Classroom groups in theory and practice

Summary

Children hold a wide range of ideas about what science is, but boys tend to have very stereotyped ideas about scientists, exclusively depicting them as male and often seeing in science something weird or magical — this is the antithesis of what science claims to be, and yet it is easy to see how the ideas can become fused or confused. Girls in this study did not see science as an exclusively male preserve and are more likely to view science in a ‘realistic’ way than are boys. In interviews with the teachers of these children (all women) awareness of the need to avoid gender stereotyping was expressed. This study shows that among their girl pupils at least, their attempts are beginning to bear fruit.     

LINK SCHOOLS: AN EVALUATION OF AN INNOVATORY SCHEME IN TEACHER EDUCATION

Teacher education is facing major new challenges. In this context the concept of partnership between LEAs, schools and the training institutions has assumed key importance. This paper outlines an in‐novatory scheme of professional partnership with a BEd primary degree programme. The Westminster Primary Link Schools Scheme is developmental, responsive to the changing nature of education, built upon existing good practice in initial and in‐service education and self‐evaluatory. The evaluation of the first year of the scheme is described. Guiding principles, relevant to the development of partnership schemes, are discussed and issues relevant to evaluations of this type are explored     

Developing a Collegial Approach to Initial Teacher Education: the Westminster B.Ed Primary Internship Project

This paper describes Hong Kong research into peer tutored instruction in reading. Tutors were trained to use Paired Reading, a technique appropriate for use across a range of ability levels, and adaptable for reading instruction in languages and orthographies other than English.

The Hong Kong research confirms that peer tutors can successfully deliver reading instruction, with both tutors and tutees benefiting in terms of enhanced reading proficiency, intrinsic motivation to learn, and self‐concept. It also suggests some factors which may enhance the effects of peer tutoring upon achievement. For tutees these are content coverage, peer self‐concept and intrinsic motivation to study. For tutors the predominant factor is locus‐of‐control.

Interestingly, tutors’ instructional behaviours during tutoring sessions appear not to have any effect on tutoring outcomes, except in so far as they might slow down coverage of the material being read.

     

The use of peer group review in the assessment of project work in Higher Education

The work that this paper reports concerns a small scale investigation and evaluation of the technique of peer group review in the assessment of design and technology project work. A cohort of fifty first year undergraduate students of Industrial Design and Technology was involved in the assessment of four practical design coursework projects which they had submitted.

Two particular aspects of peer group review are considered: the validity of student assessment in relation to parallel judgements made by academic staff; the perceptions which undergraduate students hold regarding the benefits and difficulties of this system of assessment. The paper seeks to identify the potential contribution that the technique of peer group review could make towards more effective and efficient assessment of design and technology project work from student and staff perspectives.     

Social summarization in collaborative web search

A critical challenge for Web search engines concerns how they present relevant results to searchers. The traditional approach is to produce a ranked list of results with title and summary (snippet) information, and these snippets are usually chosen based on the current query. Snippets play a vital sensemaking role, helping searchers to efficiently make sense of a collection of search results, as well as determine the likely relevance of individual results. Recently researchers have begun to explore how snippets might also be adapted based on searcher preferences as a way to better highlight relevant results to the searcher. In this paper we focus on the role of snippets in collaborative web search and describe a technique for summarizing search results that harnesses the collaborative search behaviour of communities of like-minded searchers to produce snippets that are more focused on the preferences of the searchers. We go on to show how this so-called social summarization technique can generate summaries that are significantly better adapted to searcher preferences and describe a novel personalized search interface that combines result recommendation with social summarization.     

The Learning Company

The learning company is an organisation which facilitates the learning of all of its members and continuously transforms itself in order to meet its strategic goals. The paper introduces the concept of the learning company and examines its relevance in modern industrial society. A study of Director‐level personnel in eight large public and private sector organisations in the United Kingdom provides support for the concept. Following a discussion of the learning company as an organisational transformation, guidelines for designing learning companies are proposed.