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Background: With the development of computational literacy, there has been a surge in both research and practice application of text‐based and block‐based modalities within the field of computer programming education. Despite this trend, little work has actually examined how learners engaging in programming process when utilizing these two major programming modalities, especially in the context of secondary education settings. Objectives: To further compare programming effects between and within text‐based and block‐based modalities, this research conducted a quasi‐experimental research in China's secondary school. Methods: An online programming platform, Code4all, was developed to allow learners to program in text‐based and block‐based modalities. This research collected multimodal data sources, including programming platform data, process data, and performance data. This research further utilized multiple learning analytics approaches (i.e., clustering analysis, click stream analysis, lag‐sequential analysis and statistics) to compare learners' programming features, behavioural patterns and knowledge gains under two modalities. Results and Conclusions: The results indicated that learners in text‐based modality tended to write longer lines of code, encountered more syntactical errors, and took longer to attempt debugging. In contrast, learners in block‐based modality spent more time operating blocks and attempt debugging, achieving better programming knowledge performances compared to their counterparts. Further analysis of five clusters from the two modalities revealed discrepancies in programming behavioural patterns. Implications: Three major pedagogical implications were proposed based on empirical research results. Furthermore, this research contributed to the learning analytics literature by integrating process‐oriented and summative analysis to reveal learners' programming learning quality. Lay Description: What is currently known about the subject matter: Programming has the potential to improve learners' higher‐order thinking skills.Block‐based and text‐based modalities are two major instructional methods.There has been a growing interest to understand how learning occurs in two modes.Most previous work has evaluated two modalities based on learners' knowledge, skills, and attitudes. What this paper adds: Code4all allows learners to programming in text‐based and block‐based modalities.Quasi‐experimental research was conducted to examine block‐based and text‐based programming modalities.Multimodal learning analytics were used to compare programming under two modalities.Learners' programming features, behaviouralbehavioral patterns, and knowledge gains were identified under two modalities. The implications of study findings for practitioners: Instructors should integrate text‐based and block‐based modalities into programming courses.Process‐oriented assessment should be integrated with summative assessment. Adaptive, timely scaffoldings should be provided with the external support (this should be marked like above two points). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I wrote this short story as an assignment for my ENG 315 class. I don't know where the idea came from, but it grabbed on and wouldn't let go. So as kooky as the idea was, I knew I had to just go with it. With this story, I wanted to pay homage to the fears and follies we experience in high school and the unexpected effect they often have on us. The protagonist of my story personifies that unforeseen effect--the idea that one little high school happenstance can change your perception of your life, and yourself, forever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about life project, an element that has gained centrality in secondary education during the last educational reform. For this, the article pursues a definition of the term from psychology's field, and it also problematizes how it enters the educational area. The paper presents a data collection of the guiding documents from the first occurrence of 'life project' in 1998 until the homologated version of the BNCC, aiming to understand how the insertion in education occurred. This paper highlights the interference of the economic field that supported and defended the implementation of the life project as the central axis of high school and indicates how it became a curricular component after the recommendations of Consed and the specific books selected by PNLD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translanguaging and codeswitching are frequently employed in second/foreign language classrooms. Though the differences between these two practices have been examined from a conceptual perspective, the potential of translanguaging as a pedagogical resource has not been empirically addressed. This article opens with a concise comparison of translanguaging and codeswitching, arguing that they offer different analytical and practical advantages in second/foreign language education. Using extracts from a practitioner study conducted in a high school EFL classroom in Shanghai, this paper illustrates how different linguistic and semiotic resources are deployed in a teacher's and students' translanguaging practices in order to achieve pedagogical goals, thus demonstrating the possibilities that pedagogical translanguaging encompasses. The paper argues that practitioners should be encouraged to make full use of these resources so as to create arenas of opportunity for the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a historiographical and political-linguistic perspective, in this paper I try to show some historical and educational data of Spanish teaching policies during the process of generalization of public secondary education in the context of the consolidation of the Uruguayan State (1912-1936). The selected period includes the creation of public high schools (1912) and the institutionalization outside Montevideo, Uruguay's capital city of the Spanish Language ("Idioma Castellano") (1912) and Spanish Language ("Idioma Español") (1936) and the books for students, framed in the corresponding study plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: During the COVID‐19 lockdown in 2020, teachers had to shift their teaching and assessment to online. Formative assessment (FA) can help teachers to engage, guide and monitor students' (online) learning. However, more knowledge is needed of how teachers could use the full FA process online. Methods: In this study data from 50 secondary school teachers, who taught different grade levels and subjects and joined a FA learning network that started before and continued during the lockdown, were collected. The study investigates how they used online FA practices differently than face‐to‐face FA, what challenges and opportunities they experienced in online FA and what lessons they learned and intended to keep. This mixed methods study used data from a questionnaire, interviews and webinars that were segmented, coded and analysed. Results: Results showed that many teachers implemented new FA strategies and adopted, more often than in their face‐to‐face practice, all the five phases of the FA process in an aligned matter in online FA. Teachers indicated opportunities in stimulating student engagement and guiding and monitoring student