chapter 1 Introduction: Evidence and Decision Making

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72236/1/j.1744-7984.2007.00095.x.pd

Educational change in Scotland: Policy, context and biography

The poor success rate of policy for curriculum change has been widely noted in the educational change literature. Part of the problem lies in the complexity of schools, as policymakers have proven unable to micromanage the multifarious range of factors that impact upon the implementation of policy. This paper draws upon empirical data from a local authority-led initiative to implement Scotland’s new national curriculum. It offers a set of conceptual tools derived from critical realism (particularly the work of Margaret Archer), which offer significant potential in allowing us to develop greater understanding of the complexities of educational change. Archer’s social theory developed as a means of explaining change and continuity in social settings. As schools and other educational institutions are complex social organisations, critical realism offers us epistemological tools for tracking the ebbs and flows of change cycles over time, presenting the means for mapping the multifarious networks and assemblages that form their basis

Levels and equivalence in credit and qualifications frameworks: Contrasting the prescribed and enacted curriculum in school and college

Drawing on data from an empirical study of three matched subjects in upper secondary school and further education college in Scotland, this article explores some of the factors that result in differences emerging from the translation of the prescribed curriculum into the enacted curriculum. We argue that these differences raise important questions about equivalences which are being promoted through the development of credit and qualifications frameworks. The article suggests that the standardisation associated with the development of a rational credit and qualifications framework and an outcomes-based prescribed curriculum cannot be achieved precisely because of the multiplicity that emerges from the practices of translation

Internal representations of smell in the Drosophila brain

Recent advances in sensory neuroscience using Drosophila olfaction as a model system have revealed brain maps representing the external world. Once we understand how the brain's built-in capability generates the internal olfactory maps, we can then elaborate how the brain computes and makes decision to elicit complex behaviors. Here, we review current progress in mapping Drosophila olfactory circuits and discuss their relationships with innate olfactory behaviors

Whatever happened to curriculum theory? Critical realism and curriculum change

In the face of what has been characterised as a ‘crisis’ in curriculum – an apparent decline of some aspects of curriculum studies combined with the emergence of new types of national curriculum which downgrade knowledge – some writers have been arguing for the use of realist theory to address these issues. This paper offers a contribution to this debate, drawing upon critical realism, and especially upon the social theory of Margaret Archer. The paper first outlines the supposed crisis in curriculum, before providing an overview of some of the key tenets of critical realism. The paper concludes by speculating on how critical realism may offer new ways of thinking to inform policy and practice in a key curricular problematic. This is the issue of curriculum change

Developing a predictive modelling capacity for a climate change-vulnerable blanket bog habitat: Assessing 1961-1990 baseline relationships

Aim: Understanding the spatial distribution of high priority habitats and developing predictive models using climate and environmental variables to replicate these distributions are desirable conservation goals. The aim of this study was to model and elucidate the contributions of climate and topography to the distribution of a priority blanket bog habitat in Ireland, and to examine how this might inform the development of a climate change predictive capacity for peat-lands in Ireland. Methods: Ten climatic and two topographic variables were recorded for grid cells with a spatial resolution of 1010 km, covering 87% of the mainland land surface of Ireland. Presence-absence data were matched to these variables and generalised linear models (GLMs) fitted to identify the main climatic and terrain predictor variables for occurrence of the habitat. Candidate predictor variables were screened for collinearity, and the accuracy of the final fitted GLM was evaluated using fourfold cross-validation based on the area under the curve (AUC) derived from a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) plot. The GLM predicted habitat occurrence probability maps were mapped against the actual distributions using GIS techniques. Results: Despite the apparent parsimony of the initial GLM using only climatic variables, further testing indicated collinearity among temperature and precipitation variables for example. Subsequent elimination of the collinear variables and inclusion of elevation data produced an excellent performance based on the AUC scores of the final GLM. Mean annual temperature and total mean annual precipitation in combination with elevation range were the most powerful explanatory variable group among those explored for the presence of blanket bog habitat. Main conclusions: The results confirm that this habitat distribution in general can be modelled well using the non-collinear climatic and terrain variables tested at the grid resolution used. Mapping the GLM-predicted distribution to the observed distribution produced useful results in replicating the projected occurrence of the habitat distribution over an extensive area. The methods developed will usefully inform future climate change predictive modelling for Irelan

The Boundary-spanning Role of Democratic Learning Communities: Implementing the IDEALS

This multi-case study investigates characteristics and practices in schools that expand the traditional boundaries of school leadership and transform schools into democratic learning communities based on the level of implementation of the IDEALS framework. This investigation serves as a modus to illuminate democratic processes that change schools and address the needs of the students, not the needs of the adults in the system. A sample of five purposefully selected high schools, from the Midwest USA, was utilized. The schools serve Grade 9—12 students, but vary in size, residential area and socioeconomic status of the students. This study illuminates some of the challenges and strategies that facilitate or impede the process of creating more democratic schools that expand the boundaries of inquiry and discourse to include a broader range of community stakeholders and that respect and embrace issues of equity.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

School organizational culture: The peak of research in the context of neoliberal policies

Inscrita numa matriz teórica multirreferencial, a problemática da cultura organizacional tem sido objecto de múltiplos desenvolvimentos conceptuais e diversificadas apropriações políticas e ideológicas. No campo da educação e no contexto mais específico das organizações escolares, as abordagens culturais e simbólicas sofreram algumas inflexões teóricas apenas compreensíveis quando contextualizadas no quadro mais global das políticas internacionais de cariz neoliberal e neoconservador. Neste trabalho, procura-se reflectir criticamente sobre a forma como a problemática da cultura organizacional em contexto escolar passa a ser (re)perspectivada numa altura em que se expandem alguns objectivos e valores políticos associados às ideologias da modernização e da racionalização. Num segundo momento, tomando como ponto de partida a análise de um vasto número de investigações integradas em quatro bases de dados electrónicas de âmbito internacional, debatemos as principais tendências teóricas, conceptuais e metodológicas deste campo de estudo, fazendo sobressair o lugar e o estatuto da escola enquanto contexto privilegiado de investigação, designadamente nos domínios crítico-reflexivos.Within a multi-referential theoretical framework, the issue of organizational culture has been a subject for multiple conceptual developments and different ideological and political appropriations. In the field of education and in the specific context of school organizations, the cultural and symbolic approaches were subjected to some theoretical inflections. These can only be understood in the global framework of international policies of neoliberal and neoconservative nature. First, this paper critically discusses how the issue of organizational culture in school context was put in perspectives at a time when some political-ideological objectives and values were associated to modernization and rationalization ideologies. Based on the analysis of a great number of researches included in four electronic databases with an international scope, it then discusses the main theoretical, conceptual and methodological trends of this field of study, stressing the place and statute of school as a privileged research context, namely in the reflexive and critical domain.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio