The impact of self-assessment,planning and goal setting,and reflection before and after revision on student self-efficacy and writing performance

Reading and Writing - Writing on-demand, text-based analytical essays is a challenging skill to master. Novice writers, such as the sixth grade US students in this study, may lack background...     

Evaluating e‐book platforms: Lessons from the e‐book accessibility audit

E‐books are a potential assistive technology, offering significant advantages over print books, and accessible materials are now a financial and legal necessity within UK academia. It is often difficult to find supplier information on accessibility, for example, whether files have been tagged for reading order or whether the interface has been tested with assistive technologies. Equally, library staff may lack confidence in identifying accessibility features, making it hard to promote them to students or demand them from suppliers. This article reports on a crowdsourced e‐book audit of 44 e‐book platforms that was undertaken by 33 UK universities during 2016. The research scored different platforms for a range of accessibility issues, and the resulting open data set is presented in a manner that can be interrogated by libraries looking for specific features. A key finding was that the platform can dramatically affect the accessibility of a publisher's content, making it important for publishers to work with suitable vendors to disseminate their publications.     

Bringing a student-centered participatory pedagogy to scale in Colombia

This paper presents the experience of going to scale of Escuela Nueva, an educational innovation that started in Colombia and has influenced educational policy in several countries around the world during the last 30 years. The paper is based on the experience of the leaders of the innovation and its expansion over time. As an insider´s perpective, it relies on the knowledge of senior staff of Fundación Escuela Nueva and on the published evidence and experience accumulated during the decades following the creation of the innovation. The paper describes the context where Escuela Nueva was created and the practices of participating students, teachers, schools administrators and parents when undergoing learning and teaching. It presents the conceptual underpinnings of the innovation, and discusses existing evidence of impact of Escuela Nueva on students, teachers and parents. It then examines the experience of bringing Escuela Nueva to scale, using a three-stage framework: learning to be effective, learning to be efficient and learning to expand. The paper then discusses key factors for success, and the challenges of scale, impact and sustainability, and advances the argument that good design, adequate implementation and sustained support are essential to take an innovation to scale. To conclude, the following four key lessons of Escuela Nueva to the educational change field are discussed : (1) Teachers and students need to be the key actors of the change; (2) the proposed improvements have to be easily replicable within existing conditions; (3) the attitudinal change of teachers is positively affected as a result of demonstrating that the model was feasible, a good fit for its beneficiaries and that they could do it; and (4) a systemic approach is necessary to impact simultaneously on the critical factors of success.     

All in the Family: Connecting Home and School with Family Literacy

Family literacy has come of age during the past quarter of a century. This article provides a brief review of family literacy history and components. Pedagogical implications for teachers of primary grade students are considered, and suggestions given for increasing home–school literacy involvement through the following types of initiatives: sharing information, increasing access to materials, and implementing strategies that invite family involvement.     

Changes in parent-child interaction in response to intervention

Parent-child interactions during the early years form the basis of many types of skill acquisitions, including fine motor and communication skills. Early intervention programmes aimed at promoting the attainments of children with disabilities or learning delays often suggest ways in which parents can interact with their children. The present study examined whether such intervention changes the nature of the parent-child interaction, using two groups of typically developing infants. The mothers of these two groups of prelinguistic children aged 10–12 months and 17–18 months were recorded talking to their infants when playing with a toy and then when asked to encourage their child to play in a particular way. Analyses of the affective and perceptual salience of the pitch of the mothers’ voices indicated that with the younger infants, but not the older infants, both the affective quality and the dynamic range of the mothers’ voices was reduced in the second condition. It is argued that this reduction enables the younger infants to concentrate on the task but restricts access to the linguistic content of what is said. The implications of these findings for intervention programmes are discussed.     

STEM in England: meanings and motivations in the policy arena

STEM, an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, is widely used in science education. There is confusion, however, as to its provenance and meaning which is potentially problematic. This study examines the purpose of STEM practice in education in England and asks if there are differences in perceptions of STEM between science and mathematics educator stakeholders. The study’s contribution to the literature is its unusual focus on those who were responsible for making and enacting national STEM policy. A two-phase qualitative approach was followed comprising an analysis of government documentation together with semi-structured interviews with key contributors to the science and mathematics education discourse. Findings suggest that there is a disconnect between the interpretations of the science and mathematics educators with a danger-advantage dichotomy to participation in STEM being perceived by the mathematics educators. Early aims of the STEM agenda, including increasing diversity, gave way to a focus on numbers of post-16 physics and mathematics students. We conclude that if the term STEM is to continue to be used then there is a need for greater clarity about what it represents in educational terms and a wider debate about its compatibility with the aims of science education for all.     

Travelling Without Risks? Itinerant Entertainers in the Duchy of Brabant and their Uses of Passports at the End of the Eighteenth Century

This article examines the uses of passports among itinerant entertainers travelling through the Duchy of Brabant. Making their living with public performances ranging from singing, making music, acting and puppetry to acrobatics and bear dancing, they travelled on a daily, weekly or monthly basis over short and long distances with their shows. Their high level of mobility met with multiple restrictions imposed by the authorities. Travellers with little or no means were often arrested for vagrancy or begging on the charge of having no fixed residence or a steady job. Passports could help itinerant entertainers preventing their possible arrest. This article addresses the question how ambulant entertainers made use of passports for their travels. To this end I used passport registers on the one hand and vagrancy files of arrested itinerant entertainers on the other hand. The passport registers (available for the cities of Brussels and Antwerp) provide insight into who applied for a passport. Meanwhile, the vagrancy files shed light on entertainers travelling without a passport or with invalid ones. As such, this body of sources provides us with an exceptional insight into the variety of uses of passports by itinerant entertainers in Brabant at the turn of the century.