learning more at an individual level in the online FA process, but also experienced challenges, mainly in lack of interaction online. Discussion: The sudden and necessary shift to online FA, due to the COVID‐19 lockdown, challenged teachers to more fundamentally reconsider their assessment practices and assumptions. Teachers intended to make use of these learned lessons to improve their future (blended) FA practice. Lay Description: Known about the subject matter: Online formative assessment (FA) can help teachers to engage, guide and monitor online learning.Most earlier research of online FA looked at parts of the FA process or tools.Teachers' former knowledge and skills in FA influences the online implementation.Online FA offers opportunities to promote learning, but is also challenging. What their paper adds to this: Experienced teachers were able to implement complete FA processes online.Teachers experienced that online FA could stimulate student engagement.Teachers made more time for individual help and feedback during online FA.Teachers intended to maintain these lessons learned in their future (blended) FA practice. The implications of study findings for practitioners: Combining online FA activities with face‐to‐face activities creates opportunities for future blended FA.The five phases of the FA cycle help teachers to implement FA online or in blended forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on two years of ethnographic engagement in a school‐based digital design studio in a high school on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, this paper conceptualizes the development and maintenance of an ethos of care in teaching and learning through sustaining affective resonance. Adopting musical metaphors as a vocabulary for affective movements, we operationalize practical and practiced methods for sustaining (actively extending) affective (care‐giving and care‐taking intensities) resonance (shared meaning making and cultural production). Sharing examples across years, we show the specific ways that mentors and students in the digital design studio built and nurtured care‐full practices. The purpose of the paper is to explicate the development and enactment of mentoring practices that we observed in the design studio and then to consider how these practices might be shared, spread, and adapted across contexts of teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bantu Education system, which replaced missionary-run black schooling in the mid-1950s, expanded schooling to accommodate the basic economic needs of the South African economy but it was done as cheaply as possible. The state paid teachers' salaries and in return it expected obedience and conformity from its employees. It was a tight-fisted, authoritarian education system, which stifled aspiration and human creativity. Yet, I want to argue in this paper, it unintentionally opened spaces which could nurture human ambition. I am not talking here about ambition merely for upward social mobility but for an assertion of humanity in the midst of a dehumanising social order. Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto was one of those spaces. I will show that Morris Isaacson, from the 1960s to the early 1990s, was a place where young people from mostly very poor backgrounds could aspire to be something more than an economic unit, where they could become creative and rounded human beings. Although the academic ethos of the school should not be underestimated, a variety of cultural, intellectual, and sports activities, which had no direct economic utility, enriched the lives of students and expanded their horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a post-colonial lens, this paper describes the changes and constants in Jamaica's educational system between the 19th and the early 21st century using academic literature and secondary data from the Ministry of Education. High schools initially emerged in Jamaica for the upper and middle classes only, based on the families' income level, thus excluding children from the lower income bracket. Over time, breaking the glass ceiling for lower-income students became more possible as education included students moving from elementary to high school based on merit. This still restricted a large body of lower-income students who needed the tools and merit for success in the exit examination to high schools. In the 21st century there is more direct intervention in the Jamaican school system through funding and policies that change the high school education structure available to lower-income families, making it more possible for upward mobility on the social ladder. While there may be legacies of the colonial era, Jamaica has made significant strides in moving away from her turbulent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) represents a significant development concerning the teaching mission of the university in the UK. This paper considers the background to, and the development of, the TEF. It explains the context from which the TEF emerged and unpacks a series of rationales which illustrate the need for, and the role of, the new framework. The TEF is presented as an instrument to fulfil a range of functions, including: a mechanism to determine tuition fee rises and inform student choices in a reconfigured higher education market; a means of updating the quality and regulatory regime; and a way of raising the esteem of teaching within the academy, and the importance institutions place on student education. The paper explains how the contested idea of “teaching excellence” is defined within the framework, and the metrics and methodology used to assess this. An overview of the submission process and results illustrates how the TEF works in practice. How the TEF embeds two agendas in higher education is discussed: the use of quantitative measures to capture and convey performance, and the role of the student as a consumer not just a learner. The paper concludes the TEF can be viewed as a multi-purpose evaluation tool, not merely designed by the imperatives of teaching excellence or quality assurance, but also by the need for a measure to provide market information to consumers and allocate fee increases to institutions, and this is reflected in its content and character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have found a strong relationship between the mathematics students study in school and their performance on an academic or school mathematics assessment but not on an assessment of mathematics literacy (ML). With many countries, like the USA, placing emphasis on finishing secondary education being mathematically literate and prepared for college or career, this raises the question about the relationship between the mathematics studied in school and any ML students may have. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ML assessment is embedded in real-world contexts that provide an important window on how ready students are to tackle the situations and problems that await them whether they intend to pursue further education beyond high school or intend to go directly into the labour force. In this paper, we draw upon the PISA 2012 data to investigate the extent to which the cumulative exposure to rigorous mathematics content, such as that embedded in college- and career-ready standards, is associated with ML as assessed in PISA. Results reveal that both exposure to rigorous school mathematics and experiencing the instruction of this mathematics through real-world applications are significantly related to all the real-world contextualized PISA ML scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serious games have shown to be effective in improving motivation to learn, knowledge and retention, thus are being increasingly used for alcohol and other drug (AOD) education. This paper outlines the development of an online AOD serious game for in-class use by Australian secondary school teachers for students in Years 9–10. Adapted from Edwards et al. (2018), the seven-step systematic and iterative user-centred development framework included: (1) Forming an expert multidisciplinary design team, (2) Defining the problem and establishing user preferences, (3) Incorporating the evidence base, (4) Serious game design, (5) Incorporating behavioural and psychological theory, (6) Developing a logic model and investigating causal pathways, and (7) User testing. High school students (n = 8), health and physical education teachers (n = 7), and parents (n = 8) were engaged throughout different stages of the development process to inform development and provide feedback on considerations for promoting engagement, acceptability, and usability of the game amongst both students and teachers. Overall, participants rated game acceptability and usability favourably and would recommend the game for learning about AOD. Constructive feedback and suggestions for improvements from user testing sessions were implemented to form the final version of the game and module. The next step is to test Sideffect GamePlan in a simulated classroom environment before piloting in school settings. [Display omitted] • A six-lesson alcohol and other drug education package for high school teachers to use in-class with Year 9 and 10 students. • Serious game development process outlining conceptual and theoretical approaches. • An interactive narrative serious game and in-class activities aligned to Australian health education curriculum. • Content focused on alcohol and other drug harm reduction and real-life scenarios. • User-centred design approach to promote end-user engagement and adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Tennessee Junior Academy of Science (TJAS). TJAS is one of the oldest student science competition programs in the state and nation. One of its objectives is to promote science education in the state's high schools by encouraging original scientific research by secondary school students. It invites high school students from across the state to submit papers based on research problems, with evidence of creative thought to the TJAS director by March 1 of every year. TJAS offers research grants to support student research for the TJAS program, and it is active in acknowledging science teacher contributions to science education in the state.

This paper outlines a conceptual and operational framework for understanding the relationships between school culture and teenage substance use (smoking, drinking and illicit drug use). The framework draws upon Bernstein’s theory of cultural transmission, a theory of health promoting schools and a frame for understanding the effects of place on health. It is proposed that the strength/weakness of classification (boundaries within school and between the school and outside world) and framing (communication) determine each school’s (1) organisation, curriculum and pedagogic practice and (2) valued school identities and school-oriented learning opportunities for cognitive and affective development. These identities and learning opportunities are based either on performance or personal development and social relations. Likely teacher/student identity pairings in schools promoting performance and schools promoting personal development and social relations are discussed. Schools promoting performance-based identities and opportunities may potentially have higher school-level substance use. Students adopting a valued school identity are at lowest risk of substance use. Students who are unwilling/unable to adopt a valued school identity and disengage with school-oriented learning opportunities for cognitive and affective development are at highest risk of substance use. The potential pathways through which identified contextual (structural), collective (sociocultural) and compositional (individual-level) factors may modify these relationships through school-level and individual-level meaningfulness are described. Finally, school culture-based interventions that draw on the framework outlined in this paper that may positively affect student substance use across schools are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Not enough is known about the relationship between socio‐economic deprivation and places where young people purchase food at lunchtime on a school day. This paper draws on qualitative data from 600 +  young people aged 13–15 years and illustrates that socioeconomic factors form boundaries that young people have a feeling for when buying food. This informs where they seek out lunch (at school or in local food outlets) and what products, service and prices they access and find acceptable. Such insights help to understand why inequalities in young people's health and eating practices prevail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of a tuition-free high school program launched in FY2010 in Japan on the high school enrollment rate and household spending. We have some interesting findings. First, the program contributed to improvement in the high school enrollment rate for poorer households. Second, the program stimulated household spending significantly for poorer households relative to richer households. Third, the program altered the composition of household expenditure significantly for richer households with a surge in spending shares in non-tuition education, clothing, and recreational goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address the problem of an educational gap existing between high schools and universities: many students consider their choice of field of study as inappropriate, mostly due to insufficient information regarding the discipline and the university educational process. To solve this problem, we define an innovative, information and communication technology-supported educational process enabling various ways of collaboration between high schools and universities. The goal of that process is to increase the knowledge of prospective students regarding the next level of their education. We propose an environment for the implementation of the educational process. The concepts have been verified in practise as part of the Małopolska Educational Cloud project across several disciplines. We discuss the achievements of the pilot phase of the project as well as its reception by educators and students. Based on evaluation reports and opinions from both educators and students, we claim that the proposed model for information and communication technology-supported collaboration between high schools and universities can effectively reduce the educational gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent growth in privately administered secondary education in many developed countries has been a widely observed