Educational aspirations in inner city schools

The research aimed to assess the nature and level of pupils’ educational aspirations and to elucidate the factors that influence these aspirations. A sample of five inner city comprehensive secondary schools were selected by their Local Authority because of poor pupil attendance, below average examination results and low rates of continuing in full-time education after the age of 16. Schools were all ethnically mixed and co-educational. Over 800 pupils aged 12-14 completed a questionnaire assessing pupils’ experience of home, school and their peers. A sub-sample of 48 pupils selected by teachers to reflect ethnicity and ability levels in individual schools also participated in detailed focus group interviews. There were no significant differences in aspirations by gender or year group, but differences between ethnic groups were marked. Black African, Asian Other and Pakistani groups had significantly higher educational aspirations than the White British group, who had the lowest aspirations. The results suggest the high aspirations of Black African, Asian Other and Pakistani pupils are mediated through strong academic self-concept, positive peer support, a commitment to schooling and high educational aspirations in the home. They also suggest that low educational aspirations may have different mediating influences in different ethnic groups. The low aspirations of White British pupils seem to relate most strongly to poor academic self-concept and low educational aspirations in the home, while for Black Caribbean pupils disaffection, negative peers and low commitment to schooling appear more relevant. Interviews with pupils corroborated the above findings and further illuminated the factors students described as important in their educational aspirations. The results are discussed in relation to theories of aspiration which stress its nature as a cultural capacity

The Dynamical Mean Field Theory phase space extension and critical properties of the finite temperature Mott transition

We consider the finite temperature metal-insulator transition in the half filled paramagnetic Hubbard model on the infinite dimensional Bethe lattice. A new method for calculating the Dynamical Mean Field Theory fixpoint surface in the phase diagram is presented and shown to be free from the convergence problems of standard forward recursion. The fixpoint equation is then analyzed using dynamical systems methods. On the fixpoint surface the eigenspectra of its Jacobian is used to characterize the hysteresis boundaries of the first order transition line and its second order critical end point. The critical point is shown to be a cusp catastrophe in the parameter space, opening a pitchfork bifurcation along the first order transition line, while the hysteresis boundaries are shown to be saddle-node bifurcations of two merging fixpoints. Using Landau theory the properties of the critical end point is determined and related to the critical eigenmode of the Jacobian. Our findings provide new insights into basic properties of this intensively studied transition.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, 1 tabl

Double precision trajectory program /DPTRAJ 2.2C/

Four part program computes trajectory of space probe moving in solar system and subject to variety of forces

The limits of social class in explaining ethnic gaps in educational attainment

This paper reports an analysis of the educational attainment and progress between age 11 and age 14 of over 14,500 students from the nationally representative Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE). The mean attainment gap in national tests at age 14 between White British and several ethnic minority groups were large, more than three times the size of the gender gap, but at the same time only about one-third of the size of the social class gap. Socio-economic variables could account for the attainment gaps for Black African, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students, but not for Black Caribbean students. Further controls for parental and student attitudes, expectations and behaviours indicated minority ethnic groups were on average more advantaged on these measures than White British students, but this was not reflected proportionately in their levels of attainment. Black Caribbean students were distinctive as the only group making less progress than White British students between age 11 and 14 and this could not be accounted for by any of the measured contextual variables. Possible explanations for the White British-Black Caribbean gap are considered

Efficient implementation of the Gutzwiller variational method

We present a self-consistent numerical approach to solve the Gutzwiller variational problem for general multi-band models with arbitrary on-site interaction. The proposed method generalizes and improves the procedure derived by Deng et al., Phys. Rev. B. 79 075114 (2009), overcoming the restriction to density-density interaction without increasing the complexity of the computational algorithm. Our approach drastically reduces the problem of the high-dimensional Gutzwiller minimization by mapping it to a minimization only in the variational density matrix, in the spirit of the Levy and Lieb formulation of DFT. For fixed density the Gutzwiller renormalization matrix is determined as a fixpoint of a proper functional, whose evaluation only requires ground-state calculations of matrices defined in the Gutzwiller variational space. Furthermore, the proposed method is able to account for the symmetries of the variational function in a controlled way, reducing the number of variational parameters. After a detailed description of the method we present calculations for multi-band Hubbard models with full (rotationally invariant) Hund's rule on-site interaction. Our analysis shows that the numerical algorithm is very efficient, stable and easy to implement. For these reasons this method is particularly suitable for first principle studies -- e.g., in combination with DFT -- of many complex real materials, where the full intra-atomic interaction is important to obtain correct results.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure