The purpose of this study was to explore the motivation of a group of township learners who participated in a science fair known as Expo, by using phenomenography to explore their conceptions and experiences of Expo. The data comprised paragraphs written by the learners before the regional Expo and focus group interviews conducted afterwards. The…

"School Choice and School Improvement" brings together a collection of exemplary, policy-relevant papers that examine how communities, districts, and states use choice as a strategy for improving schools and student learning. The book includes sophisticated and insightful research on private schools and vouchers; charter schools and traditional…

On behalf of the states that participated in the 2009-10 State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards (SCASS) on Technical Skills Assessment, this paper addresses two significant issues facing the nation: ensuring that more students are both college and career ready and addressing the need for better and more quality data to evaluate…

Today's students grow up in a technological milieu of hand-held computers with high storage capacities, internet access, and the ability to shoot high definition photographs and video. As such, they are empowered to construct representations of the past virtually "on the run." In this article, the authors investigated the historical "and"…

This article addresses what factors best motivate individuals to work toward shared goals. We propose that when individuals do not identify highly with a group, their contributions will mimic others': An emphasis on things done will increase their contributions toward achieving a goal, because such emphasis suggests the goal is worth pursuing.…

Central to the debate over school choice has been the question of how public schools respond to market-based competition. Many choice advocates suggest that competition can spur public schools to become more effective and efficient, but the evidence regarding the effect of competition from charters is comparably sparse and mixed. This article…

Here we draw on recent research and on earlier contributions on convergence and divergence across Great Britain to consider possible future trajectories for 14-19 education and training in England. We use a UK-wide lens to reflect on 14-19 strategies in England by showing how common issues can be tackled in different ways in Scotland, Wales and…

Little empirical attention has been paid to state capital expenditures for higher education. While some anecdotal evidence exists that the process of appropriating capital dollars to higher education institutions is a particularly political process, no study has systematically examined the determinants of higher education state capital spending.…

The development and expansion of market solutions is one of the most important changes in Swedish education in the last 30 years. The aim of the article is to describe and analyse how students and staff in upper secondary schools perceive the impact of market competition on teachers' work. Three groups of actors in two Swedish regions were…

Aggressive behavior between children in schools is a topic that receives much interest as violence and aggressive behavior cause many maladaptive social outcomes in the school setting. In the current study the Implicit Association Test (IAT) was adapted as a measure of children's implicit aggression, by assessing the association of the self…

Although managers and professionals still compete in a career tournament for advancement and pay, the career boundaries that they cross in order to compete have changed. Traditionally, such individuals came up through the ranks within the same company by specializing in one functional area and changing, as needed, the geographic location of work…

Current instructional and learning models insist that when teachers prepare lessons for their technology and engineering classes, they must begin with a sense of what students already know. In preparing lessons, many teachers use their years of classroom experience as data to inform them about students' prior knowledge and about student…

In this paper we describe some of the complexities involved in the construction of a sample of "ordinary" schools. We outline the policy context in England that produces pressures to resist "ordinariness". The paper then explores two theoretical tools, fabrication and rhetoric, that are deployed in an analysis of some key…

Recent governments have transformed the English education system from an arrangement of local, democratically managed, groups of schools into a market free-for-all in which individual schools compete for pupils, status and resources. Elements of a market exist in the relationship between parents and private schools but much market behaviour is…

This paper examines the processes of tenure denial and appeal from the standpoint of the author, who has been the Grievance Chair at Carleton University since 2000. The focus is on the ways that the grievance process as textually mediated provides for regulation and control over the forms of interaction between appellants and senior…