phenomenon. The Australian private secondary school sector has grown faster than those in any otherOECDnation, even though the average tuition fees charged by these schools have increased at double the nation’s overall rate of inflation. In this paper, we employ a panel data set to estimate a set of hedonic price indices for private secondary schools that cater to different segments of the population in order to determine if and how changes in their characteristics influence the changes in fees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we focused on the relation between the attachment of the adolescents and the risk behaviour production. In the research we worked with 220 adolescents in the lower secondary education system, average age 12.32 years. We applied two research methods: IPPA-R (Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment - Revised; Greenberg, Armsden, 1987), QRB (Questionnaire of Risk Behaviour; Čerešník, 2016). In general, we assumed that the higher risk behaviour production of the adolescents with worse relation with the parents and the peers, the lower is the level of attachment. The results showed that this assumption can be supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the international problem of 'early school leaving', this paper explores the issue of sustained participation in upper secondary education in England. It focuses in particular on the position of middle attainers, who constitute a large proportion of the cohort and whose progress will be vital in realising the government's goal of 'Raising the Participation Age' to 18 by 2015. The paper draws on evidence from national research undertaken as part of the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training in England and Wales and analysis of New Labour and Coalition policy between 2000-2012. It uses a three-year local study of 2400 14- and 16-year-olds in an established school/college consortium to illustrate the effects of policy and practice on middle attainers. We argue that this important group of young people was 'half-served' by New Labour, because of its incomplete and contradictory 14-19 reforms, and is now being 'overlooked' by Coalition policy because of its emphasis on high attainers. We conclude by suggesting a range of measures to support the 14+ participation, progression and transition of middle attainers in the English education and training system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market theory positions the consumer as a rational choice actor, making informed schooling choices on the basis of ‘hard’ evidence of relative school effectiveness. Yet there are concerns that parents simply choose schools based on socio-demographic characteristics, thus leading to greater social segregation and undercutting the potential of choice to drive quality improvements. In this paper, we explore segregation by examining catchment areas for a range of public high schools in a specific middle-class urban area. We focus on socio-demographic characteristics, including levels of income, country of birth and religion affiliation, in order to explore residential segregation according to public high school catchment areas. Our data suggest distinct residential segregation between catchment areas for each public school within our data-set, particularly for the schools deemed to be popular and rejected, that may pose risks for broader equity concerns. We argue that, in contrast to market theory, even more affluent and active choosers are not equipped with information on the programmatic quality of their different school options, but instead may be relying on socio-demographic characteristics of schools – through surrogate information about the urban spaces that the schools occupy – in order to choose peer groups, if not programmes, for their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a larger study of student understanding of concepts in linear algebra, we interviewed 10 university linear algebra students as to their conceptions of functions from high school algebra and linear transformation from their study of linear algebra. An overarching goal of this study was to examine how linear algebra students see linear transformation as related to high school function. Analysis of these data led to a characterization of student responses into three categories of mathematical structures used to discuss function: properties, computations, and a series of five interrelated clusters of metaphorical expressions. In this paper, we use this analytic framing for exploring the question: to what extent does each of the students in this study have a unified concept image of function across two mathematical contexts, high school algebra and their study of linear algebra? We found that students who expressed a unified notion of function used metaphorical language to bridge any gaps between the notion of function from high school and the notion of linear transformation from linear algebra. We conjecture that the framing of computations, properties, and metaphorical clusters could be extended to discussions of functions in contexts with other mathematical domains. Future research that further examines the extent to which undergraduate students develop a unified concept image of function could then lead to various design research efforts aimed at explicitly fostering such a unified understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘promposal’ is a growing, North American high school ritual in which one graduating senior asks another to the prom in a creative, witty, public performance that is recorded and posted online. AYouTubesearch for ‘promposal’ yields over 49,000 hits, with videos receiving up to 8,000,000 views. What does the promposal reveal about the construction of gender and identity amongst teenagers in the digital era and the nature of the voices channelled, expressed or spoken? In a study of high school students' responses to the promposal as well as a discourse analysis ofYouTubevideos, this paper argues that: students use promposals to achieve social aims by constructing and presenting desirable identities and voices across multiple platforms; the performances of gender seen in online promposals tend to draw upon, reflect, and reify traditional, hegemonic patterns of behaviour and to amplify the male voice; and promposals are a means of announcing the debut of young people as productive contributors to the neo-liberal economy as they prepare to leave high school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines justice issues of representation, redistribution and recognition within a specialised secondary school for immigrant and refugee students in Queensland, Australia. Fraser’s three-dimensional model of justice – towards the ideal of ‘participatory parity’ – is drawn on to analyse interview data gathered from a study that sought to identify productive approaches to addressing cultural diversity. Through these lenses, injustices created by mainstream/dominant discourses within and beyond the school are highlighted. The paper details the school’s efforts to support greater equity for these students through educator advocacy, critically reflective practice and a centring of students’ perspectives. The significance of educators identifying and challenging the limits and exclusions of these discourses to support these efforts