Sustaining education for sustainability in turbulent times

A study of two schools in northern Australia demonstrated the impact on Education for Sustainability (EfS) initiatives of a disruptive policy environment set in motion by neoliberal reforms focused on standards, accountability, and international competitiveness. In one of the schools, a culture characterized by trust and an emphasis on cultivating teacher and student strengths and interests contributed to the resilience of these initiatives in the face of outside pressures. In the other, administrators preoccupied with the need to implement state mandates with fidelity failed to nurture and develop a collection of remarkable EfS projects and activities.     

Teaching Quality Across School Settings

Districts are increasingly making personnel decisions based on teachers’ impact on student-achievement gains and classroom observations. In some schools, however, a teacher’s practices and their students’ achievement may reflect not just individual but collaborative efforts. In other settings, teachers’ instruction benefits less from the insights and support of their colleagues. This article analyzes multiple measures of teacher and teaching quality for 24 language arts teachers in New York City who teach in different types of school environments. Teachers in different value-added quartiles were observed and scored using two protocols, PLATO and CLASS. Schools were categorized as more and less functional using Department of Education environment grades. To compare the practices of higher and lower value-added teachers in more and less functional schools, we conduct MANOVAs of observation scores and use qualitative coding of field notes. We find value-added measures and observation protocols provide confirmatory information in less functional schools but provide contradictory information about teacher quality in more functional schools. Implications for teacher education, policy, and future research are discussed.     

Teaching Trump: Student Recommendations to Ensure Safe Discussions in a Time of Polarized Political Divide

ABSTRACT

This article includes findings from a mixed method survey at a large, public midwestern university following the election of Donald J. Trump as the president of the United States. It examines student perceptions about effective engagement in political discourse within social work classes. Survey questions urged students to suggest how instructors might facilitate this dialogue fairly in the classroom given the passionate emotions and differing viewpoints surrounding the election, while acknowledging and educating about values espoused by the profession. Findings from this study illustrate the challenges that students face in having these conversations and outline their recommendations to social work educators for facilitating safe, sensitive, and inclusive classroom discussion about politics.     

Identifying sex differences in reading disability

The issue of sex differences in reading disability has been of recent interest in relation to sex ratios in families with reading disabled children and to possible sex biases in referred populations. Data from a study of 570 twins are used to develop alternative definitions of reading disability that vary in the manner to which sex effects are taken into account. These definitions include discrepancies between reading quotients and IQ, the use of the regression of reading onto IQ and chronological age/reading age differences. In each case the reading and spelling disability was defined either separately for the sexes or based upon the data for the sexes combined and with and without an IQ>90 exclusion criterion. The consequences of using the alternative definitions for prevalence, sex ratio and heritability are examined. The results demonstrate that the characteristics of reading disabled children vary with the way disability is defined. The excess of males seems to be a robust finding. Definitions that take into account differences in mean score for males and females reduce but do not eradicate the sex ratio. From the genetic analysis, there is no support for the suggestion that the genetic effect on reading is greater for females than males. It is concluded that the use of regression based procedures for identifying reading disability is desirable but that at present there is insufficient evidence to justify the adoption of separate regression procedures for the two sexes.     

Indigenous graduate research students in Australia: a critical review of the research

Over the last decade, there has been a steady increase in the number of Indigenous graduate research students in Australia, yet research and pedagogy has not kept pace with changes underway in the sector. From an extensive search of literature published between 2000 and 2017, 15 papers (representing 10 research projects conducted by seven teams or authors) were identified that addressed Indigenous graduate research student experience. Overall, the literature tends to focus on identifying barriers to completion, noting in particular the impact of financial difficulties, social isolation and racism. A research degree is a key site for the assertion and legitimation of Indigenous knowledges, and it is here that Indigenous students are navigating tensions between legitimated disciplinary practices of the centre and the peripheral status of Indigenous knowledges. We, therefore, adopt Herbert's ‘centre–periphery’ model to interpret the research, arguing that this framework explains the focus on barriers, the neglect of pedagogy centred on academic excellence and student strengths, and research relationships between students and Indigenous communities. Our review identifies the need for a systematic research agenda specifically focused on Indigenous student success at the graduate research level, and looking internationally in order to assess the performance and strategies of Australian higher education providers in comparison to international institutions meeting the aims of First Nations research communities. This approach, we suggest, should move beyond an analysis of the nature of enablers and barriers to focus on Indigenous Higher Degree by Research success.     

Predicting international students’ academic success... may not always be enough: Assessing Turkey’s Foreign Study Scholarship Program

In 1993, Turkey’s Higher Education Council (YOK) launched a program to sponsor thousands of students for graduate study abroad, in the hopes of building up a base of highly qualified, foreign educated faculty for 24 newly established universities nationwide. With an incoming new YOK administration in 1995, dramatic changes were made in the program’s selection procedures. One of the key elements of these changes was the inclusion of a high foreign language proficiency requirement, which served both to meet certain ideological goals of the new administration as well as presuming to reduce the high degree of student failure abroad. In addition to assessing the overall success of the scholarship program in light of the changes made, this study provides another look at the connection between language proficiency and academic success, with both qualitative and quantitative data collected from 23 ‘YOK scholars’. Although finding a positive relation between language proficiency and academic success, the study suggests that rather than having solved the scholarship program’s problems by imposing high language proficiency requirements, the new YOK administration actually reduced even further the program’s ability to successfully supply faculty to the new universities. Recommendations are made for the Turkish and similar foreign study programs.     

Genetic etiology of spelling deficits in the Colorado and London twin studies of reading disability

The basic multiple regression model for the analysis of selected twin data (DeFries and Fulker 1985, 1988) was fitted to spelling data from 100 pairs of MZ twins and 71 pairs of same-sex DZ twins tested in the Colorado Reading Project (DeFries, Olson, Pennington and Smith 1991), and to data from 12 pairs of MZ twins and 15 pairs of same-sex DZ twins tested in the London twin study of reading disability (Stevenson, Graham, Fredman and McLoughlin 1984, 1987). Estimates of h _g ² obtained from analyses of these data suggest that about 60% of the deficit of probands is due to heritable influences in both samples. When a regression model was fitted separately to data from males and females in the combined Colorado and London samples, resulting estimates of h _g ² were 0.66±0.18 and 0.56±0.19, respectively, a nonsignificant difference. Collaborative analyses of data from additional twin studies of reading disability would facilitate more rigorous tests of hypotheses of differential genetic etiology as a function of group membership.