Why School Choice Reforms in Denmark Fail: the blocking power of the teacher union

This article investigates why school choice is exercised to a limited degree by parents despite major government initiatives to enhance diversity, competition and choice in the Danish education system. Denmark has had 20 years of centre‐right governments, promoting choice reforms perhaps even more vigorously than the other Nordic countries, yet school choice is seldom used – only 12% of parents choose a public school that differs from the one that is allocated to them. The literature on school choice in Denmark argues that this is primarily due to a general lack of parental interest because of the relatively high similarity across schools. In this article, we argue that the main reason is to be found in the politics of vested interests, namely municipalities’ persistent use of pupil assignment schemes supported by powerful teacher union branches at the local level.     

Undergraduate Performance of Advanced Level and Associate Degree Students: A Comparative Analysis

In the English-speaking Caribbean, the Advanced level qualification is the traditional and preferred route to accessing an education at the University of the West Indies (UWI). However, applicants with nontraditional qualifications—such as the associate degree qualification, teacher certificate, diploma, and mature student status (meaning one who is out of school for five years and over, is over the age of 25 years, has demonstrated academic potential, and has gained academically relevant knowledge and workplace experience)—are also considered for admission into the UWI degree programs. The objective of this study was to establish whether students with the traditional qualification, that is, two Advanced (A) level subjects, are better able to cope with the requirements of undergraduate study than those with an associate degree, which is one of the nontraditional qualifications. The study compared the performance of two groups of students in the University of the West Indies Faculty of Social Sciences three-year bachelor's degree program (University of the West Indies, 1996 University of the West Indies ( 1996 ). [UWI University of the West Indies: Faculty of Social Sciences Entrance List: 1996/97]. Unpublished raw data . [Google Scholar], 1997 University of the West Indies . ( 1997 ). [UWI University of the West Indies: Faculty of Social Sciences Entrance List: 1997/98] Unpublished raw data.  [Google Scholar], 1998 University of the West Indies . ( 1998 ). [UWI University of the West Indies: Faculty of Social Sciences Entrance List: 1998/99] Unpublished raw data.  [Google Scholar]). One group held the Barbados Community College (BCC) associate degree with a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 2.5 and the other group consisted of persons entering with two Advanced level subjects from colleges/secondary schools in Barbados. The study compared the performances of 1999, 2000, and 2001 UWI graduates to ascertain whether entry qualifications were related to the type of degree attained. The findings suggested that there is no significant relationship between qualifications at the time of entry and performance.     

Technology and Copyright in 1735: The Engraver's Act

Without printing technology there would be no need for copyright. Anglo-American copyright has its roots in early booksellers' practices that in 1710 were incorporated into the Statute of Anne. Several decades later in 1735 the provisions of this statute were copied in a new piece of legislation for the protection of engravings. However, “Hogarth's Act” protected only those engravings that involved original designs and thus, implicitly, made a distinction between artists and mere craftsmen. Soon, however, Parliament was persuaded to extend protection to all engravings. The history of Hogarth's Act foreshadowed the logic whereby a century later protection was extended first to special and then to ordinary photographs. Together these instances of copyright extension raise the question of to what degree similar patterns are at work in the continuing expansion of copyright today.     

Learning supportive communication through an adaptation of the board game Apples to Apples

People who receive supportive communication when they are distressed benefit from a series of advantageous outcomes. We designed the following activity based on the popular board game Apples to Apples to provide students with an experiential understanding of different types of social support—(1) emotional, (2) esteem, (3) network, (4) informational, (5) tangible, (6) celebratory, (7) social presence, and (8) nonverbal—as well as to illustrate the concepts of support matching and person centeredness.

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Relational Communication, Health Communication.

Objectives: To provide students with an experiential understanding of different types of social support: (1) emotional, (2) esteem, (3) network, (4) informational, (5) tangible, (6) celebratory, (7) social presence, and (8) nonverbal, as well as to illustrate the concepts of support matching and person centeredness.     

Nonword repetition with spectrally reduced speech: some developmental and clinical findings from pediatric cochlear implantation

Nonword repetition skills were examined in 24 pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users and 18 normal-hearing (NH) adult listeners listening through a CI simulator. Two separate groups of NH adult listeners assigned accuracy ratings to the nonword responses of the pediatric CI users and the NH adult speakers. Overall, the nonword repetitions of children using CIs were rated as more accurate than the nonword repetitions of the adults. The nonword repetition accuracy ratings from both groups of subjects were correlated with open- and closed-set word recognition scores and forward digit spans. Only the perceptual accuracy scores from pediatric CI users were correlated with measures of speech production accuracy. These results suggest that although the pediatric CI users had more experience and success in perceiving speech under degraded auditory conditions, developmental differences in their memory skills prevent them from performing as well on working memory tasks as mature listeners.     

“How do I remember when I got my dog?” The structure and development of children’s metamemory

Kreutzer et al.’s (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 40(1):1–60, 1975) metamemory interview has been widely used in children’s metamemory literature, yet the psychometric properties of the measure have yet to be reported, and the format and language of some subtests may pose problems for young children. Researchers often combine subtests with other tests purported to measure metamemory, yet there is little empirical data regarding how these subtests relate. It has been proposed that metamemory is comprised of distinct procedural and declarative components, but this has not been empirically tested in young children. Therefore, the two studies reported here aimed to adapt Kreutzer et al.’s interview to increase its developmental appropriateness, to examine the relationship between the interview subtests, to add subtests that purport to test procedural metamemory, and then to examine the factor structure of the resulting scores and investigate how metamemory changes with age across the elementary school years. The results suggest that the adapted versions of the subtests are generally less contaminated by language ability, especially for the younger children. Factor analysis indicated the presence of two declarative metamemory factors and one procedural metamemory factor. Both declarative factors followed a similar developmental trajectory, increasing steadily from early to late elementary school age, whereas procedural metamemory increased significantly between Grades 1 and 3 only.