Looking for patterns in OfStEd judgements about primary pupil achievement in design and technology

Respective English governments have placed considerable faith, political weight and not inconsiderable sums of money in a system of school inspection organised and led by the Office for Standards in Education (OfStEd). This article considers a so-called foundation subject, design and technology, and the extent to which we might meaningfully use OfStEd school and annual national subject summary reports over time to establish a clear picture about pupil achievement in design and technology. Change over time is almost certainly occurring but because of terminology and variation in information reported no clear picture emerges. If national school inspection is to be a vehicle for improving overall pupil achievement in subjects such as design and technology other approaches may be necessary.     

Migrating metaphors: the globalization of flexibility in policy

Trends towards greater flexibility are to be found in the reform of post-school education and training around the globe. They are part of a wider profile of changes to workplaces and labour relations within which greater flexibility is pursued. This paper charts our journey, through which we have sought to locate flexibility as a globalizing and globalized policy metaphor. Drawing on recent policy texts, we illustrate the multiple meanings of flexibility. The latter is explored within the growing debates about the globalization of education policies and the metaphors which have been deployed to frame these practices. Finally, we outline the role that metaphors have in policy texts and the readings to which they are subject. We argue for metaphorical readings of the texts of flexibility and globalization as a way of countering attempts to inscribe certain meanings and in order to sustain policy openings.     

Constructing a synthetic‐analytic framework for precocious writing

Conceptual models of giftedness that cannot explain the full spectrum of depicted behaviors are incomplete. The same is true for frameworks that purport to analyze those behaviors. Within giftedness, extraordinary and rare talents afford us the opportunity to extend and modify models and frameworks. This article presents an analysis of the first 2 years of writing of a precocious child whose prolific language, complex sentence structures, and sophisticated conceptual development belie his age. Attempts to conduct comparative analyses found that existing frameworks could not explain the data's holistic and thematic tones. This led to the construction of a new synthetic‐analytic framework for precocious writing that more fully depicts the known spectrum of writing elements exhibited by highly gifted children.     

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION NEEDS ASSESSMENT OF OLDER AMERICANS: METHODOLOGY AND SOME FINDINGS

This study reports on the interest of a sample of senior citizens (55 years and over) in enrolling in different types of vocational courses and their overall educational needs in relation to sex, race, educational attainment, and preference for course location. Vocational training and placement opportunities for older persons can mean outreach services, support services, and accessible institutional and community‐based programs. The research findings could lead, not only to the development of an approach to providing vocational education opportunities, but also to ways of encouraging greater use of older adults as teacher aides and resource persons in the classroom.     

The role of persuasive research in educational progress

This article describes how scaffolded instruction during whole-class mathematics lessons can provide the knowledge, skills, and supportive context for developing students' self-regulatory processes. In examining classroom interactions through discourse analysis, these qualitative methods reflect a theoretical change from viewing self-regulation as an individual process to that of a social process. This article illustrates how studying instructional scaffolding through the analyses of instructional discourse helps further the understanding of how self-regulated learning develops and is realized in mathematics classrooms. Qualitative methods, such as discourse analyses, and their underlying theoretical frameworks have great potential to help "unlock" theories of learning, motivation, and self-regulation through exploring the reciprocity of teaching and learning in classrooms.     

Universities in Europe: North American Perspectives on European Historiography

This 2005 conference dialogue does not attempt to review the formidable A History of the University in Europe, 1800–1945 edited by Walter Rüegg. But it does use this magnificent piece of scholarship to open a discussion of the scholarship on the university, worldwide. The precipitating event was a book session at the Social Science History Convention in Portland, Oregon (2005). The participants are scholars of the higher education discourse and sought to reflect upon the conceptual patterns that have produced our higher education canon. They have found both foundational bedrock and time‐bound, limited assumptions about the ‘university’ in this volume’s 16 major essays. The central issue of this critique addresses the methodological problem of how another discourse, say, American higher education, might conceive a different version of the history of the university. In the course of the discussion the participants try to lay out the conceptual guidelines for a new history of higher education.     

Examining the criminal justice and criminological paradigms: An analysis of ACJS and ASC members

Many authors have noted the existence of dual paradigms operating in crimerelated education, including those who generally study crime as a social phenomenon (criminologists) and those concerned with agencies that have been designed to deal with crime (criminal justicians). In an effort to determine the exten of convergence and divergence between these groups, we examine the characteristics of members of their respective professional associations, the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Using bivariate statistics and discriminant function analysis, we find a number of expected divergences between these groups. In addition, however, we provide a detailed examination of recent convergences suggesting the evolution of a new paradigm, one which incorporates salient features of both criminology and criminal justice.     

Criminology and Criminal Justice Doctoral Programs in 2012–2013: Transformation of a Male-Dominated Arena

This study provides a cross-sectional portrait of female scholars working as tenure-track faculty members at institutions offering doctoral degrees in criminology and/or criminal justice. Relying primarily upon departmental websites as an initial source of information, it was determined that the 35 programs were comprised of 198 (35.9%) female and 353 (64.1%) male tenure-track faculty members. Despite the historical male domination of criminal justice professions as well as higher education instructional roles, this study finds that females represent an increasingly visible and instrumental component of doctoral education within the discipline. Females comprised at least 50% of faculty members within seven doctoral programs, and seven programs had female administrators. Most importantly, a majority of the hires over the previous 12?years were female. Assuming this trend continues, a once male-dominated academic discipline will soon find itself in the midst of unprecedented change.     

A SYSTEMS MODEL FOR CURRICULUM DECISION MAKING

Abstract

Two types of community colleges are described, one serving as a miniuniversity and the other as an opportunity center. The academic progress of 750 students from four community colleges, two classified as miniuniversities and two as opportunity centers, was compared in terms of (a) persistence, and (b) success after transferring to a senior institution. Institutions classified as opportunity centers were found to graduate a greater proportion of their students than did the miniuniversities. Academic performance after transferring to a senior institution was equivalent for students graduating from either type of institution. It is concluded that large numbers of community college students are unnecessarily discouraged and thereby deterred from higher education by community colleges that operate as miniuniversities and that the needs of most community college students are better served by the opportunity center.     

Increasing the Reading Achievement of At-Risk Children Through Direct Instruction: Evaluation of the Rodeo Institute for Teacher Excellence (RITE)

This study compared the occupational aspirations of beginning high school students by gender and ethnicity, and examined the relationship between the educational demands of the occupations desired by students and their academic performance before and after entering high school. Desired occupations were obtained from 662 entering 9th-grade students in a large urban district, and linked to General Educational Demand ratings and to student grades. Young women were more likely than young men to aspire to professional occupations and to occupations requiring more education. The educational demands associated with students' aspirations accounted for about 3% of variance in grades. Educational demands of desired jobs were highest across all groups for Latina young women and lowest for Latino young men. Forty-one percent of African American young men aspired to be professional athletes, but this aspiration was not associated with grade point average before or after entering high school.