'She just got me’: supporting care experienced young people negotiating relationships and identities at school

In this article we examine the complex relationship between care experience, mental health and exclusion from school and how young people (YP) negotiate these different experiences and identities. The study is a secondary analysis, informed by symbolic interactionist theory, of interviews conducted with 19 care experienced YP in Scotland. Not all of the YP were excluded and not all had a formal mental health diagnosis, as such our study design allows interrogation of the contexts and relationships which not only facilitate but also disrupt pathways to exclusion. It also allows reconsideration of assumptions of vulnerability which are often applied to care experienced YP. Our findings suggest that these YP are moving beyond ‘role playing’ the identities ascribed to them and actively seek out relationships which enable them to construct alternative identities.     

The impact of COVID-19 on A Level exams in England: Students as consumers

The recent global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic created significant challenges for society, not least for education. England went into lockdown in March 2020; following this, A Level exams were cancelled and the Department for Education announced that results were to be determined by teacher-assessed grades. This paper draws upon research conducted during this time with A Level students. It is based on a total of 53 Skype interviews with students who had their A Level exams cancelled, most of whom had ambitions to start university in September 2020. A number of striking findings emerged from the study. Students were well-informed about the changes to the A Level exam assessment and the impact structural inequalities were likely to have on assessed grades. White students and those from independent fee-paying schools were consistently more satisfied with the measures put in place to assess their grades compared to students from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds. However, all students—regardless of their background—identified patterns of unfairness which were based on structural inequalities. We conclude that these findings point to students adopting some of the attributes of the ‘student as consumer’, not by concentrating on choices associated with free market economies such as ‘good value’, but rather by identifying more ethical ‘values’ within education.     

Salience of Emotional Intelligence as a Core Characteristic of Being a Counselor

The authors investigated the association between emotional intelligence and counseling self‐efficacy. Participants were 140 counseling students and practicing counselors who completed the Emotional Judgment Inventory and the Counseling Self‐Estimate Inventory. Emotional intelligence differentiated counselors from noncounselors (Mdn d = .6650) but provided mixed results in differentiating counseling students and counselors. Moreover, the emotional intelligence factors Identifying Own Emotions, Expressing Emotions Adaptively, and Using Emotions in Problem Solving successfully predicted counseling self‐efficacy of both counseling students and practicing counselors (R = .537). Emotional intelligence may be another marker for individuals exploring professional counseling as a career and for improving students' counseling self‐efficacy.     

The Dearing Report: A Transatlantic View

The Dearing Report reflects the perspectives on higher education of the Government that appointed it, perspectives that are widely shared among the leaders of British institutions outside of academic life. It is of interest for that, rather than for its recommendations, which are fundamentally flawed. The Report does not show an intimate knowledge of the institutions about which it advises; it separates its discussions of finance from its comments on teaching and learning; it ignores the wide diversity of higher education institutions, subjects, and students in making its sweeping recommendations, and it does not recognise the limits of its own knowledge, nor make provision for the continuing improvement of the knowledge and understanding on which future policies for British higher education might be based. For these and other reasons, the Report is now one of the many problems facing British higher education rather than part of their solution.     

More than Bags of Words: Sentiment Analysis with Word Embeddings

ABSTRACT

Moving beyond the dominant bag-of-words approach to sentiment analysis we introduce an alternative procedure based on distributed word embeddings. The strength of word embeddings is the ability to capture similarities in word meaning. We use word embeddings as part of a supervised machine learning procedure which estimates levels of negativity in parliamentary speeches. The procedure’s accuracy is evaluated with crowdcoded training sentences; its external validity through a study of patterns of negativity in Austrian parliamentary speeches. The results show the potential of the word embeddings approach for sentiment analysis in the social sciences.     

Archives and Historians of Sport

Archives and the documents within them are at the heart of the practice of history and the occupational culture of historians. A majority of historical work has been characterized and defined by research in archives of varying kinds. Yet, the material within archives is both partial and political and using it is never straightforward. For historians of sport, the material available in archives can be especially limited but, with some careful reading between the lines, there is still much to learn from and interpret within traditional archives. This paper explores the different kinds of archives and archival material that historians of sport have used and the uses they have been and can be put to. Archives, however, are not static entities and the paper also discusses the impact and implication of digitization processes and programmes to popularize and legitimize traditional archives. Although sport has been seen as one of the ways of diversifying the content and audience of archives, the paper argues that the practical and interpretative challenges historians of sport face in archives are no different to those faced by other historians.