Melding Internal and External Support for School Improvement: How the District Role Changes When Working Closely With External Instructional Support Providers

To support instruction, school districts must provide a wide array of assistance to schools. Broadly speaking, districts play the roles of authority in holding schools accountable for their activities and performance, support in assisting school faculties to build their capacity to better instruct students, and brokerage between schools and outside providers of service and materials. The roles of authority, support, and brokerage typically contend with each other, producing a set of perennial tensions for district leaders. This article examines the influence on these three roles of external support providers working in close partnership with districts on instructional improvement efforts. First, the article reviews the literature on district/provider partnerships for examples of role adjustment. Second, using a case study of a deep partnership between a district and an external provider, this article empirically examines the influence of a district/provider partnership on the balance of district roles. The findings illustrate how the traditional district roles of authority, support, and brokerage are adjusted by partnerships with external providers.     

Team Experiences for Science and Social Studies Preservice Teachers

Becoming an effective literacy learner requires a bit of slowing down and appreciating the reflective nature of reading and writing. Literature circles support this instructional direction because they provide opportunities for immersing students in discussions that encourage their personal responses. When students feel their personal responses are nurtured and respected, they develop confidence to grow beyond status-quo thinking and to engage in critical perspectives on meaning making. These reflective practices from personal to critical are important ingredients for effective literacy learning.     

Self-Regulation May Not Be Enough: A Rejoinder to Horns-Marsh

This qualitative research study traces the motivations for teaching of 13 teacher candidates enrolled in an urban-based alternative certification program. After using a push–pull factor analysis, the data suggest that most participants left their previous careers due to financial shortcomings or work instability. As a result, these participants were also less attracted to teaching based on altruistic reasons when compared to those whose major motivation to teach occurred as part of a quest for personal fulfillment.     

The Color of Leadership

On July 1, 2000, I became the first black dean of Education in the almost 100-year existence of the formidable University of Pretoria, South Africa. This essay offers a set of meditations on being a black dean in a white university at the birth of a post-apartheid democracy. There are many sides to this narrative. It is a story of leading in a young democracy and about black leadership in a conservative white environment. It is about the emotions and politics of change. It is about engaging established patterns of certainty and control, and managing the inevitability of loss and change. It is about race, reconciliation, and restitution—all at the same time.     

A cross-cultural comparison of numeracy skills using a written and an interactive arithmetic test

This study applied two arithmetic tests, one written and one one computer-based interactive, to samples of primary school children from two populations, one suburban non-Aboriginal and one rural Aboriginal. The results from the written test were significantly (p?&;lt;?0.001) better for the non-Aboriginal children than for the Aboriginal children. This was not the case with the results from the computer-based interactive test. The study used Rasch-based methodology to reduce the results from the two tests to a common scale, to ascertain whether the Aboriginal children performed better (in relation to the non-Aboriginal children) in the computer-based than in the written test. The study found that this was the case, and concluded that the results from the computer-based test exhibited less cultural bias against the Aboriginal children than the written test.     

Cameos,supporting roles and stars: citation and reflection in the context of initial teacher education

Background: Reflection is well established as an important part of teacher education, but it is also the focus of critical enquiry. This means that reflection is of interest to those who wish to explore its use to produce ‘better’ teachers. It is also of interest to scholars who are interested in the wider implications of reflection, for example, in relation to power and social control. Academic articles are the primary medium through which ideas and practices are communicated. However, they can only contribute if they are accepted for publication on the basis of making a contribution to knowledge. To be seen in this way, a journal paper needs to cite earlier work to show understanding of this work and how this is being augmented.

Purpose: This paper aims to initiate an academic debate of citation practices which, it argues, should be based on an awareness of current practices and a willingness to share, and even change, them. To facilitate the debate and the development of a better understanding of citing and its implications, the paper offers a tripartite citation framework.

Sources of evidence: The extensive citation analysis literature is reviewed to provide a context for an examination of the variety of citation practices found in 24 papers, which all focus on initial teacher education and which cite the same critical paper (Fendler, L., Teacher reflection in a hall of mirrors: Historical influences and political reverberations. Educational Researcher, 32, no. 3: 16–25, 2003; doi: 10.3102/0013189X032003016).

Main argument: This paper argues that there is value in differentiating three categories of citation, labelled ‘cameo’, ‘supporting role’ and ‘star’. These categories do not make judgements about what counts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ referencing. Rather, they provide a way for authors to assess how they are citing and what the possible consequences may be. These can include an apparent lack of understanding not just of a cited paper but also of the wider literature. This means that citation that is not being carefully managed can undermine an argument.

Conclusions: This paper concludes that there is there is a need to initiate an academic debate about citation which is premised on the development of self-awareness about current practice and its consequences. Such a debate could bring about a number of benefits. It would encourage individual scholars to develop self-aware and ethical citation; it would also clarify current expectations about citation and enable academic communities to reflect on whether enquiry is well served by them.     

Chinese whispers? Investigating the consistency of the language of assessment between a distance education institution,its tutors and students

Ensuring the fairness of assessment is important in all areas of higher education. It is particularly so in distance education, where the communication around assessment and feedback is a principal method of supporting learning, and even more so when the students are at the entry point into higher education. This research explores the nature of the language used in explaining the purpose and process of assessment on an access programme at The Open University, UK, from the perspective of the module team, the tutors and the students. It takes a qualitative approach to examine the clarity and consistency of assessment tasks, assessment guidance and TMGs. Analysis revealed inconsistencies in the language used in relation to assessment, which has led to a revision of how assessment tasks and guidance are communicated to students and tutors.     

Two steps forward,one step back: Effect size reporting in gifted education research from 1995–2000

The APA Task Force on Statistical Inference recently recommended reporting effect sizes alongside results of statistical significance tests. The purpose of this article is to investigate effect size usage in gifted education research and to follow up on a similar investigation published by Plucker (1997). A content analysis of effect size reporting was conducted of articles published in the Journal for the Education of the Gifted, Roeper Review, and Gifted Child Quarterly from 1995–2000. Results of the present study were similar to the findings of Plucker (1997): No statistical difference in reporting was found across journals or across years, and a moderate difference was found between effect size reporting in univariate versus multivariate statistics. The benefits to gifted education research of understanding the relationship among sample size, effect size, and statistical power are discussed.     

School grades,school context and university degree performance: evidence from an elite Scottish institution

This paper investigates degree classification outcomes for students with SQA Higher qualifications at an elite Scottish university. Students are characterised according to a new indicator based on their secondary school’s academic performance relative to the national (Scottish) average. The results show that our school context indicator provides valuable information for interpreting school qualifications with respect to a student’s potential to benefit from their university studies. If school context is ignored, raw school grades alone may be an incomplete measure of academic ability and the probability of success at university.