is highlighted. Fraser’s theorising is presented as useful in capturing, understanding and addressing justice and marginality in schools amid the broader social context where matters of justice are characterised by uncertainty, complexity and contention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to present the main results of research on the role of Spain's Grouped Rural High Schools (CRA-Colegios Rurais Agrupados) in strengthening the peasantry. From this perspective, the research methods were a survey and analysis of bibliographies related to the countryside and education, Spain, and, also, field research of an agency directly linked to the theme and of the CRAs themselves. While in Brazil the popular struggle for rural education strengthened during the 1990s, in Spain education for the countryside was institutionalized. As a consequence of demands made by interested parties, the system of Colegios Rurais Agrupados (CRA) was implanted. It was seen as a way to combat the disappearance of schools as a unique cultural reference for rural communities. However, this paper argues that the new form of organization has been unable to contribute to the development of the peasantry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data from a qualitative study of urban high school students that asked students to reflect on the experiences of their lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and questioning peers. The focus group participants wrote letters to an imaginary new student at their school, discussed what they see and hear in their schools, and kept journals recording a week's worth of observations. The writings and conversations are analyzed in this paper through the lens of Foucault's Care of the Self in order to understand how young people characterize their own and their peers' actions and words as ethical moves in the fashioning of themselves as sexual subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a rare response by Ofsted to academics' concerns about a prevailing compliance model of Citizenship in secondary schools. Ofsted's defence of a non-compliance model is then tested against a small sample of Ofsted inspection data. The limited evidence suggests that Ofsted's defence is undermined by the adoption of an instrumentalist approach to participation, driven by the school improvement agenda, and, it is argued, reinforced by the Every Child Matters agenda. The outcome of this approach, which promotes an uncritical concept of participation, is an uncoupling of the political, moral and community that lay at the heart of the Crick Report. Parallels are drawn with the late-nineteenth-century compliance model of Citizenship, which Ofsted claim in their defence is very different from the twenty-first-century participatory model. There follows a review of political change since the Crick Report, which suggests that lack of participation by young people—which is the premise of both that report and Ofsted's depoliticized version of it—is no longer the issue; instead, the question is about whether there should be participation at any cost. To exemplify what this critical concept of participation might look like in a school context, the author draws on his case study of an Iraq war school protest in a fresh start school. It is argued that this example of critical participation maintains the link between the political and moral, and thereby actually makes a contribution to school improvement, by acknowledging staff and pupils' awareness of the complexities, emotions and contradictions of participation. The paper concludes that depoliticized dutiful citizenship will be encouraged if the prevailing concept of participation in schools is an instrumental and uncritical one. This in turn may lead to a widening gulf between the school's and the pupils' understanding of participation, which may eventually impact on sustained school improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of school transitions for pupil adjustment, particularly their impact on later well-being and attainment, remains contested. This paper draws on data from a longitudinal, school-based study of over 2000 Scottish pupils, first surveyed in 135 primary schools (age 11) in 1994, and followed up in 43 secondary schools (age 13 and 15) and again after leaving school (age 18/19) in 2002/3. The length of follow-up makes this study unique in transition research. After a year in secondary school (age 13), the majority recalled having had difficulties of adjustment to both school and peer social systems at the beginning of secondary education. While the primary (but not secondary) school played a small part in accounting for different transition experiences, controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic and other factors, personal characteristics were much more important. Respondents of lower ability and lower self-esteem experienced poorer school transitions; those who were anxious, less prepared for secondary school and had experienced victimisation, poorer peer transitions. Further analysis of the impact of school and peer transitions on well-being and attainment revealed that each had specific independent effects both within and beyond secondary education. At age 15, a poorer school transition predicted higher levels of depression and lower attainment; a poorer peer transition, lower self-esteem, more depression and lower levels of anti-social behaviour. Although reduced in size, similar results extended to outcomes at age 18/19. These effects bear comparison with those associated with gender and school disengagement, clearly demonstrating the importance of successful transition for later well-being and attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of online technologies to extend the learning of a group of junior secondary school students after attending a Sun, Science, and Society camp. The students were of mixed ages and came from metropolitan and rural schools. Their teachers described them as students of high ability or students interested in science who required extension work. These students were engaged in online learning for a period of 6 months after the camp. This paper reports on how they engaged with the extended and open learning supported by online technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the author's experiences of interviewing seven men and seven women who graduated from a Danish high school in 1980, at a moment when the upper secondary system underwent a process of democratisation. She questioned the informants as to the role education has played in their lives, and as to the sense their choice of education makes to them. In addition to providing extensive narrative data about the experience of going through the educational system in the 1970s and 1980s, her interview process also raised two fundamental methodological issues. The first regards the relationship between the narrative and its historical context. The second relates to how narrated truths can be understood more as split and divided between the interviewee and the interviewer than as negotiated, as is frequently argued. In the paper it is suggested that these narratives act more as a testing ground for the development of interpretations and reflections about the early years of the so-called “educational explosion” that has taken place in Denmark from the 1960s