Educational Transfer of Sorts: The American credit system with Chinese characteristics

The credit allocation system, a prevalent element of American higher education, is designed to further general education. This paper assesses the success of transferring this American component into a Chinese context. After a general discussion of higher education and credit systems in their American and Chinese environments, the paper presents a case study. It explores from both a cultural and pedagogic perspective the employment of the credit system at Shenzhen University in southern China. Cultural, environmental and structural factors contribute to the transfer's ineffectiveness. Without systemic and structural changes, the educational reforms discussed will be unlikely to accomplish their stated goals of active learning and individualistic curricula. The narrowness of curriculum is likely to continue, unaffected by the credit system.     

Social‐Information‐Processing Skills of Kindergarten Children with Developmental Learning Disabilities

The study examined the social‐information‐processing skills of kindergarten children with developmental learning disabilities (LD) utilizing Crick and Dodge's (1994) model of children's social adjustment as a theoretical framework. Participants consisted of 20 kindergarten children with developmental LD who attended three integrated kindergartens and 20 children without developmental LD from the same kindergartens. Participants were assessed on social‐information‐processing skills, feelings of loneliness, sense of coherence, and teachers' ratings of behavioral problems and positive resources. The results indicated that girls with developmental LD performed significantly lower on two information‐processing steps—the response decision and the enactment steps—than did girls without LD. Such differences were not found for boys. The results also showed that the social‐information‐processing skills of children with developmental LD were correlated with teachers' ratings.     

Review article

Ducellier, A., Kaplan, M., Martin, Bernadette, avec la collaboration de Françoise Micheau. Le Moyen Âge en Orient. Byzance et l'Islam. Des Barbares aux Ottomans. Paris: Hachette Histoire Université, 1990.     

Research in Clinical Supervision: Revitalizing a Scientific Agenda

The purpose of this article was to revitalize and disentangle common misconceptions about a scientific agenda for clinical supervision.     

‘We Decided to Give it a Twirl’: single-sex teaching in English comprehensive schools

This article reports the recent experiences of single-sex teaching in 31 co-educational English comprehensive schools, often implemented because of the perceived need to raise boys' achievement. Since it was often undertaken on a short-term basis, its effectiveness is difficult to evaluate, although some positive aspects were noted in some schools in terms of raised achievement levels and increased confidence and participation in class. In other schools, however, single-sex teaching appeared to have little impact on achievement levels and led to increased problems of behaviour management in boys' classes, with male bonding between male teachers and male students reinforcing the qualities associated with hegemonic forms of masculinity. The authors conclude, therefore, by suggesting that single-sex classes can provide a positive and successful experience for girls and boys where there is strong commitment from staff, a willingness to evaluate and to diffuse good practice, but crucially where gender reform strategies are in place to challenge any practices and behaviours that reinforce stereotypical gendered roles.