Funding,reputation and targets: the discursive logics of high-stakes testing

This paper provides insights into teacher and school-based administrators’ responses to policy demands for improved outcomes on high-stakes, standardised literacy and numeracy tests in Australia. Specifically, the research reveals the effects of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and associated policies, in the state of Queensland. Drawing suggestively across Michel Foucault’s notions of disciplinary power and subjectivity, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, the research utilises interviews with teachers and school-based administrators to reveal how high-stakes, standardised testing practices served to discursively constitute performative teacher subjectivities around issues of funding, teacher and school reputation and target-setting within what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’. The paper argues that the contestation evident within this field is also reflective and constitutive of more educative schooling discourses and practices, even as performative logics dominate.     

‘I’m just a numbers person’: the complexity,nature and effects of the quantification of education

This paper draws upon the sociology of numbers, particularly work by Theodore Porter, to reveal the multifarious ways in which numbers actively constitute practices in schools. Drawing upon a case study of one low-performing school in a low-performing region in the state of Queensland, Australia, and theorising into the sociology of numbers, the research explores the complex ways in which numbers came to constitute and dominate the practices in this school site under a broader national, state and regional policy context demanding rapid improvements in various forms of standardised tests and associated practices. Specifically, the research reveals a strong and simultaneous focus by teachers upon a variety of numeric data collected at national, regional and local levels, and intricate relations between these data; multiple visualisation, triangulation and comparison approaches towards such data in virtual and physical formats; and the enumerative nominalisation of both students and their reading attainment in relation to specific, concretised levels of achievement and various types of scale scores. The research cautions against the sheer volume of such enumerative practices, which, while productive of teachers’ understandings of student capacity against standardised measures of achievement, may also lead to a more reductive view of education, dominated by concerns about achievement in standardised tests (and associated practices) alone.     

Students selling sex: marketisation,higher education and consumption

Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy, yet the relationship appears consistent and permanent. This paper draws on findings from the largest study into the stripping industry in the United Kingdom to explore the relationships between students, sex work and consumption. To make sense of the relationship between students and participation in the sex industry, a deeper understanding of other social and cultural processes is needed. In this discussion we argue that the following points are relevant and interlinked: changes to the nature of sexual commerce and sexual consumption as they become part of the marketplace; changes in social attitudes and the rise of ‘respectability’ in sexual commerce; the ‘pleasure dynamic’ amongst students; and changes in the higher education structure that place students as consumers as well as financially fragile. We set out a future research agenda given that this relationship is set to grow as the individual bares the cost of higher education.     

Education as a ‘risky business’: Theorising student and teacher learning in complex times

This paper employs sociological literature on risk and the commodification of education to explain current schooling practices in a context of increased concerns about students’ behaviour and results on standardised tests of achievement. Drawing upon teacher and student learning practices in three school sites in south-east Queensland, Australia, the article reveals how specific tests, packages and programmes have been employed as technologies of governance to minimise the risk of adverse student behaviour, maximise student outcomes on standardised tests, and provide teachers with discrete learning experiences construed as improving such outcomes. The sum total of these foci is the construction of education as an increasingly ‘risky business’ which employs a myriad of products and tests to manage perceived and actual risks. The paper also reveals how these products and processes constitute student misbehaviour and inadequate teacher and student learning as ‘risk objects’ requiring constant intervention, but which also inhibit inclusion in schooling settings, and challenge teachers’ professionalism.     

Writing to learn: can reflection journals be used to promote self-reflection and learning?

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate whether there is evidence of reflection in student-written journals and to investigate whether students show improvements in their reflective skills through journal keeping. To that end, the reflection journals of 3460 first-year students enrolled in a polytechnic were studied by means of an automated coding procedure. Data used in the analyses were students' journals for an entire week, collected once at the beginning and again at the end of an academic year. Outcomes of the content analyses suggest that there is evidence of reflection in students' journals and that students reflected on three general categories related to their learning: critical review of past learning experiences, cognitive learning strategies and summaries of what was learnt. Furthermore, the findings also indicate that students show improvements in their reflective skills as they progressed through the academic year. The findings when taken together suggest that reflection journals can be used to promote self-reflection and learning amongst students.     