until today than as ultimate truths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows the results of a study on TV consumption at home that has been developed both in state and private Primary and High schools. This paper tries to emphasize the need for media literacy at home, including parents and tutors and taking into account the results of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper asks whether high school leadership activities play an important role in explaining the Hispanic college-completion gap. The analysis in this paper considers the role that English language fluency plays in a Hispanic student''s leadership probability and in the student''s future educational success. The main results in this paper are: first, after controlling for demographic and school characteristics, there are no major differences in high school leadership activities between Hispanics and non-Hispanics; second, high school leadership activities predict higher college attendance rates for all demographic groups; and third, high school leadership activities predict a higher probability of attaining a college degree among Hispanic students whose first language is not English. Importantly, this relationship is stronger among students whose first post-secondary institution is a 2-year college. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reports on an empirical case study conducted to investigate the overall conditions and challenges of integrating corpus materials and corpus-based learning activities into English-language classes at a secondary school in Germany. Starting from the observation that in spite of the large amount of research into corpus-based language learning, hands-on work with corpora has remained an exception in secondary schools, the paper starts by outlining a set of pedagogical requirements for corpus integration and the approach which has formed the basis for designing the case study. Then the findings of the study are reported and discussed. As a result of the methodological challenges identified in the study, the author argues for a move from ‘data-driven learning’ to needs-driven corpora, corpus activities and corpus methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the social factors influencing the learning of two cohorts of school students and their experience of compulsory secondary education in a city in southern England - the secondary schooling phase of a 12-year, longitudinal ethnographic study that also tracked the same children's experiences through primary schooling. We embed our report of secondary school findings within the theoretical models and understandings generated by the Identity and Learning Programme as a whole. The paper addresses three key issues. First, we trace how social influences on learning broaden as young people develop through adolescence, and illustrate why viewing learning as social activity is so important. Second, we discuss evolving processes of social differentiation in relation to gender and social class. We draw particular attention to the dangers of over-simplified models of social reproduction. Finally, we review an analysis of strategic action and identities, contrasting the differentiated experience of young people attending independent and selective schools compared with those attending non-selective comprehensive schools. Overall, this analysis seeks to complement studies of differentiated educational outcomes by suggesting possible social processes that could help to account for them. The Identity and Learning Programme, both in its secondary phase and as a whole, shows clearly how individual agency enables young people to cope with their circumstances. However, in so doing, they both reproduce elements of constraint/opportunity and construct others anew. This has significant implications for policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been renewed interest over the past 5 years among sociologists in empirically examining the status of sociology in high school. The few studies that have recently been conducted, however, have focused almost exclusively on high school sociology teachers. The nature and structure of the courses themselves have been largely ignored. Given the American Sociological Association’s recent attempts to develop and implement an Advanced Placement course, it seems especially important to examine the characteristics of existing sociology courses. This paper uses the results of a national mail survey to describe and discuss three aspects of the nature and structure of a random sample of sociology courses that were offered during the 2005–06 school year: instructional materials and pedagogical resources, teaching techniques, and course content. I demonstrate that these aspects of the courses look remarkably similar across the country: Teachers rely overwhelmingly on standard introductory textbooks to structure their courses. They are also apt to utilize supplemental materials from textbook publishers and from newspapers and newsmagazines, and to use a combination of lecture and discussion in their sociology classes. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although theories on anti‐oppressive education abound, few scholars have conducted empirical studies of anti‐oppressive educational curricula to test the alignment of theories—constructed largely by university scholars—and practices carried out by K–12 educators and students. While feminist poststructuralist theorists have critiqued critical pedagogy and multicultural scholars for not interrogating their universalist claims and for overemphasizing rationalist discourses, many of their calls for situated, performative pedagogy remain abstract. The following paper attempts to make some of the conceptualizations of social justice education concrete by examining student responses to two experiential activities in a high school leadership program. Comprising students from eight high schools located in a single metropolitan area, this program sought to increase student consciousness of the pervasive prejudice and discrimination in US society and, subsequently, to move these students to action. This paper analyzes the student interpretations of two awareness‐raising activities at the program’s leadership camp to argue that on‐the‐ground anti‐oppressive educational endeavors require significant time, commitment and organizational structures as well as the integration of poststructuralist, critical, multicultural and feminist ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1994, two documents, A statement on science for Australian Schools and Science--a curriculum profile for Australian schools, were published. They heralded the start of a new era in science education in Australian primary and secondary schools. Since that time each state and territory has produced their own curriculum documents for the learning area of science so that there are now eight separate curriculum documents that describe the teaching, learning and assessment of science in Australian schools. