Teaching te reo Māori as a second language in primary schools: two case studies.

The provision of second language education in New Zealand primary schools has been, until recently, a rare addition to programmes. Its wider implementation in New Zealand primary schools has always been limited by low numbers of fluent bilingual teachers, and a perception that in a predominantly English speaking country such as New Zealand there is no need to teach additional languages in primary schools. The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) provides the first opportunity to formally include second language education in primary schools, and to establish the learning of second languages as a worthwhile pursuit in New Zealand. However, the success of such a policy change will depend on the ability of the Ministry of Education and course providers to upskill teachers in their ability to speak additional languages and teach them. This article reports on the outcomes of a Ministry-funded project designed to strengthen the second language teaching approaches of upper primary school teachers who teach te reo Maori. It provides case studies of two of the teachers who completed this course, and finds that while there are clear benefits to be derived from such teacher professional development courses, these courses need to focus on long-term objectives and be channelled to those teachers and students who stand to benefit the most from professional development courses

Demographic response to economic shock

The clear division of the world in the 1950s and 1960s into rich countries with low fertility and mortality and poor countries with higher fertility and mortality was used to support strongly held views that economic development was necessary for demographic change and that demographic change was necessary for economic development. Cross-sectional relationships between mortality or fertility and economic indicators have been used to argue both for and against national or international health or family planning interventions. Policymakers want increasingly to know to what extent short-run economic fluctuations result in short-run demographic fluctuations. The author addresses this question with special attention to the possible effects on mortality of the Third World economic crises of the 1980s. He examines the historical record, working backward from the recent past to periods before the demographic transition. The historical record, he concludes, does not support the existence of strong short-run responses in mortality to economic change and sometimes not even longer-term relationships. Clearly the strong cross-sectional relationship now evident between mortality and economic status must have arisen through some such long-term relationship. Economic downturns not associated with famine appear to have little short-term impact on mortality. Famines, whether associated with major economic downturns or not, appear to have major short-term effects on mortality.Demographics,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Adolescent Health,Early Child and Children's Health,Health Economics&Finance

Maori-medium education: current issues and challenges.

This paper summarises the key issues and challenges that have emerged from a recent major report by the authors on Maori-medium education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The discussion is situated within a wider international analysis of bilingual/immersion programmes, including heritage language programmes for indigenous peoples. Key issues explored in the paper include the negotiation of, and occasional tension between, the wider goals of indigenous Maori language revitalisation and the successful achievement of bilingualism and biliteracy in Maori-medium educational contexts. Issues to do with current pedagogy, staffing and resourcing of Maori-medium programmes are also examined. The paper concludes with suggestions for the ongoing development and extension of Maori-medium education

Neonatal mortality in the developing world

This paper examines age patterns and trends of early and late neonatal mortality in developing countries, using birth history data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). Data quality was assessed both by examination of internal consistency and by comparison with historic age patterns of neonatal mortality from England and Wales. The median neonatal mortality rate (NMR) across 108 nationally-representative surveys was 33 per 1000 live births. NMR averaged an annual decline of 1.7 % in the 1980s and 1990s. Declines have been faster for late than for early neonatal mortality and slower in Sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions. Age patterns of neonatal mortality were comparable with those of historical data, indicating no significant underreporting of early neonatal deaths in DHS birth histories.birth history, early neonatal mortality rate, heaping, late neonatal mortality rate, mortality, neonatal mortality

Probabilistic record linkage and an automated procedure to minimize the undecided-matched pair problem

Probabilistic record linkage allows the assembling of information from different data sources. In this article, we present a procedure in case a one-to-one relationship between records in different files is expected but is not found only by applying the probabilistic record linkage methodology. Our data were births and infant deaths from the 1998-birth cohort whose mother's place of residence was the City of São Paulo at the time of birth. Our assumption was that pairs for which a one-to-one relationship was obtained, and a best-link was found with the highest combined weight would be considered as uniquevocally matched pairs or gold-standard and should then provide information in order to decide about pairs in which such a relationship could not be established. For example, we observed that the for the unequivocally matched pairs a clear and expected relationship between differences in dates of death and birth registration could be assessed. As a result, such a relationship was used to help solving the remaining pairs for which a one-to-one relationship could not be found. Indeed, we reduced the number of non-uniquely matched records and even though we could not establish a one-to-one relationship for every single death we reduced the number of uncertain. We suggest that future research using record linkage should use combined strategies from results from first record linkage runs before a full clerical review (the standard procedure under uncertainty) in order to most efficiently (and less costly), retrieve record matches.: probabilistic record linkage; best-link; birth-cohort; one-to-one match

