Education Special Issue Research Articles

Learning Environment and the Comprehensive Examination of Nursing Students

The atmosphere of the classroom environment embodies an affective tone in which teaching and learning take place. The aim of this study was to find out the relationship of the learning environment and comprehensive examination results of Tagum Doctors' College Nursing students for school year 2009-2010. This study utilized a descriptive-correlation design of research. Pertinent data were collated through the use of the researcher-made questionnaires as the data-gathering tool and the level comprehensive examination results. The respondents of this study were the 35 first and 50 second-year students enrolled in Tagum Doctors' College, Inc. A complete enumeration was used in identifying the respondents since the same students went through the mandatory exam given by the school, to assess their level of knowledge of both general, special education issues and their specialty area. Using pearson r product moment correlation, findings revealed that there is no significant relationship between the extent of learning environment and the level of comprehensive examination result of both first- year and second-year nursing students in Tagum Doctors' College. This implies that the learning environment does not affect the level of comprehensive examination result of nursing students. This would mean that assessment is not a just a test but can be reflected in the learning process.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Globalisation, Societies, & Education

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Globalisation, Societies, & Education

Entrepreneurship, Creativity and Interdisciplinarity

This special issue of Industry and Higher Education is devoted to a selection of papers, reviewed and revised for publication, from the Eighth International Conference on ‘New Horizons in Industry, Business and Education’ (NHIBE) held in Chania, Crete, Greece in August 2013. This introductory paper provides an overview of the conference, summarizes the most important presentations and offers some reflections on the conference outcomes.

Unlocking Learning

Welcome to the Journal of Management Education (JME) special issue on Assessment in Management Education. We have talked about the importance of this topic for years and are happy to present a special issue to help our readers think critically about the “what, why, and how” of assessment. Assessment is a reality of life for management educators, but the ideal assessment plan can be quite elusive. Historically we can identify both effective and ineffective uses of assessment. For a positive example, we turn to Alverno College (Alverno College Faculty, 1994; Mulvey, 1992). In 1973, Alverno implemented an abilitybased curriculum that employs competency assessment and faculty feedback to assess students’ performance instead of traditional testing. They focused on eight abilities, including critical thinking, social interaction, and communication, that faculty considered the foundation of liberal arts education. Instead of assessing students at the end of the program, Alverno students begin the assessment process as soon as they enroll in the College. Thus, their assessment process is not a single point in time but spans students’ entire college career. In addition, students are assessed on abilities in the context of real-life situations using specified criteria, and then they receive individualized feedback they can use for further development. These assessments are also integrated into course work and tied to a real-world professional work context (e.g., the integrated competence seminar in the middle of each program).

Instruction, Not Inclusion, Should Be the Central Issue in Special Education: An Alternative View from the USA

Abstract A focus on anything other than instruction undercuts the legal and moral rights of students with disabilities to an appropriate education and fails to produce substantive social justice. Differences among differences must be recognized to guarantee the civil educational rights to which people with disabilities are entitled. Instructionally-relevant differences include many disabilities, but they do not include such differences as skin hue, parentage, sexual orientation, national origin, and many other kinds of diversity. If special education's focus is inclusion rather than effective instruction of students with disabilities or if all differences are assumed to be equal and have the same remedy, then special education will one day be looked upon as having gone through a period of shameful neglect of students' needs.

Note from the Editors

We are pleased to present to our readers our first issue as the editors of Journal of International Special Needs Education (JISNE) as the journal begins its seventeenth year. We hope to continue the great tradition of high quality that was maintained under the scholarly and wise editorship of Dr. Thomas P. Gumpel for the past seven years. Under Tom's leadership, JISNE has grown significantly. The quantity and quality of submissions to the journal have greatly increased from within and outside of the U.S.A., underlining the international nature of the journal. Additionally, the journal moved to become an e-journal since Fall 2013. It has been a great pleasure and a learning experience for both of us to work with Tom as Associate Editors during the past year. We thank Tom for his enthusiastic stewardship of the Council for Exceptional Children-Division of International Special Education and Services' flagship journal, and wish him all success in his future endeavors.We are also pleased to welcome the new and returning Editorial Board members. JISNE follows the double-blind peer review process whereby the reviewers and the authors are unaware of each other's identity. We rely on the Editorial Board members and Field Reviewers for their service in validating the information that is contained in the manuscript and commenting on its quality. The constructive feedback from reviewers helps the authors to improve their manuscripts to make them more relevant for JISNE's diverse readership.We believe this special issue of JISNE, devoted to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability would be of great interest to the readers. Three of the four articles presented in this special issue cover topics related to the CRPD reflecting different perspectives. We are thankful to Tom for initiating this issue.Winzer and Mazurek's article addresses the genealogy of the CRPD, and the authors argue that the CRPD is both a human rights treaty and a development tool. Schooling is enshrouded as a rights-based case, and inclusive education is viewed as a development tool.Kauffman and Badar argue that instruction, not inclusion, should be the central issue in special education. Anything other than instruction undercuts the legal and moral rights of students with disabilities to an appropriate education and fails to produce substantive social justice.Kanter, Damiani, and Ferri emphasize the importance of Article 24 of the CRPD to ensure an inclusive education system at all levels. The authors then discuss the role of inclusive education in Italy, which has long been regarded as a leader in the field of inclusive education.Argyropoulos and colleagues highlight the framework and discuss the results of an action research project which aimed to facilitate the adoption of assistive technology devices and specialized software by teachers of students with visual impairment.We would like to thank the authors for their thought provoking articles, and our reviewers for their contribution to a high-quality issue. We hope you will find these articles interesting and informative to read. Finally yet importantly, we encourage potential authors to continue to submit their original research, research syntheses, multi-case country studies, and evidence-based policy analyses to JISNE. Do check out our revised author and reviewer guidelines at http://www.jisne.org/.—Rashida Banerjee & Dimitris AnastasiouEditors

Multidisciplinary Collaboration to Support Struggling Readers: Centering Culture in Concerns About Process and Outcomes

Our commentary responds to the five articles of the special issue on multidisciplinary collaboration to support struggling readers. From our perspectives informed by experiences working with diverse student and family populations in urban settings, preparing pre- and in-service educators and specialists to do the same, and working in federally funded technical assistance and dissemination centers focused on equity issues in general and special education, we highlight themes and raise issues across the articles. Accordingly, we discuss learning to read in the broader context of literacy acquisition, and examine issues of effectiveness, power, and privilege within consultative and collaborative professional relationships aimed at addressing diverse learners' reading capacities and outcomes.

Introduction: Conceptual Change and Its Models

This special issue of Science and Education contains selected articles from the Conceptual Change and Its Models (ConChaMo) workshops held in 2012–2013 in Helsinki, Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, made possible with the generous support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. The workshops brought together researchers from diverse fields of science, cognitive science and educational sciences, in order to develop views and insight how conceptual learning and conceptual change takes place and could be facilitated in science learning. Conceptual change is a central notion of many contemporary accounts of learning. It refers to learning process, where learners do not merely accumulate more knowledge, but where their conceptions of phenomena in a certain domain undergo a restructuring process, leading from common-sense beliefs to scientific conceptions. The conceptual change approach on learning has potential to transform science education, and bring it closer to the empirical and theoretical work on conceptual development, concept learning, and conceptual evolution in psychology, philosophy and cognitive science. The general goal of the thematic special issue is to facilitate interdisciplinary communication so that progress will be made towards integrated theories of conceptual change. The aim is not only to bring researchers and ideas together, but also to unite them in the form of new types of research methods and theoretical models. Combining the approaches of the psychological, educational, philosophical, and computational sciences will result in deeper understanding of conceptual change. Conceptual change, as a research paradigm itself, and how the different views on cognitive and psychological mechanisms have framed the conceptions of conceptual change, is discussed in the article Towards an Explanation for Conceptual Change: A Mechanistic Alternative by Anna-Mari Rusanen. She introduces some new viewpoint on understanding the conceptual change as a research paradigm, and argues that proper understanding of conceptual change hinges on proper description for the information processing task and on cognitive mechanisms responsible for those tasks.

