The December 2008 special issue of the "Oxford Review of Education" provided a review of education policy during Tony Blair's tenure as Prime Minister. This paper forms a response to the ten contributions to that special issue and discusses some of the issues raised in them. While a few positive aspects of education under New Labour were…

In contrast to Shultz and Takane [Shultz, T.R., & Takane, Y. (2007). Rule following and rule use in the balance-scale task. "Cognition", in press, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.12.004.] we do not accept that the traditional Rule Assessment Method (RAM) of scoring responses on the balance scale task has advantages over latent class analysis (LCA):…

"The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales" (1992) by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith was awarded a Randolph Caldecott Honor Medal in 1993. Scieszka and Smith subvert textual authority through playing "with literary and cultural codes and conventions" (McCallum 1996, p. 400) in their metafictive text. In this article, I discuss the…

In this article, the author comments on John Radford's article "Psychology in its Place," which is a provocative and thoughtful piece on the state of psychology as a discipline in higher education. In his article, Radford introduces evidence that psychology graduates are attractive to employers for their numeracy and literacy skills and…

In what ways might people counteract the prevailing practices that encourage school professionals to resist, ignore, avoid, and discount parental opinions, perspectives, desires, and knowledge about their children's lives? In what ways might parents themselves inform the process of increasing involvement and establishing partnerships? The studies…

Initial studies on the acquisition of two Spanish copulas, "ser" and "estar", emerged from a research agenda exploring whether second language (L2) development was driven by universal mechanisms manifested in stages rather than an accumulation of entities (Rutherford, 1987). Concerning the Spanish copulas, the stages of acquisition through which…

One of the questions an author/illustrator of picture books is often asked is: "Who do you write and illustrate for?" This paper asserts that the most successful creations are those produced without too much concern for how they will be received, or by whom. They do not set out to appeal to a predefined audience, they build one for…

This dissertation draws on textual reader response theory and humanities-based Disability Studies theories to explores the ways in which preservice teachers participating in a course called "Issues of Diversity in Children's and Adolescent Literature" and their instructor, who is also the researcher, made sense of representations of disability in…

Dutro discusses an analysis of the disconnect between the material realities of the lives of a group of third-grade children living in poverty and the middle-class assumptions of a district-mandated unit within a literacy curriculum. The analysis arose in the context of an ethnographic study of identity and classroom literacy practices; it was…

This article describes elaboration in "literary letters" (Atwell, 1984, 1987) written by developmental reading students. Nineteen community college students received instruction in "elaborative thought patterns," or types of elaboration, to improve the quality of their responses to popular fiction. This instruction was part of…

This article investigates mental representations of literary characters and their relations with other aspects of response to literature and age, gender, and expertise. A Saga chapter and the beginning of a contemporary novel were presented to 16 participants from each of three age groups (13 years, 17 years, adults) equally divided by gender and…

Amongst academics working with postgraduate students, there has recently been increasing interest in ways of supporting advanced academic literacy (AAL). This is a concern for us at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where we teach a diverse group of postgraduate students, most of whom are subject practitioners in…

Offers reaction to McBride and Martin's article on eclecticism in counseling. Acknowledges hierarchy of eclectic practices presented by McBride and Martin provides a refined depiction of the state of eclectic practice in the field of mental health counseling. However, strong disagreement is expressed with unenthusiastic attitude toward…

The objective of this study was to determine how readers process narrative texts when the main character has multiple, and changing, goals. Readers must keep track of such goals to understand the causal relations between text events, an important process for comprehension. The structure building framework theory of reading proposes that readers…

This is a brief response to some of the issues raised by Gorard and Fitz in their paper, "What counts as evidence in the school choice debate?" published in the "British Educational Research Journal" v32, n6, 2006. Gorard and Fitz claim a "basic arithmetic error" (p. 807) in giving equal weighting to all LEAs (Noden,…