The development of national standards for adult educators in Namibia

Since gaining independence from South Africa in 1990, Namibia has placed considerable emphasis on education, including adult learning. As a means of improving the quality of adult learning, the Namibian Ministry of Education commissioned the development of national standards in 2010 to express competency requirements for adult educators. Particular attention was paid to the views of adult learners who participated through thirty focus groups. The participatory process revealed that the work of an adult educator is more complex and demanding than had previously been appreciated. The required competencies were categorised under four headings: (1) Knowledge as an adult educator, (2) Practice as an adult educator, (3) Relationships as an adult educator and (4) Ethics and professionalism as an adult educator. The Namibia Qualifications Authority, acting under its legislative mandate of setting occupational standards for occupations, jobs, posts and positions, approved the national standards in 2011.     

Discontinuities in university student experiences of learning through discussions

This article reports on research into the student experience of learning through discussions in a third‐year undergraduate engineering subject. Information engineering students studying e‐commerce were required to engage in face‐to‐face and online discussions as a key aspect of their learning experience. This study investigates the quality of the experience of learning through those discussions using quantitative methodologies from Student Learning Research. Analyses of student ratings on the closed‐ended questionnaires identify qualitatively different approaches to learning through discussions, both in face‐to‐face contexts and online. Relationships are found among the variation in the quality of these approaches and how students perceive issues such as workload, what they thought they were learning through discussions and performance. Implications arising from these results identify different suggestions for teaching students to discuss successfully in different contexts.     

Democracy,Justice, and School Closures

Over the past few decades, school closure has emerged as a key strategy for education reform. Districts across the country have moved to close schools deemed to be chronically underperforming by official metrics as way to promote academic achievement. More recently, a sizeable body of literature has emerged raising significant questions about the wisdom of school closures, with some scholars and activists criticizing school closures as an injustice. In this article, Ellis Reid takes seriously the claim that the adoption of school closures as a reform strategy is unjust. Drawing on work in democratic theory, Reid argues that the widespread embrace of school closures to "turn around" schools thought to be failing rests in part on racially stigmatizing ideas about schools serving Black and Latinx students and the communities in which these schools are embedded. Importantly, racial stigmatization is not an isolated problem but rather points toward a broader crisis in American democracy. Ultimately, Reid argues that responding to this crisis demands that we take seriously the arguments advanced by the critics of school closures and adopt a broader view of the value of a school.     

Early Literacy Predictors and Second-Grade Outcomes in Children Who Are Hard of Hearing

This study contrasted the early literacy outcomes of children who are hard of hearing (CHH) with children with normal hearing (CNH). At age 5, prereading skills of oral language, phonological processing, and print knowledge were examined in CHH (N = 180) and CNH (N = 80). The CHH had poorer oral language and phonological processing abilities than the CNH but comparable knowledge of print. At age 8, measures of word reading, and reading comprehension yielded no differences between CHH (N = 108) and CNH (N = 62) except for reading comprehension for the moderately severe CHH. Reading achievement in CHH was found to exceed predictions based on prereading performance. This resilience was associated with gains in oral language during the early school years.     

The heterogeneity of new entrants and the selectivity of higher education institutions: Some results using data from the CHEERS project

This paper attempts to test whether there stillexist differences in selectivity between highereducation institutions. Data from the CHEERS(Careers after Higher Education: a EuropeanResearch Survey) project enables us to describethe differences in institutional selectivity ineach country across different fields. We askthe question: how selective are institutionstoday, particularly in the case of Europe andJapan?. In order to describe the selectivity ofhigher education institutions for each field ineach country, we use the entry grade given byeach graduate in the CHEERS data. Despite thedifferences in the grading references in thedifferent countries, these data can be used toassess the heterogeneity of the selectivity ofeach institution within the fields in eachcountry. To do so, we computed a mean for eachinstitution/department (using all graduatesfrom each institution in the sample). We thencomputed a mean for all the institutions/departmentsand the dispersion coefficient(which was multiplied by a hundred). Countrieswith a low dispersion coefficient appear to behomogeneous in terms of selection across thedifferent institutions, whereas those with ahigh one have institutions clearly moreselective than others. Using the example ofBusiness studies, it can be shown that theselection process of higher educationinstitutions is more or less heterogeneousaccording to countries. Differences betweentypes of institution also explain thedifferences in selectivity between institutionsin some countries but not in others.     

College student learning from televised versus conventional classroom lectures: A controlled experiment

In a controlled experiment, students in two sections of introductory sociology were exposed either to conventional classroom lectures or to the same lectures broadcast live in an adjacent room on a television monitor. Except for the first round of six lectures, when technical problems appeared to have lowered test performance by the experimental groups, learning under the two lecturing modes was statistically equivalent. Self-reported class attendance, also, seemed to have been unaffected by lecturing modes. This study confirms the general pattern of results from a number of prior, albeit less rigorously designed, studies of live vs. televised lecture courses.     

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