Is French immersion a special education loophole? … And does it intensify issues of accessibility and exclusion?

What happens when children are asked to give up their right to special education in order to access a French immersion program? By examining one mother's efforts to secure gifted support in a French immersion program, this critical inquiry offers a parental perspective of the special education issues of accessibility and inclusion. The two children at the center of Beatrice's narrative, Julie and Liz, initially received attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) and attention deficit disorder (ADD) diagnoses and were subsequently identified with a gifted exceptionality. After outlining Beatrice's interlocking challenges with special education identification and support in French immersion, key themes are discussed along with their related implications for research, policy, and practice. In Beatrice's experience, a bilingual program proved to be a loophole, where one's legal right to access gifted special education support was circumvented. While the author focuses on a Canadian French immersion setting, the findings outlined in this paper have larger implications for bilingual programs around the world, such as dual language education programs.

Trending in 2014: Hippocrates

Trending in 2014: Hippocrates

Multilingual resources in classroom interaction: ethnographic and discourse analytic perspectives

This special issue of Language and Education contributes to a distinctive and growing tradition of ethnographic and discourse analytic research on multilingual classroom interaction. To illustrate the nature and significance of the articles assembled here, this introduction provides a brief genealogy of this research tradition. We review two broad generations of studies, along with some of the different orienting theories and methodologies guiding the studies: (1) a first generation of research in multilingual classroom contexts that grew out of the field of linguistic anthropology in North America and (2) a second generation of studies, emerging from the early 1990s onwards, that developed critical, interpretive approaches to the study of multilingual classroom interaction. The second-generation studies were conducted in a wider range of research sites, including post-colonial settings, and they were explicitly framed with reference to language-in-education policies. We then introduce the five articles in this special issue. We argue that they represent a third generation of studies that are opening up new epistemological spaces at the interface with other fields of research, such as multimodality in classroom interaction or ethnography of language policy, while building on the robust foundation of first- and second-generation research in multilingual classrooms.

An Introduction to the Journal of Nano Education's Special Issue Commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the NSF NUE Program: A Story of the NUE Program's Impact at Valdosta State University

An Introduction to the Journal of Nano Education's Special Issue Commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the NSF NUE Program: A Story of the NUE Program's Impact at Valdosta State University

Introduction: Science and Literature Special Isssue

The most extraordinary fact about the need for a discussion of the relationship of Science and Literature, is that it needs discussing. The strangeness of the idea can be more fully elaborated if we consider it next to two other great conjunctions, Science and History and Science and Philosophy. The former, Science and History, was in existence even before Science and History acquired their present disciplinary panoplies. There is a well-documented story of how history was used in understanding the work of early modern natural philosophers, for example, or how History of Science itself emerged as a coherent modern discipline within the Twentieth century (Kragh 1989, pp. 1–19). The latter conjunction, Science and Philosophy, had its origins in the birth of systematized thinking. From there, it has only grown stronger. In these cases, there seems to be no need to establish the necessity of the rapprochement or argue for its inevitability. What is then the differentiating factor for Science and Literature? What is the reason that two such broad and archetypical fields of study are only cautiously approached together? Or to be more provocative, why aren’t there Departments of Science and Literature alongside the venerable History and Philosophy of Science Departments and Programs? These are of course rather rhetorical questions. But in the next few pages, we will try to take them at face value, in order to show how this special issue of Science & Education tackles the subject of Science and Literature. A first attempt to examine the apparent incompatibility of Science and Literature is to consider their relationship historically. It could be the case that what we today call Science did not intersect with Literature, in their evolution towards modern disciplinary status. But recent scholarship has done much to dispel such notions. Even in the case of exemplary figures of early modern sciences, such as Galileo Galilei or Nikolaus Copernicus, it has

Tolerable and inclusive learning spaces: an evaluation of policies and specifications for physical environments that promote inclusion in Turkish Primary Schools

