they conceptualised SaP and the opportunities they believed SaP afforded their universities. Thematic analysis revealed three overlapping conceptions of partnership: SaP as counter-narrative, SaP as values-based practice, and SaP as cultural change. The findings are first interpreted through the lens of liminality and an ethic of care. This is followed by a discussion of inclusivity of involvement, resistance, and reinforcement of neoliberal agendas despite good intentions. Finally, implications for cautious enactment of both practice and research are offered.     

Imaginary subjects: school science,indigenous students,and knowledge–power relations

The perspectives of indigenous science learners in developed nations offer an important but frequently overlooked dimension to debates about the nature of science, the science curriculum, and calls from educators to make school science more culturally responsive or ‘relevant’ to students from indigenous or minority groups. In this paper the findings of a study conducted with indigenous Maori children between the ages of 10 and 12 years are discussed. The purpose of the study was to examine the ways that indigenous children in an urban school environment in New Zealand position themselves in relation to school science. Drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein, we argue that although the interplay between emergent cultural identity narratives and the formation of ‘science selves’ is not as yet fully understood, it carries the potential to open a rich seam of learning for indigenous children.     

If and When Money Matters: The Relationships Among Educational Expenditures, Student Engagement and Students�� Learning Outcomes

Calls for accountability in higher education are prompted in part by questions concerning whether colleges and universities use their resources effectively to promote student learning. Unfortunately, too little is known about whether money matters to desired outcomes of college. Using students?? responses to the 2004 administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) in concert with institutional data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the College Board, this study examined the relationships between educational expenditures, student engagement and selected student self-reported learning outcomes, controlling for student and institutional characteristics. Results indicated that expenditures were modestly related to student engagement and learning outcomes. However, the nature of these relationships differed, depending on the engagement/outcome measure and student year in school.     

Creating a “third space” in student teaching: Implications for the university supervisor’s status as outsider

The work of teacher education during student teaching typically takes place in two distinct “spaces”: placement sites and college/university settings. The program featured in this article is structured in ways that clearly mark out those two spaces. Yet this configuration led our university supervisors, whose work primarily took place in the field, to feel like “outsiders.” To redress this concern, a third learning space was incorporated into our student teaching seminar. We suggest that “third spaces” in combination with return-to-campus courses not only mitigates the peripherality of university supervisors, but also amplifies the influence of a teacher preparation program.     

Observed Emotional and Behavioral Indicators of Motivation Predict School Readiness in Head Start Graduates

Emotions and behaviors observed during challenging tasks are hypothesized to be valuable indicators of young children's motivation, the assessment of which may be particularly important for children at risk for school failure. The current study demonstrated reliability and concurrent validity of a new observational assessment of motivation in young children. Head Start graduates completed challenging puzzle and trivia tasks during their kindergarten year. Children's emotion expression and task engagement were assessed based on their observed facial and verbal expressions and behavioral cues. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that observed persistence and shame predicted teacher ratings of children's academic achievement, whereas interest, anxiety, pride, shame, and persistence predicted children's social skills and learning-related behaviors. Children's emotional and behavioral responses to challenge thus appeared to be important indicators of school success. Observation of such responses may be a useful and valid alternative to self-report measures of motivation at this age.     

Classroom dimensions predict early peer interaction when children are diverse in ethnicity, race, and home language

The purpose of this study was to test a model for predicting preschool-age children's behaviors with peers from dimensions of the classroom and teacher-child relationship quality when the children were from diverse race, ethnic, and home language backgrounds. Eight hundred children, (M = age 63 months, SD = 8.1 months), part of the National Evaluation of Early Head Start, participated in this study just prior to entering kindergarten. We observed children with peers in their classrooms and rated classroom peer group size, affective climate for peer interaction, teacher management of the classroom, and materials for dramatic play. Teachers reported on teacher-child relationship quality. Children from Spanish-speaking homes played similarly in classrooms where Spanish was and was not spoken. After control variables and receptive vocabulary scores were entered into the model, classroom dimensions and teacher-child relationship quality significantly predicted pretend play, anxious-withdrawn, aggressive, and victim of peer aggression behaviors with peers. Children engaged in more pretend play and received lower ratings of being the victim of peer aggression when classroom groups were smaller. When teachers perceived teacher-child relationships as lower in conflict and higher in closeness, children's anxious-withdrawn, aggressive, and victim of aggression ratings were lower. Children's ratings of being the victim of peer aggression were higher when ratings of classroom positive peer climate were lower. Child-teacher ethnic or racial match did not moderate these predictions.     

An Assessment of Pronouns as Linguistic Cues for Predicting Work Attitudes

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (Reich, 1993) proposed that the pronouns employees use to describe their organization reveal information about their levels of engagement and affective commitment at work. In particular, he predicted that employees who describe their organization using the pronoun “we” are more engaged and committed than those who use the pronoun “they” in describing their organization. Reich's proposal has intuitive appeal and has been repeated in popular press accounts, but the accuracy of his prediction has not been empirically evaluated. In this article, we systematically examine the “Reich test” and find that the gender of the respondent is an important boundary condition to Reich's prediction. That is, our findings suggest that use of the pronoun “we” may serve as a predictor of work engagement and affective commitment for men, but not for women. We discuss the implications of these findings and the promise of exploring employees' linguistic indicators to understand social, affective, and cognitive psychological processes.