Stalking the Micro‐politics of Schools in Pursuit of a Realistic Research Agenda

The last decade has witnessed a period of endemic reform within educational systems and schools. In particular, changes have been implemented that may entail different configurations of decision‐making at the site level with significant reverberations for the workplace environment of the school. This paper suggests that because of the ubiquity of reform, rich opportunities have been provided for researching educational change. Nevertheless, in order to develop a holistic understanding of the effect of change in schools a perspective is required that takes Into account the socio‐political and cultural context of an organisation. For this purpose, the micro‐political perspective may be able to convey a more realistic depiction organisational behaviour than conventional theory has been able to offer. Therefore, this paper elucidates the major ideas of some prominent micro‐political theorists and makes recommendations for future research into aspects of life in schools. It is hoped that the paper may contribute to a revival of the micro‐political perspective in conducting educational research.     

The irrationality of rationalized program development

Conclusions The core of our argument rests in the nature of the relationship between regional and provincial educational authorities and local schools/communities. In the present situation the relationship is ambiguous. On one hand, the province and the boards issue guidelines and demand that local schools develop programs in conformity with them. At the same time the schools are urged to be innovative and to develop programs to meet local needs. Although the drafters of guidelines apparently see no contradiction between these two directives, we, and many practitioners we have talked with, do.It is our position that the local school/community should be primarily accountable to the community it serves for developing learning environments that fairly reflect the community's educational values, expectations, and priorities. The school should be accountable to central authorities for proper expenditure of monies and for observing basic standards of honesty and fair play in its operations. Finally we wish to stress again the importance of providing help rather than advice to developing programs. Advice coming from a source that in the recent past was primarily a legislative and policing agency cannot help but be construed by school practitioners as a thinly disguised directive. Even if this were not the case, advice is of limited value to people who lack the resources and technical expertise to implement their educational ideas. Real help, in the form of needed resources, technical services, and expert consultation, might inject a new spirit of goodwill and cooperation into what has been at best a guarded relationship between the schools and central educational authorities.OISE     

From seeing and hearing to remembering: A conception of the instructional process

This article presents a conceptual schema of the instructional process which is intended to make a number of relevant findings from research more readily understood and applied by designers of instruction and instructional materials. It is based on severll summary sources of research-based findings and principles from the perception, memory, and concept formation literature. The basic conception is that learning is the product of an ongoing interactive process between learner and environment, and that instruction is a temporary and purposeful intervention in that process, the aim of which is the optimization of the learner-environment interaction.The schema is organized around relevant characteristics of the learner, i.e., four basic learner requirements (stimulation, order, strategy, and meaning). These basic learner requirements are subdivided into twenty limitations, particularities and qualities of the human information processing systems. The resulting picture of the human learner provides the basis for describing what the other part of the interaction — the instructional environment — should be like in order to provide an optimum fit between learner and environment. The schema subsumes and interrelates many of the research-based principles found in the literature and hence may make them more memorable and usable.1 Because of the generality of research findings referred to in this schema, few specific references will be given. However, the principles on which the schema is based are all properly credited in the sources noted earlier, e.g. Fleming and Levie (1978).This article is based on a paper presented at the IWAPP Festival 1980, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, January 1980.Note     

The role of the content and structure of curriculum material in cognition

Summary and Conclusion What has been reported here is an objective, pre-trial formative evaluation of the core of an ASEP unit designed to show its potential in terms of themes and structure, a revision on the basis cognitive-field learning theory of those sections of the core shown by the analysis to be possibly deficient, and an ongoing field-trial of the original and revised cores. The field-trial results, though only tentative, have demonstrated the use of the Carss (1973) content analysis technique as it may be applied to formative curriculum evaluation since it supplies “... the diagnostic analysis which is at the heart of formative evaluation” (Baumgart; 1972:9). The technique produces, prior to field-trials, usable information with respect to the potential inherant in the text, showing for example where structure is poor or where there is irrelevant or too much information. The technique also allows feedback from field-trials to be used more constructively since general statements or questions, hitherto of little use in giving writers directions for revision, can be linked to themes, the content and distribution of which are available. The use of this technique for the analysis of the manifest content of communication-written or verbal—seems unlimited. The analysis of the teacher and pupils verbal communications in parallel with the textual analysis, and the analysis of “expert” ideas on “what is science?” to obtain the “essence” of science are but two. The technique itself needs further refinement and this refinement and possible uses offer an interesting challenge for future research.     

Hybrid index maintenance for contiguous inverted lists

Index maintenance strategies employed by dynamic text retrieval systems based on inverted files can be divided into two categories: merge-based and in-place update strategies. Within each category, individual update policies can be distinguished based on whether they store their on-disk posting lists in a contiguous or in a discontiguous fashion. Contiguous inverted lists, in general, lead to higher query performance, by minimizing the disk seek overhead at query time, while discontiguous inverted lists lead to higher update performance, requiring less effort during index maintenance operations. In this paper, we focus on retrieval systems with high query load, where the on-disk posting lists have to be stored in a contiguous fashion at all times. We discuss a combination of re-merge and in-place index update, called Hybrid Immediate Merge. The method performs strictly better than the re-merge baseline policy used in our experiments, as it leads to the same query performance, but substantially better update performance. The actual time savings achievable depend on the size of the text collection being indexed; a larger collection results in greater savings. In our experiments, variations of Hybrid Immediate Merge were able to reduce the total index update overhead by up to 73% compared to the re-merge baseline.

Computational auditory scene analysis: listening to several things at once

The problem of distinguishing particular sounds, such as conversation, against a background of irrelevant noise is a matter of common experience. Psychologists have studied it for some 40 years, but is is only comparatively recently that computer modelling of the phenomenon has been attempted. This article reviews progress made, possible practical applications, and prospects for the future.