‘The danger of a single story:’ a reflection on institutional change,voices, identities,power, and outcomes

ABSTRACT

What role does academic development have to play in responding to radical cultural shifts in the global landscape? Whose voices and identities are contributing to institutional change? This reflective essay encompasses the perspectives of the four international panellists in the opening plenary of the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED) 2018 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, USA – Torgny Roxå on ideologies; Chng Huang Hoon on agency and empowerment; Joy Mighty on voices and identities; and Mary Deane Sorcinelli on evidence and outcomes. These perspectives set the stage for the conference, and, brought together in this paper now, they address key conference themes, offer coordinates for reflection, and pose further questions about our profession.     

Promoting doctoral students' research self-efficacy: combining academic guidance with autonomy support

A diverse sample of doctoral students completed an on-line questionnaire assessing their supervisors' academic, personal and autonomy support and their research self-efficacy. The more task-related help and personal support students received, the more positively they evaluated their supervision. The degree to which supervisors encouraged students to think and act autonomously (autonomy support) was not uniquely associated with students' supervision satisfaction but predicted greater research self-efficacy. A combination of high levels of autonomy and academic support was associated with the highest levels of research self-efficacy, whereas when greater levels of personal support were accompanied by low levels of autonomy support, students reported lower research self-efficacy. These results indicate that effective doctoral supervision involves supporting students to voice and act on their own ideas while simultaneously providing guidance on how to complete research tasks.     

Reflections on the First International iPED Conference,Coventry TechnoCentre,UK, 10–11 September 2006

Through reflection on the First International iPED Conference 2006, and its overarching theme of ‘Pedagogical Research and Academic Identities’, this paper considers the achievement of the wider aims of the conference, which were to facilitate dialogue between researchers in order to explore the conference themes collaboratively, and to provide networking opportunities which would enable participants to build alliances. The abstracts for all papers mentioned are available via the conference website www.coventry.ac.uk/iped2006.     

Getting to the heart of it: understanding mentoring relationship quality from the perspective of program supervisors

ABSTRACT

Mentoring relationship quality has frequently been associated with improved effectiveness of mentoring interventions for youth. As youth mentoring research has largely been undertaken in community-based, one-to-one mentoring programs in the United States, there have been recent calls to investigate mentoring relationships in specific contexts. Accordingly, this research examines relationship quality within nine mentor-mentee dyads involved in a New Zealand school-based mentoring program that combines one-to-one and group mentoring. This research identifies key features of and perceived influences on mentoring relationship quality using qualitative interviews with program staff and mentor portfolios. The results indicate that high quality relationships were formed during the program, and were primarily facilitated by mentors who demonstrated attunement, critical self-reflection, self-efficacy, and a holistic view of their mentee. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.     

Confirmation of precounselling expectations: Does expectation valence moderate changes in state anxiety?

Despite considerable research attention, it remains unclear whether failing to meet clients' precounselling expectations causes increases in state anxiety. Empirical support for such a relationship is equivocal and it has been suggested that the treatment of expectations as a unitary construct and a lack of theory have given rise to this situation. The present study measured pre- and post-session expectations and anxiety in a sample of clients attending a university counselling service. The Expectations About Counselling questionnaire (EAC) and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory — Form Y (STAI-Y) were used as dependent measures. Self-Regulation theory and the Attentional Bias model of anxiety provided a theoretical framework from which the experimental hypothesis was drawn. Affective valence of expectations (positive vs. negative) was assessed as well as whether confirmation or disconfirmation occurred. As predicted, the results failed to support a main effect for disconfirmation on elevations in state anxiety, but the moderating effect of expectation valence was observed. The theoretical and methodological implications of the results are briefly discussed.     

Are There Gender Differences in How Students Write Their Essays? An Analysis of Writing Processes

This study compared gender groups on the processes used in writing essays in an online assessment. Middle‐school students from four grades responded to essays in two persuasive subgenres, argumentation and policy recommendation. Writing processes were inferred from four indicators extracted from students’ keystroke logs. In comparison to males, on average females not only obtained higher essay scores but differed from males in their writing processes. Females entered text more fluently, engaged in more macro and local editing, and showed less need to pause at locations associated with planning (e.g., between bursts of text, at sentence boundaries). That these differences were detected after controlling for essay scores suggests that they cannot be attributed solely to disparities in group writing skill.     

Conditions influencing faculty voting in collective bargaining elections

This research examines the factors that influenced voting behavior in two faculty union defeats at New York University. Faculty members' and librarians' demographic and professional characteristics referred to in previous research on collective bargaining were not good predictors of how they voted in these elections. However, their satisfaction with conditions at NYU, especially satisfaction with participation in governance, was a strong predictor of how they voted. Furthermore, faculty characteristics were found to influence their satisfaction with conditions. This paper also discusses the importance of the swing votes cast in a run-off election by the members of a previously defeated third party and the influence on the election outcomes of an independent group of faculty members opposed to unionization.     

On the relation between automated essay scoring and modern views of the writing construct

This paper examines the construct measured by automated essay scoring (AES) systems. AES systems measure features of the text structure, linguistic structure, and conventional print form of essays; as such, the systems primarily measure text production skills. In the current state-of-the-art, AES provide little direct evidence about such matters as strength of argumentation or rhetorical effectiveness. However, since there is a relationship between ease of text production and ability to mobilize cognitive resources to address rhetorical and conceptual problems, AES systems have strong correlations with overall performance and can effectively distinguish students in a position to apply a broader writing construct from those for whom text production constitutes a significant barrier to achievement. The papers begins by defining writing as a construct and then turns to the e-rater scoring engine as an example of AES state-of-the-art construct measurement. Common criticisms of AES are defined and explicated—fundamental objections to the construct measured, methods used to measure the construct, and technical inadequacies—and a direction for future research is identified through a socio-cognitive approach to AES.     

Plato and the Police: Dogs,Guardians, and Why Accountability is the Wrong Answer

Attention to significant commonalities between the position of teachers and police officers, we suggest, illuminates problematic aspects of their position within a democracy. Demographically, both the teaching force and the police force are disproportionately white, yet the commonalities extend beyond race. We suspect too little attention has been paid to other social categorizations, namely social class and gender. Toward this end, we explore the significant commonalities between the position of teachers and police officers and suggest that aspects of their position within a democracy make accountability a problematic tactic for addressing systematic failures. In this article we turn to Plato's discussion of the guardians for his ideal Republic because Plato squarely faces a problem that still dogs us: How are those persons given the right to uphold order to be prevented from turning on the polis they are meant to protect? The answer we offer rests on a theorization of a middle position and on a democratically situated ethical response to the other.