Students and the Governance of Higher Education in Norway

The article discusses the question of student participation in higher education governance at the national and the institutional levels in Norway. Two ideal-type perspectives on governance are developed in order to illuminate the Norwegian case: a democratic perspective and a market perspective. The article provides a brief overview of the historical development of student participation in higher education governance, emphasizing how students view their own role in the governance arenas in which they participate. Close attention is paid to student participation and influence in quality assurance schemes at both the national and the institutional levels. In the conclusion, the article discusses how the recent developments are changing the balance towards the market model of higher education governance, without obliterating significant elements of the hitherto predominant democratic governance model.

     

Conflicting goals of educational action: a study of teacher agency from a transactional realism perspective

This study focuses on the different ways in which teachers relate their situational agency and professional assignment to the national curriculum content and curriculum dilemmas. It builds theoretically on transactional realism and empirically on analyses of interviews with teachers, exploring the nature of teacher agency during the enactment of a new Swedish curriculum reform. To uphold a dual perspective of teachers’ relation to the curriculum as both collectively and individually experienced and as both an ideal and realistic–practical relation, we term the future as ‘projective experiences’, the presence as ‘practical-evaluative experiences’ and the past ‘iterational experiences’ in relation to agency. Especially, we are interested in the ‘what’ in the curriculum – what the teachers find intriguing, important or impossible and what affects how they relate to the curriculum as part of the multidimensional structures influencing their agency. This approach reveals that the crucial issue of teacher agency is related to the policy discourse on knowledge and equity as standards and the uniformity of assessment and its pedagogical consequences.     

Locality-adapted kernel densities of term co-occurrences for location prediction of tweets

While geographical metadata referring to the originating locations of tweets provides valuable information to perform effective spatial analysis in social networks, scarcity of such geotagged tweets imposes limitations on their usability. In this work, we propose a content-based location prediction method for tweets by analyzing the geographical distribution of tweet texts using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE). The primary novelty of our work is to determine different settings of kernel functions for every term in tweets based on the location indicativeness of these terms. Our proposed method, which we call locality-adapted KDE, uses information-theoretic metrics and does not require any parameter tuning for these settings. As a further enhancement on the term-level distribution model, we describe an analysis of spatial point patterns in tweet texts in order to identify bigrams that exhibit significant deviation from the underlying unigram patterns. We present an expansion of feature space using the selected bigrams and show that it eventually yields further improvement in prediction accuracy of our locality-adapted KDE. We demonstrate that our expansion results in a limited increase in the size of feature space and it does not hinder online localization of tweets. The methods we propose rely purely on statistical approaches without requiring any language-specific setting. Experiments conducted on three tweet sets from different countries show that our proposed solution outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques, yielding significantly more accurate predictions.     

An examination of the roles of the teacher and students during a problem-based learning intervention: lessons learned from a study in a Taiwanese primary mathematics classroom

The benefits of problem-based learning (PBL) to student learning have prompted researchers to investigate this pedagogical approach over the past few decades. However, little research has examined how PBL can be applied to mathematics learning and teaching, especially in countries like Taiwan, where the majority of teachers are accustomed to lecture methods and students are used to this style of teaching. This study examines the actions of a teacher and her class of 35 fifth-grade students (10–11-year-olds) as they tried to take on and respond to the demands of their new roles as “facilitator” and “constructors”, respectively, during a one-year PBL intervention in a Taiwanese mathematics classroom. Our findings provide insights into classroom participants’ role transition, from a customary role to a new role, when engaging with PBL. We identify an interrelationship between the teacher and student roles and discuss implications for the implementation of PBL at the primary education level.     

Creating effective teaching and learning environments: Building a positive behavioural support (PBS) model for UK special schools

The importance of reducing restraint and restrictive interventions in special schools has been recognised across the four nations of the UK. Government guidance for England and Wales, and recommendations produced by Restraint Reduction Scotland, both reference Positive behavioural support (PBS) as an evidence-based approach that can be used to proactively support pupils with, or at risk of, behaviours that challenge. The Department of Education of Northern Ireland recommends the development of behaviour support plans to support children with special education needs and disabilities. Special schools, however, also have a responsibility to set high expectations for every pupil, to provide access to the respective national curricula and to meet individual needs. School-wide positive behavioural support (SW-PBS), originated in the USA in the 1990s in response to a body of evidence that showed improved social and academic outcomes when behavioural interventions were implemented across whole school settings. It is increasingly being adopted in the UK. Drawing upon examples from schools in England and Wales with which the authors are familiar, this paper outlines the rationale for a special schools' model of SW-PBS and illustrates the ways in which this can be adjusted to meet the specific needs of each setting.

Key Points

• Reducing restraint and restrictive interventions in schools is a high priority across all four nations of the UK.
• Special schools also have a responsibility to provide children with special education needs and disabilities positive learning environments that maximise learning opportunities and meet individual needs.
• School-wide positive behaviour support (SW-PBS) provides a useful framework to help special schools meet these expectations.