Inclusive education (IE), which calls for equal opportunities for students with diverse abilities in the achievement of knowledge, has been developed as a central pedagogical strategy in primary schools worldwide, including those in Turkey. Besides educators, the issue of IE becomes an important discussion area among designers who question the provision of supportive learning environments in terms of inclusion. Equal opportunity, diversity, social justice and participation are necessary parameters for a comprehensive understanding of inclusion and the evaluation of the spatial character of inclusive learning environments. The lack of clarity of ideas about inclusion leads to limited implementation of IE in Turkey. Insufficient provision of school facilities that are necessary for IE and a lack of effective and comprehensive design approaches for physical learning environments further complicate this situation. Design specifications in Turkish regulations regarding inclusive learning environments in primary schools remain too technical, as they merely focus on the issue of disability and special education rather than inclusion. This paper focuses on assessing the conformity of these regulations to universal design (UD), a recent architectural design strategy that supports the idea of inclusion in physical environments through its mission of design for all and design for equity and social justice and seeks to make physical environments accessible, usable and tolerable for all students with diverse abilities.

Crossing the Divide? Diversity Issues in Teacher Education and Special Education

We would like to thank the editors of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) for the opportunity to respond to Leah Wasburn-Moses's thoughtful response to our article, Diversity in Teacher Education and Special Education: The Issues That Divide. In our article, we identified what we believe are fundamental differences in how voices in the special education and general teacher education diversity communities think about human differences and suggested that these differences represent a that has proved difficult to bridge. We argued, for example, that the discourse in special education is underpinned by cognitive perspectives on teaching and learning that contrast sharply with the sociocultural theories of learning that inform the work of many general teacher educators working from a social justice perspective. We were careful not to claim, however, that the positions we ascribed to dominant voices in special education apply to all special educators, a point Wasburn-Moses raises. The work of some special educators is informed by the same sociocultural theories that underpin our work, and certainly there are more than a few researchers in the general teacher education community whose work is informed by cognitive theories of learning. We recognize that in any field, there are many voices, but in the case of special education, the discourse continues to be strongly influenced by cognitive theories of learning and the theoretical divide between the special education and general teacher education diversity communities has made collaboration between (many) special educators and general teacher educators nettlesome. Similarly, we did not--and would not--claim that social justice is an issue that is of interest only to general teacher educators. We can think of many special educators who have long-held commitments to social justice, including Janette Klingner, Beth Harry, Marlene Pugach, Mara Sapon-Shevin, Tom Skrtic, Steve Gelb, and Kathy McMahon-Klosterman (one of Wasburn-Moses's colleagues at Miami University) among others. Lou Denti (Denti & Whang, 2012), a special educator at California State University-Monterey Bay, edited a recently published volume specifically devoted to issues of social justice, a volume to which Curt Dudley-Marling contributed a chapter. And, of course, there are many general teacher educators with no particular commitments to social justice. Again, as this is a major point raised in Wasburn-Moses's response to our article, we want to be clear that we are not claiming that there is one perspective shared by all and only special educators or by all and only general teacher educators. Clearly there are overlaps between these groups. However, at this point in time, discourses in these two communities represent a that has been difficult to span. Space limitations do not permit us to respond to all of the points Wasburn-Moses raised in her critique of our essay. Here we elaborate on a few of the most important issues she raised. Our Charge First, we agree with Wasburn-Moses that polarizing the work that relates to diversity in general teacher education and special education ultimately does not serve either field very well. However, it is important to understand the argument in our essay in terms of the task we were asked to take up in the JTE special issue edited by Marleen Pugach, Linda Blanton, and Lani Florian (2012), which explored diversity and disability in teacher education. The editors titled the editorial that introduced their special issue unsettling conversations, and they characterized the issue's aim as unravel[ing] the thorny problem of why ... there has been comparatively little discussion about the role of special education within the larger discourse of diversity of race, class, culture, and language (p. 235). They called for an honest, difficult, and much-needed dialogue across diversity communities, which they anticipated would engender inherent discomfort as we crossed into unfamiliar territory (p. …