The value and valuing of continuing professional development: current dilemmas,future directions and the case for action research

This paper explores and challenges the rationale for current, mainstream approaches to teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) within schooling systems. Such approaches are significantly influenced by neoliberal and managerial pressures, evident in advocacy for generic, individualistic models of teacher learning, often focused on specific state-sanctioned domains. The paper draws upon a précis of recent action research literature, and empirical research from Sweden, to argue for an alternative paradigm, based on the practices and principles of participatory and collaborative action research. Action research is not presented as a simplistic ‘method’ which can be ‘applied’ regardless of context, but is explicitly focused on situated, specific, local sites. While more managerial and neoliberal practices can close down debates necessary for effecting real improvements in practice, evidence suggests action research, in its emancipatory iterations, enables a rich conception of educational practice which cannot be ‘managed’ into existence by a simplistic application of ‘what works.’     

Shrink-film microfluidic education modules: Complete devices within minutes

As advances in microfluidics continue to make contributions to diagnostics and life sciences, broader awareness of this expanding field becomes necessary. By leveraging low-cost microfabrication techniques that require no capital equipment or infrastructure, simple, accessible, and effective educational modules can be made available for a broad range of educational needs from middle school demonstrations to college laboratory classes. These modules demonstrate key microfluidic concepts such as diffusion and separation as well as "laboratory on-chip" applications including chemical reactions and biological assays. These modules are intended to provide an interdisciplinary hands-on experience, including chip design, fabrication of functional devices, and experiments at the microscale. Consequently, students will be able to conceptualize physics at small scales, gain experience in computer-aided design and microfabrication, and perform experiments-all in the context of addressing real-world challenges by making their own lab-on-chip devices.     

Internal and external focus of attention in a novice form sport

In the current experiment, we examined optimal focus for novices during a movement sequence in which performance was measured on accurate movement form/technique. A novel gymnastics routine was practiced under either an internal skill-relevant, internal skill-irrelevant, external, or no attention focus. Retention and transfer tests were then completed. During acquisition, adopting an internal irrelevant focus significantly improved performance, whereas an external focus degraded performance. There were no significant group differences in the retention and transfer tests. This suggests that learning of movement form/technique did not benefit from a specific focus of attention. The results are interpreted via an attentional capacity viewpoint and the notion that form tasks do not always contain obvious movement effects central to common coding and the constrained action hypothesis.     

The role of athlete narcissism in moderating the relationship between coaches' transformational leader behaviors and athlete motivation

Leadership research that examines follower characteristics as a potential moderator of leadership effectiveness is lacking. Within Bass's (1985) transformational leadership framework, we examined follower narcissism as a moderator of the coach behavior-coach effectiveness relationship. Youth athletes (male = 103, female = 106) from the Singapore Sports Academy (mean age = 14.28, SD = 1.40 years) completed the Differentiated Transformational Leadership Inventory (Callow, Smith, Hardy, Arthur, & Hardy, 2009), the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Raskin & Terry, 1988), and indices of follower effort. Multilevel analyses revealed that athlete narcissism moderated the relationship between fostering acceptance of group goals and athlete effort and between high performance expectations and athlete effort. All the other transformational leader behaviors demonstrated main effects on follower effort, except for inspirational motivation.     

Effects of self-talk: a systematic review

This article presents a systematic review of the literature examining the relationship between self-talk and performance. "Second-generation questions" regarding potential mediators and moderators of the self-talk-performance relationship were also examined. A total of 47 studies were analyzed. Results indicated beneficial effects of positive, instructional, and motivational self-talk for performance. Somewhat surprisingly, two evidence-based challenges to popular current viewpoints on self-talk emerged. First, negative self-talk did not impede performance. Second, there was inconsistent evidence for the differential effects of instructional and motivational self-talk based on task characteristics. Results from the mediation-based analysis indicate that cognitive and behavioral factors had the most consistent relationships with self-talk. The findings are discussed in the context of recent theoretical advances, and the article includes recommendations for future research (e.g., the use of designs allowing the testing of meditational hypotheses) and for current applied practice (e.g., avoiding the use of thought-stopping techniques).