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and summary of the key features of the documents and to highlight some of the similarities and differences. This paper is timely as there are renewed calls for a national curriculum and it will provide readers with background information needed to participate in an informed debate about the advantages and disadvantages of both national and state-based approaches. This paper is also of significance to those teachers who move from one state system to another, for educators involved in national curriculum projects such as Primary Connections and indeed to anyone who wonders what is taught in other states and territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between sex, gender and sexuality through a series of close readings of data generated through an ethnography undertaken in a south London secondary school. The paper takes as its focus girls aged 15 to 16 and considers how particular sexed, gendered and sexualized selves are constituted. Drawing on Foucault's understanding of subjectivation and the subsequent work of Judith Butler, in particular her theorization of the inseparability of gender and sexuality in the contemporary discursive frame, these analyses demonstrate how students' mundane and day-to-day practices—including bodily deportment, physical games, linguistic accounts, and uses of clothing, hairstyles and accessories—are implicated in the discursive constitution of student subjectivities. The paper argues for an understanding of sex–gender–sexuality joined together in discursive chains and intersecting with further identity categories. As such, the paper suggests that subjectivities might helpfully be thought in terms of constituting constellations that create both possibilities and constraints for ‘who’ students can be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I consider the performativity of racial identities and difference at a southern US high school. I utilize Butler's performativity theory along with geographic theories of race, racial difference, and racism to argue that teenage girls reinstate racial difference through their everyday spatial practices. The paper has two substantive sections in addition to the introduction and the conclusion. The first explores the segregated high school lunchroom. Here I examine two girls' narratives and suggest that these girls encounter the spatiality of racial difference in the lunchroom and repeat the practices of segregated sifting. Thus, they reinscribe racialized difference and identity through their spatial practices of sifting with same-race friends. The second substantive section focuses on girls' practices of identifying others' racial identities. In this section I argue that these identifications are spatialized and that racial difference and categorization are achieved through spatial policing and boundary making. Throughout the paper I argue that racial identity and racial difference are performative, but that performativity must account for the normative spatiality of social and racial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the system of banding used in England by the former Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in order to seek to obtain an intake to secondary schools that was balanced in terms of ability. The first part of the paper provides a brief history of the system of banding, how it was informed by verbal reasoning testing and how it was subsequently based on the results of a specially constructed reading test. The second part of the paper examines the extent of banding after the abolition of the ILEA. Whilst LEA-wide banding is currently only used by three LEAs, many schools in inner London that are responsible for their own admissions (i.e. voluntary-aided and foundation schools) have introduced banding. The problems associated with banding at a school level are discussed and it is argued that banding at the level of the LEA is likely to be more equitable, more transparent and more likely to reduce social segregation; in addition, there is some evidence to suggest that the ILEA banding system resulted in a higher percentage of parents achieving their stated first preference school than more recent admissions policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three concepts relating to the role of heads of department (HoDs) in secondary schools: boundary management; the roles of subject leadership and departmental functioning as HoD activities; and the place of HoDs in evolving school hierarchies. To throw light on the last an empirical study is reported that explores hierarchies in middle management across three professions, and draws comparisons. The paper rejects boundary management as an appropriate model. It concludes that hierarchical models in education are very different from those in the military or in business and establishes a typology against which to view the research data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information literacy is the ability to access, evaluate, and apply information from a variety of sources in appropriate contexts to construct knowledge. In the current digital age, information literacy has inevitably been influenced extensively by developments in technology with the emergence of digital information literacy. The Internet has become a prominent source of digital information and students need to be competent and critical users of the information hosted by the Internet. This paper describes the baseline findings of the digital curricular literacy research project undertaken by the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice in Singapore. Seven Secondary schools in Singapore participated in this preliminary study. Student participants were grouped together in pairs to be collaboratively engaged in Internet information seeking tasks. The student pairs were assigned History-based and Science-based tasks and their online movements were captured using a screen capture software, Snapzpro. The findings of this study have been analyzed and will be presented in this paper based upon Ellis' information seeking behaviors model. Patterns and characteristics of students' information seeking processes were investigated according to the different stages of Ellis' model. Our findings revealed that the majority of Singapore students primarily focused on the following phases of Ellis' model: starting, browsing, chaining, differentiating and extracting. We have observed two levels of starting, differentiating and extracting which we would like to term as primary and secondary in this study. No significant trends were observed in relation to the monitoring component in his model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past 25 years have seen an accelerating erosion of the comprehensive 'ideal' in England and Wales. Parental choice has replaced centralized LEA allocation of pupils, systems for engineering a balanced social mix in schools have been largely abandoned, and the introduction of 'league tables' to measure the comparative effectiveness of individual schools has led to a polarization of secondary school intakes--the very opposite of what the original comprehensive system was intended to achieve. The current Labour government has created a range of differing 'types' of secondary schools, including 'beacon', 'specialist', and 'training' schools, as well as planning to increase the provision of 'faith' schools. Prominent government spokespersons have disparaged the 'bogstandard' comprehensive school, and called for an end to the 'one size fits all' rationale for secondary education. The paper examines the reasons behind the erosion of the comprehensive ideal in England and