Introduction: How Science Works—and How to Teach It

The contents of this special issue of Science & Education are the offspring of a workshop named How Science Works and How to Teach It, which was organized in collaboration with European Society for the History of Science and held at Aarhus University, Denmark, in June 2011. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together historians and philosophers of science and science education researchers to discuss how to improve teaching and learning of how science works in science education. (The term how science works was considered appropriately inclusive. For brevity we will also use the more familiar NOS). The workshop had 30 participants from 12 countries (Cyprus, USA, Brazil, France, Australia, Germany, Italy, Finland, Denmark, Colombia, Spain, and Austria) approximately equally distributed between historians and philosophers on one side, at science educators on the other. There were 21 presentations and additional workshop discussions. The rationale behind bringing the two groups of expertise together can be stated at two levels: At a pragmatic level, teaching of how science works must balance validity in the representations of science with (systemic) educational purposes and perceived meaningfulness on the side of the students. To achieve this both kinds of expertise are clearly necessary. Direct contact between groups should enable a dialogical renegotiation of the balance between elements. At a theoretical level, the workshop rationale relates to forms of knowledge and knowledge-transformations. We know that there is a large gap between academic knowledge about history and philosophy of science, and the NOS-knowledge enacted and learned in classrooms. Even in the ideal classroom situation one should expect some gap, since knowledge necessarily is transformed as it crosses institutional contexts, from the field of knowledge production (History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science) to the field of reproduction (Science Education). Basil Bernstein (1990) has used the term recontextualization to designate this transformation process, while the French mathematician Yves Chevallard talks about ‘didactical transposition’ (DT) (Chevallard 1985).

What patients want

ObjectiveAlthough most health care professionals im- or explicitly will assume that they tend to use patient-centered communication strategies, there are reasons to believe that this might not always be a valid assumption. In everyday practice, professionals’ own value system is often the dominant steering guide. This Special Issue aims to bring together ongoing research and reflections about the quality of health care communication from the patients’ own perspective. In short: what do patients want? MethodsThis introduction presents a comprehensive overview of the papers in the special issue of Patient Education and Counseling within a framework that describes the collected papers according to the six functions of medical consultations, taking account of the studies’ applied methodologies: quantitative versus qualitative. ResultsTwo functions of the medical consultation are strongly represented in the collected papers on the quality of communication from the patients’ perspective: ‘fostering the relationship’ and ‘information giving’. There is a remarkable difference between the qualiative and quantitative studies, showing that if patients are not limited to prestructured questionnaires but completely free to express themselves, they tend to focus on ‘fostering the relationship’ with an emphasis on personal attention, warmth and empathy. ConclusionsPatients’ needs and preferences for personalized and humane medical care cannot be overestimated. For the rest, patient diversity is striking, showing the limited usefulness of general communication guidelines for the other five functions of the medical consultation. Researchers should be aware that patients’ views might be different dependent on the applied methodologies.

Dedication of this Special Issue of Canadian and International Education to Joe Farrell

