The effectiveness and retention of teachers with prior career experience

As schools and districts seek to recruit teachers, individuals in non-teaching professions are an appealing possible pool. These potential teachers come with work experience and may have expertise that would serve them well in the classroom. While there has been substantial rhetoric assailing the virtues of teachers with prior professional experience, no research that we know of has assessed the effectiveness of these teachers in terms of student learning. This study uses data from New York City to assess the relative effectiveness and retention of career-switchers. It provides some evidence that these teachers are no more effective than other new teachers, and, in fact, they appear to be less effective at raising math scores of elementary and middle school students. There is little difference in overall transfer or leave rates between teachers with prior experience and other teachers, although career-switchers from college recommended programs do appear more likely to transfer schools.     

Bidding and prices for online art auctions: sofa art or investment

The article uses auction data collected from the eBay internet site to examine the effect of various parameters on number of bids and selling price of art. The article further uses an insight from the auction literature to gather evidence about whether art on eBay is purchased for consumption or investment purposes. The article argues that the evidence found of a positive relationship between the number of bids and the final price suggests that art sold on eBay is not, in general, investment art.      

Afterglow: Conceptions of record and evidence in archival discourse

In the last ten years, influential voices within and on the periphery of the record keeping community have succeeded in establishing the preservation of “evidence” as the governing purpose of contemporary archival theory and methods development. Afterglow offers a critique of the concept of evidence in archival discourse. Its main contention is that one can put records into evidence; one cannot set out to put evidence into records. The argument rests on the following assertions: (1) current discussions of evidence rest on a blindness to certain contradictions embedded in claims that record keeping principally involves evidence keeping, or “evidence management”; (2) a politics of temporality, under which an interplay of disciplinary knowledge claims and professional interest is discernible, helps to account for the contemporary rhetoric describing the relationship between “record” and “evidence”, and (3) the late-twentieth century legal, political, and cultural climate, along with the technological environment, explain the increasing prominence of “evidence” in these knowledge claims and professional ambitions. The essay concludes with recommendations for addressing these issues. Thanks go to Terry Cook, Visiting Professor in the Archival Studies Programme, Department of History, University of Manitoba, and co-editor of this series of essays, for his close reading and detailed comments on this essay. Particularly invaluable was his knowledge of historical and contemporary archival thinking on the notion of evidence.     

《托玛斯·莫尔--跨越时代的巨人》剧本及影片的教学与研究设想

<托玛斯·莫尔--跨越时代的巨人>是英国作家罗伯特·波特创作的一部舞台戏剧,并将该剧改变成了曾多次获奖的好莱坞电影剧本.笔者认为该剧非常适合在中国进行教学与研究.文章首先介绍了剧作家罗伯特·波特的生活和工作情况.波特曾在英格兰和美国编写过舞台戏剧和电影剧本.文章继而介绍了该剧的主人翁--英国的大学校长托玛斯·莫尔先生.莫尔以作家(著有古典著作<乌托邦>)和法官而闻名.因此,研究该剧有助于将他们介绍给中国的读者.然后文章说明理由,为什么该戏剧和电影对中国的教学与研究有作用.其中该戏剧和电影里的对话几乎是一样的,因而两种形式均可采用.此外,文章为读者介绍了在英汉两种语言中一些对研究者和教师而言可利用的实用信息.最后,该文作者以在中国的亲身教学经历提出了一些建议.     

Deaf Culture and Competing Discourses in a Residential School for the Deaf: “Can Do” Versus “Can't Do”

From an ethnographic case study of a state-funded residential school for the Deaf, the authors employed Critical Discourse Analysis to identify competing discourses in the talk of educators. These discourses are embedded in the historical oppression and labeling of deaf people as disabled and the development of Deaf culture as a counter-discourse. Implications include changing teacher/administrator hiring practices, improving professional development options, and distributing power between Deaf and hearing educators.     

Enhancing Memory Access for Less Skilled Readers

Less skilled readers’ comprehension often suffers because they have an impoverished representation of text in long-term memory; this, in turn, increases the difficulty of gaining access to backgrounded information necessary for maintaining coherence. The results of four experiments demonstrated that providing less skilled readers with additional explicit interconnections enhanced their text representations in memory and increased their ability to maintain coherence. Experiments 1a and 1b confirmed the finding that less skilled readers were not disrupted by global inconsistencies. Experiments 2a and 2b showed that text manipulations designed to enhance the accessibility of global information led to less skilled readers being disrupted by global inconsistencies.     

Developing a Growth Mindset through outdoor personal development: can an intervention underpinned by psychology increase the impact of an outdoor learning course for young people?

This study considers the impact of using a series of Mindset interventions during a five-day outdoor personal development (OPD) course. Self-efficacy, resilience and Mindset were measured pre course, post course and one month post course. It was hypothesised that both experimental and control groups would increase their self-efficacy and resilience, and that the Mindset (experimental) group would significantly increase beyond the levels of the control group, who took part in the standard OPD course. It was also predicted that the Mindset group would move towards a Growth Mindset, whereas the control group would not show any change in Mindset. Hypotheses were tested using a randomised, quasi-experimental method. Separate mixed analyses of variance were carried out for each dependent variable, followed by planned comparisons and post-hoc tests using a Bonferroni correction. Results showed that both groups increased self-efficacy over time; however, there was no further significance for the experimental group. Resilience only increased significantly in the experimental group while the control group made no significant gain, and students in the experimental group moved significantly towards a Growth Mindset while the control group did not.