PRINTED COMMENTS WITH ITEM ANALYSES

This article suggests that item analysis computer programs include, as an option, a printing of English comments alongside of the item statistics. The particular comments that appear for each item depend upon that item's statistics. These comments should provide clear directions to the classroom teacher for the improvement of the items, and they should be flexible to reflect the differing decisions required by norm-referenced items and criterion-referenced items.     

Researching Environmental and Sustainability Education Policy: Slumbers and Awakenings

This article offers a series of reflections based on a recent edited collection, Environmental and Sustainability Education Policy: International Trends, Priorities and Challenges. As one of its editors, here I bring together key features of the collection and themes pertinent to this emerging field of scholarship, to offer some way-markers for possible future research avenues. Taken together, I trust these observations might help others navigate what we encountered in policy studies and practice development, and illuminate various blank, blind, bald and bright spots for research and policy in both environmental and sustainability education, and related fields of inquiry.     

Personal variables affecting the perspectives of head‐teachers and teachers towards teacher participation in school decision‐making

The article reviews research which has taken place relating to the influence of certain biographical factors on head‐teacher and teacher perspectives on who should take decisions within schools. The particular biographical factors which are considered are status, sex, age, length of experience and school size. Each is examined independently and shown to have some influence though existing research does not always agree on the type or extent of this influence. The article concludes by stating that whatever this influence might be, it is only one small aspect of the complex decision‐making process.     

Understanding Teachers' Work: is there still a place for labour process theory?

After a brief and vigorous appearance in the 1980s, labour process theory has become a marginal presence in the contemporary literature on teachers' work. This paper argues that a key reason for this marginal status is that, in the education literature, labour process theory has been unable to shake clear of its historical connection with the Braverman proletarianisation thesis. This has produced a focus on a single mode of control (scientific management) and its effects (e.g. deskilling and intensification), rather than on the forms and purposes of control of teachers. As a consequence, labour process theory has appeared deterministic. If it is to fulfil its potential as an important lens through which to analyse empirical research into the work of educators, labour process theory requires theoretical renovation, particularly in relation to the special contexts and circumstances of education and teachers' work. The paper contributes to one aspect of that task—the nature of control and its purposes in relation to state teachers.     

Constructing Parental Involvement in an Education Action Zone: Whose need is it meeting?

This paper illustrates some of the tensions and contradictions in schools' attempts to develop parental and family involvement through a case study of parental involvement in an Education Action Zone. It focuses on how schools constructed parental involvement, the kinds of work they engaged in, the issues raised in managing and resourcing parental involvement projects, the perceived benefits of running the projects and the likelihood of the projects being sustainable. It is argued that the models of parental involvement that schools developed had important consequences for the role parents were allowed to play. Varying roles impose different kinds of demands on schools and parents and require different kinds of relationship between schools, parents and the local community. The more expansive the view of parental involvement, the greater the costs in running such projects and, hence, particularly in poor areas, the less chance of them being sustainable. Moreover, there were evident contradictions between the standards and inclusion dimensions of parental involvement projects. In particular, there was, and is, an evident tension for the schools around constructing parents as a resource for schools to tap into in the drive to raise standards and constructing the school as a resource for parents and the wider community to tap into in the drive to promote local regeneration and inclusion. This is being resolved in favour of the standards agenda.