Departmentalized,Self-Contained,or Somewhere in Between: Understanding Elementary Grade-Level Organizational Decision-Making

Recent trends indicate a move away from self-contained classrooms and toward content-focused departmentalization in elementary schools. This study takes a snapshot of the existing organizational structures used in elementary schools in one district and explores administrators’ beliefs and practices regarding this phenomenon. Our findings suggest administrators base their decisions to organize grade levels on various factors, including their own experiences, contextual dynamics, and personal perceptions of outcomes for students and teachers.     

Supporting Learners' Agentic Engagement With Feedback: A Systematic Review and a Taxonomy of Recipience Processes

Much has been written in the educational psychology literature about effective feedback and how to deliver it. However, it is equally important to understand how learners actively receive, engage with, and implement feedback. This article reports a systematic review of the research evidence pertaining to this issue. Through an analysis of 195 outputs published between 1985 and early 2014, we identified various factors that have been proposed to influence the likelihood of feedback being used. Furthermore, we identified diverse interventions with the common aim of supporting and promoting learners' agentic engagement with feedback processes. We outline the various components used in these interventions, and the reports of their successes and limitations. Moreover we propose a novel taxonomy of four recipience processes targeted by these interventions. This review and taxonomy provide a theoretical basis for conceptualizing learners' responsibility within feedback dialogues and for guiding the strategic design and evaluation of interventions.     

Health informatics program design and outcomes: Learning from an early offering at a mid-level university

Curriculum development is particularly challenging in computing-related disciplines as the computing industry changes more quickly than most. As information technology degrees have become relatively pervasive, some institutions that offer information systems degrees have recognized a need to develop specialist studies in information systems. This detailed case study shows the forces related to a successful implementation of new Health Informatics degrees. The case describes both an unsuccessful and then a successful attempt at essentially the same curriculum development. Although the case includes some local political factors, these represent typical considerations that a curriculum developer is likely to encounter.     

CONSTRUCTING PUBLIC SCHOOLING TODAY: DERISION,MULTICULTURALISM, NATIONALISM

In this article, Walter Parker brings structure and agency to the foreground of the current tumult of public schooling in the United States. He focuses on three structures that are serving as rules and resources for creative agency. These are a discourse of derision about failing schools, a broad mobilization of multiculturalism, and an enduring nationalism. Drawing on Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, Parker examines how these discourses figure in redefining school reform, redefining school curricula, and requiring schools once again to serve nationalistic purposes.     

Reconceptualising the curriculum: from commodification to transformation

This article inveighs against the prevalent commodified discourse in Higher Education especially as it impacts on curriculum planning, quality assurance and learner typologies. It expresses a concern that educational research, in offering models drawn, but now divorced from, practice, may contribute to this negative impact. As an example, a polarised model distinguishing features of ‘traditional’ from ‘emerging’ curricula is criticised as contributing to this commodification; as diminishing the status of university teachers, as offering an instrument to reductive quality assurance systems and as militating against the disciplines operating as communities of practice. In contradistinction to this dichotomizing model, but extrapolating from the same article, a ‘both/and’ model outlining elements of process- and discipline community-based ‘transformational curricula’ is offered. It is perhaps impossible to write about the evils of externalised models and reductively abstract discourse without contribut ing to that very effect. The article therefore ends with two voices which are not those of educational researchers.