Wales. There is no simple party political division to explain the abandonment of the comprehensive school; no single vote, debate, or act of parliament to mark its end, and no commission of enquiry, report, or unequivocal body of research evidence to justify the policy moves away from 'the common school'. The study of the strange death of the comprehensive ideal in England and Wales provides interesting insights into the ways in which educational policy is made and unmade in modern democratic societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on research in progress in Melbourne secondary schools in which a community language is taught to students from a range of backgrounds. The programmes are described and contextualised. The project is developing models and strategies to enable schools to cater for the needs of secondary schools of students with and without home backgrounds in the target language and from different degrees of background in a community language which they are learning at school. The paper presents a typology of student background and explores how community resources can be utilised, for the benefit of students with and without a home background in the target language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ongoing challenge faced by the Chicana author in developing and implementing a feminist of colour curriculum for an after-school women group in a large New York City high school. The focus of this paper is to explore the challenges of diverse cultural exchanges of feminist knowledge, even within the same geographical location and especially where there exists unequal institutional, political or social power among and between group members and facilitators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of an experimental teaching carried out on 12-year-old students. An open-ended task was given to them and they had not been taught the algorithmic process leading to the solution. The formal solution to the problem refers to a system of two linear equations with two unknown quantities. In this mathematical activity, students worked cooperatively. They discussed their discoveries in groups of four and then presented their answers to the whole class developing a rich communication. This study describes the characteristic arguments that represent certain different forms of reasoning that emerged during the process of justifying the solutions of the problem. The findings of this research show that within an environment conducive to creativity, which encourages collaboration, exploration and sharing ideas, students can be engaged in developing multiple mathematical strategies, posing new questions, creating informal proofs, showing beauty and elegance and bringing out that problem solving is a powerful way of learning mathematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a larger study on “Gender practices and violence between peers: the stakes of mixed-sex education”, this paper examines the methodological challenges specific to carrying out ethnography in an elite high school. The researcher’s subjective experience in the field reveals the power dynamics at play in the elite setting. We also examine how interdisciplinary collective analysis of the observation journals unveils less-examined challenges to conceptualization in the research process. We call for the heuristic value when contradiction and subjectivity are acknowledged and implicated both in the field and data analysis, which leads us to articulate different social identities in the elite school environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings of Phase 1 of a larger study examining social connectedness in schools. A semi-structured interview was conducted with 14 teachers to ascertain perceptions of social connectedness across three high schools in a city in Queensland, Australia. The interview examined how teachers perceived four broad strategy levels for building social connectedness: (i) at a school level; (ii) linking to the broader community; (iii) at a classroom level; and (iv) helping individuals to connect. All schools employed school-wide practices to involve the community in the education process, recognizing the importance of cultural and background knowledge, civic participation, and school–community interactions. The three areas identified to improve connectedness within the school communities were to recognize and embrace the important role of technology for community building, to allow time within the curriculum for teachers to work on the social and emotional well-being of their students, and to reinforce efforts to develop a shared language for staff around pedagogical practices. Teachers gave strong support to the need for ongoing professional learning, peer collaboration, and administrative support, and sufficient quality time to achieve these outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the phenomenon of academic plagiarism among students enrolled in Secondary Education and High School. It is a subject poorly studied at pre-university level and very scantily discussed in the Spanish-speaking context. It investigates the frequency of committing plagiarism and the relationship between gender and procrastination and such practices. A questionnaire was administered to a representative sample (n=2,794). The results show that plagiarism is certainly present and widespread in the secondary classrooms. Furthermore, it shows that men have significantly higher levels of perpetration than women and than students who tend to leave the tasks until the last moment are more likely to plagiarize. The fruits of this research suggest the need to take into serious consideration the magnitude and severity of the problem identified; secondary schools should urgently plan and undertake measures in order to reduce and prevent the commission of this type of academic fraud. Secondly, results are useful to give clear guidance to teachers about the need for them to follow up and apply an effective control of the writing process of academic essays and tasks by students. Improving IT and library competences of the students has been identified as one of the main strategies needed to effectively address the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates engagement (E), alignment (A), and rigor (R) as vital signs of high-quality teacher instruction as measured by the EAR Classroom Visit Protocol, designed by the Institute for Research and Reform in Education (IRRE). Findings indicated that both school leaders and outside raters could learn to score the protocol with adequate reliability. Using observations of 33 English language arts (ELA) teachers and 25 mathematics teachers from four high schools, findings indicated that engagement, alignment, and rigor were all predictive of math and ELA standardized achievement test scores when controlling for the previous year's scores, although some of the associations were marginal. Students' self-reports of their engagement in school were also generally predictive of test scores in models that included perceived academic competence and observed engagement, alignment, or rigor. We discuss the importance of classroom engagement, alignment, and rigor as markers of instructional quality and the utility of the EAR Protocol as a means of assessing instructional quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]