Qualitätssicherung: Unde venis et quo vadis?

Externe Qualit?tssicherung hat sich in den letzten zehn Jahren von einem kaum beachteten Aspekt zu einem Leitmotiv der europ?ischen Hochschulreformen entwickelt. Nicht zuletzt durch die geplante Neuordnung der externen Qualit?tssicherung hat dieses Thema auch in ?sterreich an Bedeutung gewonnen. So wichtig verschiedene europ?ische Initiativen für diese Entwicklungen waren und sind, so existieren doch keine rechtsverbindlichen Normen auf supranationaler Ebene. Die EU kann aufgrund der Subsidiarit?t im Hochschulbereich ihre Positionen nur in Empfehlungen an die Mitgliedstaaten und in Berichten ausdrücken; innerhalb des zwischenstaatlichen Bologna-Prozesses einigten sich die Signatarstaaten freiwillig auf eine Reihe von Prinzipien zur Qualit?tssicherung sowie auf einen Katalog von Standards und Leitlinien (ESG), die die interne Qualit?tssicherung an den Hochschulen, die externe Qualit?tssicherung durch Agenturen sowie die Meta-Qualit?tssicherung der Agenturen betreffen. Der Beitrag schildert die verschiedenen EU- und Bologna-Initiativen und skizziert Fragestellungen, die sich aus den bisherigen Entwicklungen für Qualit?tssicherung auf der europ?ischen und nationalen Ebene ergeben.     

Included or excluded? The dual influences of the organisational field and organisational practices on new female academics

A number of measures have been taken by the society to ensure gender equality in higher education. Nevertheless, women still face great difficulties when pursuing an academic career. Our aim is to increase the understanding of how the society, conceptualised as the organisational field, interacts with organisational factors and personal actions as women try to establish themselves within academia. We followed a group of female PhD students and their struggle to graduate at a Swedish, traditionally male‐dominated, university department. The paper analyses how actors and regulations in the society interact with the department’s gendered structures and practices. Three processes that influenced the women’s career opportunities have been identified – a process of integration, liberation and legitimatisation. We also show that women can get accepted and realise their short‐term objective, based on support from the society, while not necessarily being included by the department in a longer‐term perspective.     

Swedish PE teachers struggle with assessment in a criterion-referenced grading system

In the field of education, the international trend is to turn to criterion-referenced grading in the hope of achieving accountable and consistent grades. Despite a national criterion-referenced grading system emphasising knowledge as the only base for grading, Swedish physical education (PE) grades have been shown to value non-knowledge factors, such as students’ characteristics and behaviour. In 2011, a new national curriculum was implemented which attempts to deal with the problem by prescribing specific knowledge requirements with a clear progression as the only basis for different grades. The aim of the present study is to explore the impact of the new knowledge requirements on what teachers consider important when assigning grades. It is also to discuss what non-knowledge-related aspects (if any) teachers continue to look for and why these seem to remain resilient to the reform. The Repertory Grid technique was employed to interview the teachers before (2009) and after the implementation (2013). During the interviews, the grading of 45 students was discussed, which generated 125 constructs. After the implementation, there was a near doubling of knowledge constructs, half as many motivation constructs and an almost total elimination of constructs based on confidence and social skills. While motivational factors were still considered valuable for the award of a higher grade, clear criteria seemed to be important, but too limited for the teachers’ needs. In order to understand the persistence of motivational factors, we discuss the results in relation to Bernstein’s interrelated message systems of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. We emphasise the need to discuss how valid grades can be achieved and, at the same time, give value to the regulative discourse in order to realise the overarching national goals of values and norms in education and PE.     

Performing cleanliness: clean milk competitions in Britain,c.1920–1940

The question of how best to secure a healthy, disease-free milk supply was one of the most contentious public health issues in interwar Britain. Commentators identified improper and unhygienic milking practices as just one area of the dairy industry in desperate need of reform. In the 1920s a loose partnership of agricultural scientists and educators, civil servants, and dairy businesses turned to competition as a means by which to convince milkers as to the benefits of “scientific dairying”. Clean milk competitions came to simultaneously educate and discipline British dairy workers by working to redefine milking skill with the help of the laboratory sciences. However, the venture was a contentious one, wherein competition participants would often resist the meanings and methods that were coming to be employed in the quest for “clean milk”.     

Proxy-produced ethnographic work: what are the problems,issues, and dilemmas arising from proxy-ethnography?

This article addresses the implications of researcher-student cooperation in the production of empirical material. For the student to replace the experienced researcher and work under the researcher’s supervision, we call such work proxy-produced ethnographic work. Although there are clear advantages, the specific relations and positions arising from such a set-up between the teacher/researcher and the proxy ethnographer/student are found to have implications for the ethnographies produced. This article’s main focus is to show how these relations and positions have shifted the focus of the ethnographic work and in some way have distorted the ethnographies in certain ways. It is shown how the participating researchers have distinctive, incorporated dispositions with which they pre-consciously participate in an implicit and subtle relation that can make it easy to overlook the distortions during the research process. These ethnographic distortions are generated within a framework drawn primarily on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.     

We Could be Heroes

Conor P. McLaughlin and Christopher B. Newman challenge us to use our power to create new possibilities for equity on our campuses.     

Three strikes and you’re out: culture,facilities, and participation among LGBTQ youth in sports

ABSTRACT

School-based sports and physical education play an important role in the development of youth (Jones, Edwards, et al., 2017), but participation in athletics is unequal for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth compared to their straight/cisgender peers [Greenspan, S. B., Griffith, C., & Murtagh, E. F. (2017). LGBTQ youths’ school athletic experiences: A 40-year content analysis in nine flagship journals. Journal of LGBT Issues in Counseling, 11(3), 190–200]. Sport cultures, generally, recreate dynamics of exclusion for marginalized youth. However, there are opportunities to transform these spaces into more inclusive and positive environments to support positive growth for all young people [Newman, T., Alvarez, A., & Kim, M. (2017). An experiential approach to sport-based positive youth development. Journal of Experiential Education, 40(3), 308–322]. Our study uses a data set of adolescents, collected as part of a community-based participatory action research project led by high school students in southeast Michigan, USA. Respondents reported their sexual and gender identities, as well as experiences in youth sport, as well as safety using sex-segregated facilities (i.e., bathrooms and locker-rooms). Using mediation models based on linear regression, we found evidence that LGBQ high school students play sports at a significantly lower rate compared to straight students, and among those who play sports, LGBTQ respondents felt significantly less safe compared to straight and cisgender students. Opposite to the LGBQ and trans youth in this study, straight/cisgender youth also reported feeling safer using all facilities. The mediation models suggest that these inequalities help to explain disparities in rates of sports participation and feelings of safety while participating. These findings have important implications for policy, practice, and future research.     

Conducting Rigorous Survey Research in the Study of School-Based Consultation

The evidence base for school-based consultation practice and training is limited by a small number of studies, possibly due to unique challenges in researching consultation. For example, there are myriad variables to measure and idiosyncratic cultural and contextual factors to account for when investigating what works, for whom, and in what circumstances. Survey methodology offers one means for conducting consultation research. This article proposes a process for rigorous survey research in school-based consultation training and practice, which addresses some potential concerns regarding survey research. Specifically, issues of survey development, survey validation, sampling, and data collection are addressed. These processes are illustrated through the design and administration of an online survey of 262 early career school psychologists; preliminary data analyses suggested strong scale reliability, minimal item response bias, and population representativeness. Recommendations for future consultation survey research are provided.