Response to Intervention Screening and Progress‐Monitoring Practices in 41 Local Schools

This study describes response to intervention (RTI) screening and progress‐monitoring instruments and procedures in 41 local school settings. For screening the schools most often used published reading assessments or commercial products; a three‐times‐per‐year screening schedule was most prevalent. For progress monitoring schools most often relied on published reading assessments; a weekly progress monitoring schedule was most prevalent. The variability between local school practices is discussed with regard to efficiency, equity, and viability of RTI.     

Shared future – shared values? Taking stock of the peace process in Northern Ireland: teenagers’ perspectives

ABSTRACT

Although preceded by years of political and policy developments, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement) in 1998 is generally regarded as marking the end of conflict and the beginning of the transition to peace. However, this transition has been neither linear nor straightforward. Divisions, both physical and symbolic, reflecting collective identities and ‘otherness’, remain resistant to change and continue to foster sectarianism, mistrust and outbreaks of violence. Despite some positive change, not least of which is the absence of sustained violence, the majority of neighbourhoods and schools remain either Protestant or Catholic. Drawing on data from the Young Life and Times (YLT) survey, an annual attitudinal survey of 16-year-olds in Northern Ireland that has been running since 2003, this article explores what young people's perspectives reveal about the complexities and the challenges involved in transitioning to a more shared society. Where relevant and possible, their attitudes are compared with those expressed by adults in the annual Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) survey. A primary focus on tracking teenagers' attitudes is important for a number of reasons. While often regarded as a ‘post-conflict’ generation, segregation and polarisation remain features of teenagers' everyday lives and the political landscape. Children and young people are one of the four key strategic priorities in the latest government strategies to build united communities and achieve change and are embedded in the Programme for Government 2016–2021. If these government commitments are to be realised, the voices of young people must become central rather than peripheral. It is important, therefore, that their opinions are not only sought, but also interrogated and fed into policy.     

Comparison of methods: Passing and Bablok regression

The comparison of methods experiment is important part in process of analytical methods and instruments validation. Passing and Bablok regression analysis is a statistical procedure that allows valuable estimation of analytical methods agreement and possible systematic bias between them. It is robust, non-parametric, non sensitive to distribution of errors and data outliers. Assumptions for proper application of Passing and Bablok regression are continuously distributed data and linear relationship between data measured by two analytical methods. Results are presented with scatter diagram and regression line, and regression equation where intercept represents constant and slope proportional measurement error. Confidence intervals of 95% of intercept and slope explain if their value differ from value zero (intercept) and value one (slope) only by chance, allowing conclusion of method agreement and correction action if necessary. Residual plot revealed outliers and identify possible non-linearity. Furthermore, cumulative sum linearity test is performed to investigate possible significant deviation from linearity between two sets of data. Non linear samples are not suitable for concluding on method agreement.     

Task of the teaching life: Self through bakhtinian dialogue and ideological engagement

This article describes Mikhail Bakhtin’s 20^th century work on dialogue as it may serve one engaged in the teaching as a vocation and existential pursuit rather than as a job or profession. Dialogue, as theorized by Bakhtin, within the pedagogical real, potentially becomes a mod of being through which the individual engages in the project of selfhood, a task basic to the human enterprise. For Bakhtin, dialogue was in part a structure within and through which we come to consciousness and give flesh and meaning to our existence. According to Bakhtin, the structure of self is dialogical and unfinalizable, meaning that each individual comes to consciousness through dialogue with some other. From a Bakhtinian perspective, the, selfhood as a dialogical formation constitutes a fundamental relation by which we much participate without end, making dialogue an unavoidable social activity immersed in language.     

Preservice teachers’ learning with Yuin Country: becoming respectful teachers in Aboriginal education

The ownership of Aboriginal knowledge and the Aboriginal perspective presented in school curriculum is always with Country. A number of preservice teachers were taken to a sacred story, “Gulaga a Living Spiritual Mountain,” to participate in an elective subject to engage in respectful reciprocal relationship with Country. The spirituality of Country is unknown to many preservice teachers, consequently the concept of Country as teacher in a respectful reciprocal relationship was unfamiliar. Engaging in Aboriginal ways of knowing, learning, and behaving provides an opportunity for preservice teachers to initiate a relationship with Country to respectfully implement Aboriginal perspectives in their own teaching. This article not only examines how preservice teachers developed a relationship with Country, but also importantly demonstrates how a relationship between Country, researcher, all the participants, and the research can inform respectful behaviour in reculturalising Aboriginal perspectives.     

Meet the phallic teacher: designing curriculum and identity in a neoliberal imaginary

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure negotiated in teachers’ everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a 3-year Australian doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an environment where feminist and poststructuralist work of the late 20th century seems to have lost traction. These observations made here are based on empirical research in a Victorian school, combined with autoethnographic writing and other materials connecting teachers’ and researchers’ lives to the broader cultural postfeminist debate. The paper makes room for an absent subject, the teacher, marginalised in neoliberal discourses of curriculum and critiques the masculinist hegemony of outcomes and standards-based education. This provides us with new ways to challenge increasingly dominant current paradigms and to conceptualise a different future in which the standpoints of teachers are privileged in curriculum theory and curricular innovation.     

Sponsors of Pleasure: Wide Reading Re-imagined Through Social Curation

This article moves beyond book-based school ‘wide reading’ to propose constellations of multimodal media, including music videos, fashion parades, literary works, online games and material artefacts, along with associated pedagogies, as sponsors of pleasure. The article, based on empirical research with teachers in an Australian secondary school, proposes how the pleasure teachers experience in textual curation and research during curriculum planning might inform understandings of what reading might be for students. The author also considers the barriers to recognising diverse texts as having merit for study. Featuring Mattel’s Barbie, Kanye West and Andy Warhol, the article demonstrates how curation can inspire a vibrant reading fan culture and asks how teachers and students can negotiate or co-design ‘reading for pleasure’ curricula that make meaningful use of learner desires to seek collaboratively and collate creatively traces of meaning across media. Reading is an inevitable, spontaneous and enjoyable aspect of these practices.     

Motivational Characteristics in Mathematical Achievement: a study of gifted high‐achieving,gifted underachieving and non‐gifted pupils

The aim of this study was to examine whether motivational‐emotional variables such as intrinsic orientation toward schoolwork, Mathematics anxiety, academic self‐esteem, attribution of success and failure in Mathematics and situational interest in Mathematics could differentiate different groups of mathematically gifted pupils. The research was based, theoretically, on an interactional model of giftedness. The sample consisted of 147 selected primary school pupils (9‐10 years of age) who were assigned to the following groups for comparison: mathematically gifted achievers (n = 31), mathematically gifted under‐achievers (n = 31) and mathematically non‐gifted pupils (n = 85). The results of a discriminant analysis show that the gifted pupils differ from the non‐gifted ones in attaining higher levels of intrinsic orientation toward Mathematics, lower Mathematics anxiety, lower attribution of success to external factors and effort, as well as in lower attribution of failure to external factors and abilities. Also, gifted achievers have lower attribution of success to effort than gifted under‐achievers and non‐gifted pupils.