Beyond Agreement: Value Judgements in Conflict Resolution and Cooperative Conflict in the Classroom

Also PCMA Working Paper #6.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51111/1/343.pd

Progressive Education: Why it\u27s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find

Looks at the varying ways educators characterize progressive education, why progressive education makes sense, and why it might be the exception rather than the rule in educational philosophies.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/progressive/1001/thumbnail.jp

The Schools Our Children Still Deserve

The title I originally had in mind for the 1999 book that became The Schools Our Children Deserve was Better Schools Than We Had. The idea here was that we want our kids’ education to be superior to what most of us received (and I use that last word deliberately, with its implications of passivity). You’d think such a desire would be uncontroversial; after all, parents say they hope their children will be more successful in conventional terms than they, themselves, have been: more years in school, more prestigious careers, and so on. But when it comes to the type of schooling people want for their kids, there’s often a strong traditional undertow. Regarding any familiar pedagogical practice -- homework, grades, tests, worksheets, lectures, discipline -- it’s as if the default parental posture is, “Hey, if it was bad enough for me, it’s bad enough for my kids.

Traditional and Health-Related Philanthropy: The Role of Resources and Personality

I study the relationships of resources and personality characteristics to charitable giving, postmortem organ donation, and blood donation in a nationwide sample of persons in households in the Netherlands. I find that specific personality characteristics are related to specific types of giving: agreeableness to blood donation, empathic concern to charitable giving, and prosocial value orientation to postmortem organ donation. I find that giving has a consistently stronger relation to human and social capital than to personality. Human capital increases giving; social capital increases giving only when it is approved by others. Effects of prosocial personality characteristics decline at higher levels of these characteristics. Effects of empathic concern, helpfulness, and social value orientations on generosity are mediated by verbal proficiency and church attendance.

Hugs and behaviour points: alternative education and the regulation of 'excluded' youth

In England, alternative education (AE) is offered to young people formally excluded from school, close to formal exclusion or who have been informally pushed to the educational edges of their local school. Their behaviour is seen as needing to change. In this paper, we examine the behavioural regimes at work in 11 AE programmes. Contrary to previous studies and the extensive ‘best practice’ literature, we found a return to highly behaviourist routines, with talking therapeutic approaches largely operating within this Skinnerian frame. We also saw young people offered a curriculum largely devoid of languages, humanities and social sciences. What was crucial to AE providers, we argue, was that they could demonstrate 'progress' in both learning and behaviour to inspectors and systems. Mobilising insights from Foucault, we note the congruence between the external regimes of reward and punishment used in AE and the kinds of insecure work and carceral futures that might be on offer to this group of young people

Intermediated Social Preferences: Altruism in an Algorithmic Era

What are the consequences of intermediating moral responsibility through complex organizations or transactions? This paper examines individual decision-making when choices are known to be obfuscated under randomization. It reports the results of a data entry experiment in an online labor market. Individuals enter data, grade another individual’s work, and decide to split a bonus. However, before they report their decision, they are randomized into settings with different degrees of intermediation. The key finding is that less generosity results when graders are told the split might be implemented by a new procurement algorithm. Those whose decisions are averaged or randomly selected among a set of graders are more generous relative to the asocial treatment. These findings relate to “the great transformation” whereby moral mentalities are shaped by modes of (a)social interaction

Design and Implementation of Pay for Performance

A large, mature and robust economic literature on pay for performance now exists, which provides a useful framework for thinking about pay for performance systems. I use the lessons of the literature to discuss how to design and implement pay for performance in practice