Economic crisis, structural adjustment, and health in Africa

This report applied two types of analysis to two types of data to try to quantify any short-term effect economic criswas and adjustment might have had on child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. First the aggregate data for ten countries covered by the Demographic and Health Surveys project was analyzed. Then an elaborate data set for Cote d'Ivoire collected in the mid-1980s was analyzed. Both analyses used time-period dummy variables to identify the effects of criswas and adjustment. Despite very different methodologies and data sets, the two analyses produced surprisingly similar results. The authors found that in the short run, neither crisis nor adjustment increased child mortality at the national level, relative to countries not undergoing adjustment. However, the authors examined only short-term effects - the only ones they could expect to measure. The long-run effects of criswas and adjustment will depend on adjustment's success in boosting sustained long-term growth. Such growth should reduce child mortality and speed the reduction of fertility as well, thus reinforcing declines in child mortality.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Early Child and Children's Health,Health Economics&Finance,Adolescent Health,Early Childhood Development

Death distribution methods for estimating adult mortality

TThe General Growth Balance (GGB) and Synthetic Extinct Generations (SEG) methods have been widely used to evaluate the coverage of registered deaths in developing countries. However, relatively little is known about how the methods behave in the presence of different data errors. This paper applies the methods (both singly and in combination) using non-stable populations of known mortality to which various data distortions in a variety of combinations have been applied. Results show that the methods work very well when the only errors in the data are those for which the methods were developed. For other types of error, performance is more variable, but on average, adjusted mortality estimates using the methods are closer to the true values than the unadjusted. The methods do surprisingly well in the presence of typical patterns of age misreporting, though GGB is more sensitive to coverage errors that change with age; the Basic SEG method (e.g. not adjusting for any slope with age of completeness estimates) is very sensitive to changes in census coverage; but once slope is adjusted for changing census, coverage has little effect. Fitting to the age range 5+ to 65+ is clearly preferable to fitting to 15+ to 55+. Both GGB and SEG are very sensitive to net migration, which is an Achilles heel for all of the methodologies in this paper. In populations not greatly affected by migration, our results suggest that an optimal strategy would be to apply GGB to estimate census coverage change, adjust for it and then apply SEG; in populations affected by migration, applying both GGB and SEG, fitting both to the age range 30+ to 65+, and averaging the results appears best.adult mortality, death distribution methods, estimation, sensitivity analysis, simulation

Unconventional approaches to mortality estimation

Most developing countries do not have complete registration of deaths on which to base mortality estimates. Four broad categories of unconventional methods have been developed to provide mortality estimates in such settings. The first consists of approaches for evaluation adjustment of incompletely recorded deaths by comparison with recorded age distributions. The second consists of alternative data collection methodologies collecting information about deaths by age. The third consists of approaches based on asking respondents about the survival or otherwise of close relatives. The fourth estimates mortality from changes in age distributions, interpreting cohort attrition as mortality. Methods in the first two categories offer the greatest potential for contributing information on developing country mortality to the Human Mortality Database. Methods in the first category are illustrated here by application to data from the Republic of Korea for the second half of the 20th century. In populations with good age reporting and little net migration, these methods work well and offer the opportunity to include developing country data in the HMD.adult mortality, developing countries, estimation, Human Mortality Database

A New Model of Topcolor-Assisted Technicolor

I present a model of topcolor-assisted technicolor that can have topcolor breaking of the desired pattern, hard masses for all quarks and leptons, mixing among the heavy and light generations, and explicit breaking of all technifermion chiral symmetries except electroweak $SU(2) \otimes$U(1). These positive features depend on the outcome of vacuum alignment. The main flaw in this model is tau-lepton condensation.Comment: 9 pages, TeX, uses harvmac.te