Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Rhetorical relationships with students: A higher education case study of perceptions of online assessment in mathematics

Some students perceive that online assessment does not provide for a true reflection of their work effort. This article reports on a collaborative international project between two higher education institutions with the aim of researching issues relating to engineering student perceptions with respect to online assessment of mathematics. It provides a comparison between students of similar educational standing in Finland and Ireland. The students undertook to complete questionnaires and a sample of students was selected to participate in several group discussion interviews. Evidence from the data suggests that many of the students demonstrate low levels of confidence, do not display knowledge of continuous assessment processes and perceive many barriers when confronted with online assessment in their first semester. Alternative perspectives were sought from lecturers by means of individual interviews. The research indicates that perceptions of effort and reward as seen by students are at variance with those held by lecturers. The study offers a brief insight into the thinking of students in the first year of their engineering mathematics course. It may be suggested that alternative approaches to curriculum and pedagogical design are necessary to alleviate student concerns

Ethnography And Discourse Analysis: Dilemmas In Representing The Voices Of Children

How can researchers produce work with relevance to theoretical and formal traditions and requirements of public academic knowledge while still remaining faithful to the experiences and accounts of research participants based in private settings? Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research explores this key dilemma and examines the interplay between theory, epistemology and the detailed practice of research. It does this across the whole research process: access, data collection and analysis and writing up research. It goes on to consider ways of achieving high standards of reflexivity and openness in the strategic choices made during research, examining these issues for specific projects in an open and accessible style. Particular themes examined are: the research dilemmas that occur from feminist perspectives in relation to researching private and personal social worlds; the position of the researcher as situated between public knowledge and private experience; and the dilemmas raised for researchers seeking to contribute to academic discourse while remaing close to their knowledge forms. This chapter examines these themes in particular relation to representing children's accounts in the public sphere

The recovery perspective in assertive community treatment : how is it done and what does it mean to services users and service providers?

La présente étude s’intéresse à l’approche du rétablissement dans les milieux de pratique en santé mentale au Québec. Par le biais d’une analyse des actions et des interactions quotidiennes des divers acteurs impliqués au sein d’une équipe d’intervention communautaire de Suivi Intensif dans le Milieu (SIM), la recherche menée permet de comprendre une des applications des politiques québécoises en santé mentale. En mettant en contexte les actuelles politiques de santé mentale, les deux premiers chapitres illustrent certains des paradoxes, des défis et des préoccupations liés aux diverses conditions de pratique dans le champ de la santé mentale. Plus spécifiquement, il présente le développement du Suivi Intensif dans le Milieu (SIM) et la pratique axée sur le rétablissement, ainsi que leur légitimation, au regard des approches d’intervention préconisées en santé mentale au Québec et des contextes organisationnels dans lesquelles elles sont mises en œuvre. Le troisième chapitre expose le cadre théorico-conceptuel de l’étude, lequel s’ancre dans la perspective critique constructiviste, et s'inspire de la « pratique critique » (critical practice), de l'ethnométhodologie et des framing theory pour l'analyse des données empiriques. Le cadre méthodologique qui circonscrit la recherche, et notamment l’approche par observation-participante, qui s’est étalée sur une période de 7 mois d’immersion au sein d’une équipe SIM à Montréal, fait l’objet du quatrième chapitre. De façon cohérente avec la méthode ethnographique, le cinquième chapitre fournit une description en profondeur du contexte de pratique, de l’équipe d’intervention choisie et étudiée ainsi que des acteurs qui la composent. À l’intersection des paradigmes de la médicine traditionnelle, du rétablissement et des perspectives managériales influençant le champ de la santé mentale, le sixième chapitre met en perspective les opportunités et les défis qui émanent des actions et des interactions de l’équipe SIM observée. Quant au septième chapitre, il résume les expériences quotidiennes des personnes utilisatrices et des intervenants, par le biais des observations consignées à propos de leurs rôles professionnels et sociaux, de leurs activités ainsi que de leurs échanges et interactions. En s'appuyant sur des exemples de cas, des citations détaillées ainsi que sur les observations menées, chacun de ces trois chapitres de résultats explicitent les tenants et aboutissants des actions et des interactions quotidiennes, ainsi que l’influence du contexte organisationnel, des schémas de pratique et des discours dominants en santé mentale. Le dernier chapitre se penche sur les modalités et les dynamiques d’interaction des intervenants et des utilisateurs de services, au regard du contexte local et urbain de pratique. En focalisant ainsi sur les contenus relationnels des échanges entre les acteurs, cette discussion offre une analyse approfondie des modes de (re)production de la folie, et de leur mobilisation dans le champ de la santé mentale au Québec.The present study proposes an exploration of the daily actions and interactions amongst various actors in an Assertive Community Treatment psychiatric team as a way to understand the practical operationalization of mental health policy orientations such as recovery. Chapters one and two illustrate some of the paradoxes, challenges and concerns related to the various conditions of mental health practice in an intensive community mental health team in the context of current mental health policies. In particular, the development and ensuing legitimacy of both Assertive Community Treatment and recovery-oriented practice in Québec as well as the current organizational contexts and intervention approaches are detailed. The third chapter outlines the framework for the study, which is based on a critical constructionist perspective and draws upon critical practice, ethnomethodology, and framing theories for data analysis. The fourth chapter summarizes the ethnographic methodology undertaken for data collection. This transpired during 7 months of immersive participant observation with an urban Montréal team of mental health professionals and service users. Consistent with ethnographic methods, the fifth chapter presents a “thick description” of the team, the various actors, and the context of practice. The sixth chapter illustrates the opportunities and challenges of acting and interacting in an intensive community mental health team at the intersection of traditional medical paradigms, and recent policy paradigms, such as recovery and managerialism. The seventh chapter illustrates everyday experiences of service providers and service users as seen through their activities and conversations as well as the actualization of their roles. Drawing on case examples and detailed citations and observations each of the three results chapters explains how daily actions and interactions are accomplished and influenced by context, practice routines, and conversations. The eighth chapter reflects on the ways service providers and service users in a local, urban Montréal ACT team interact in their current context. This final discussion chapter provides a deeper reflection as to how and why relationships with each other, and with madness, are produced and mobilized

RESILIENT ROTHERHAM?

The notion of community resilience is complicated in part because both terms have many aspects. We have distinguished three types of community: of purpose, such as a political association, of culture, such as religion and of locality, such as a neighbourhood. Our primary interest in this report is with communities of locality. We have suggested a three-faceted model of resilience in which it is described as: of something, to something (a stressor), to an endpoint. Thus (local) community resilience is: of a neighbourhood or locality, to a stressor, such as an earthquake, to an endpoint, such as back-to-normal. The stressors faced by a community can be acute, such as an earthquake or the shutdown of a local employer, or chronic, such as long-term poverty and unemployment. Community resilience is most easily seen in relation to acute stressors in part because both the stressor and endpoint are fairly clear. It is less clear with chronic stressors mainly because the endpoint cannot be back-to-normal. We therefore suggested a distinction between as-you-were and as-you-should-be endpoints. An example of as-you-should-be resilience is where someone becomes a well-functioning adult despite abuse as a child. In relation to communities of locality, the as-you-should-be endpoint is roughly that they will provide places which enable rather than impede their members to live well, to flourish and to be happy. A local community is resilient to the extent that it does this in the face of stressors, such as poverty. Resilient communities can be identified by combining measures of individual wellbeing, such as quality of life and health, with indicators of stressors, such as deprivation. A resilient community is one that is deprived but in which people do better than average in regard to these measures. This method of identifying resilient communities is an outlier method; it depends on finding those better than average. One problem with this is that it does not give an objective measure of resilience; we could use it only to show that one community has become more resilient in relation to another, not that it has become more resilient per se. Final v7 23 This problem links to a more general problem with the literature on measuring, characterising and enhancing community resilience. This is that insufficient distinction is made between measures of how well people within a community are doing, i.e. their wellbeing, and of how resilient they are, i.e. their wellbeing given particular stressors. Thus most of the measures we identified in the literature as possible contributors to resilience were more like contributors to wellbeing. For example, measures to improve the built environment or social networks are better characterised as enhancing social capital and wellbeing rather than resilience. In practice, there seems likely to be a link between resilience and wellbeing. An individual or community without resilience to likely challenges would have precarious wellbeing

Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach

Where have all the students gone? They are all on Facebook Now

This paper reports and discusses findings from a study carried out amongst a subset of 5th semester students (app. 80) in the programme CDM, Aalborg University (AAU). The purpose of the study was to uncover what networked technologies students use to support their studies and their problem and project based group work. We also wished to explore their rationales and motives for employing those particular tools. While there is much research into the technologies students use we understand too little about students' motives for using or choosing particular technologies (Henderson, Selwyn, & Aston, 2015). In the paper we therefore discuss the technologies they use and their motives for doing so. The study has however unearthed some deeper questions and concerns. For one thing it became apparent that students' uses of networked technologies were heavily reliant on commercial mainstream solutions. Services such as Facebook, Dropbox and Google Docs were the dominant choices of technology and students chose these - without much reflection - as they were the easiest and most widely used. Secondly, it became apparent how these services formed a completely parallel or alternative technological infrastructure to the ones offered by the institution (Moodle). These points have led us to questions such as: Should we promote more critical and reflexive discussion of technologies for learning in higher education, and what is the role of higher education institutions in relation to technological infrastructures i.e. does it make sense to maintain a learning management system if students are not using it. These are issues we raise in the final discussion

City liveability and housing in Nigeria: a case study of low-income housing in Niger State

Studies on the liveability of cities have been on the increase due to their perceived aftermath significant contributions to the quality of life. Although the quality of life (QOL) has been studied from different disciplines, however, it does not mean absence of diseases or sickness rather QOL depends primarily on the living environment. The aim of this study is to examine the quality of life against the backdrop of the existing environment in the public low-income housing estates in Niger State of Nigeria. The conceptual framework for this study was developed based on empirical review. Based on the desktop literature the study used both subjective and objective measurements to investigate the liveability of the selected housing estates. Issues examined include the home environment, neighbourhood amenities,economic vitality, social environment and civic protection. Questionnaires were distributed to household heads in the selected three housing estates. The stratified random sampling technique used was to choose all types of homes. The data analysis techniques include; descriptive statistics, factor analysis and structural equation modelling (SEM). This study contributes to the existing body of knowledge in liveability studies in terms of model construct. It also uncovers the quality of life in public low-income housing in Niger State

Special Libraries, December 1974

Volume 65, Issue 12https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1974/1008/thumbnail.jp