Dedication of this Special Issue of Canadian and International Education to Joe FarrellDecember, 2012Joe's life and work was multidimensional: he was not just a world class scholar and leader of comparative and international education, and a mentor for colleagues and students; Joe was also a Scout leader, a folk guitarist, and a loving father and grandfather who used to talk about his grandchildren often and passionately. Writing about all these aspects of Joe's life and work would require a voluminous book.We dedicate this special issue of Canadian and International Education (CIE) to Professor Joe Farrell who passed away on Saturday, December 8, 2012 as a result of a sudden case of septicemia. Over the course of his career, Joe made tremendous contributions to the field of comparative and international education. Joe was the founder of the Comparative, International, and Development Education Centre (CIDEC) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). He was a world renowned professor for more than four decades, and a great mentor of innumerable students, instructors, and fellow inquirers around the world. His award winning research on alternative schools in the developing world, educational planning, and equity in education has informed educational practice and scholarship worldwide.In this dedication, I reflect as editor of Canadian and International Education upon my own experiences with Joe Farrell. I've also asked Sarfaroz Niyozov, CIDEC Co-Director and author of one of the articles in this special issue; Melissa White and Grazia Scoppio, members of the Comparative and International Education Society of Canada (CIESC) executive and former doctoral students of Joe's, and Vandra Masemann, former colleague of Joe's and former CIESC President, to write about the personal impact he had on their lives.Reflections of Marianne Larsen, Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario, and Canadian and International Education EditorI first met Joe in the fall of 1999. I had completed my Masters in Comparative and International Education at the Institute of Education, University of London and was going to spend a year back home in Toronto before beginning my doctorate in England again in 2000. My supervisor, Bob Cowen, put me in touch with Joe to see if I could be a guest member of the CIDEC community over the course of the year. Joe was so warm and welcoming to me. He found an office space for me, invited me to present my research to the CIDEC community, and made me feel as though CIDEC was my academic home for the year. In March 2000, I went to the CIES conference in San Antonio and was delighted to see a panel comprised of Andreas Kazamias, Bob Cowen, Rolland Paulston, and Joe Farrell. They reflected on the state of the field of comparative and international education, and called for different approaches to the study of the international, such as the historical, sociological and philosophical. Joe pointed out the difficulty of trying to use comparative education to predict the future and the need to attend to narrative detail in our work. His words were inspiring to me as a new scholar in the field and are still to this day.Reflections of Sarfaroz Niyozov, Co-Director, Comparative, International and development Centre, OISE, University of TorontoLosing Joe was a personal shock equal to losing a family member. Joe has been a positive influence in my life since 1997, when I arrived at OISE from Tajikistan via Karachi (Pakistan). As I joined OISE, my advisor, noting my background and interest in international education and post-Soviet development issues suggested that I get in touch with Joe Farrell and David Wilson. So I became a member of Joe's comparative circle, attending classes, joining CIDEC discussions, and reflecting on the learning. Occasionally Joe would invite me to lunch and share his experiences of working in and with socialist countries such as his work in Chile and his meeting with early post-Soviet policy makers. …

Knowledge and school talk: Intellectual accommodations to literacy?

This paper introduces the goals of the research project on which this special issue of Linguistics and Education is based. A case is made for considering contemporary education as saturated by and dependent on oral and written language, and on beliefs and practices that relate knowledge, talk, reading and writing. The project is directed at a better understanding of the relationship between oral and written language, and, through collaborations between researchers and teachers, at improving practices that encourage learning. This paper frames the special issue by pointing to a crucial but largely unremarked misalignment – between teaching and learning via classroom interaction and assessment via individual written performance – that lies at the center of current educational practice. A recognition of that misalignment and its significance for students together call for a theoretical and empirical re-engagement with the relationship between literacy education and knowledge on the part of educational practitioners and researchers.

PBIS as Prevention for High-Risk Youth in Alternative Education, Residential, and Juvenile Justice Settings

This special issue of Education and Treatment of Children explores the use of positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS) as a means of prevention for high-risk youth being served in non-traditional, more restrictive educational settings including alternative education (AE), residential, and juvenile justice (JJ) settings. PBIS is a multi-tiered framework differentiating interventions and intensity of delivery based on student needs and data; and is applicable across all education settings. Currently, the PBIS framework has been implemented in many traditional education settings and has recently been adopted and adapted to non-traditional settings. Youth within these settings present a wide range of academic and behavioral deficits and excesses that could benefit from the tiered support within the PBIS framework. The goal of this special issue is to provide empirical and practical information on the PBIS framework to educators and a wide-range of service providers (e.g., behavior specialists, counselors, mental health, advocacy, and policy organization personnel) who work with high-risk youth in AE, residential, and JJ settings to improve youth outcomes and teacher effectiveness. In an effort to (a) support the continued and extended use of PBIS in these settings; (b) focus on the utility of PBIS as a method of prevention, in particular as a means to address the school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon of more restrictive placements and possible incarceration; and (c) provide resources and research directions for the field, we have assembled articles that address implementation of PBIS in AE settings across the tiers and provide lessons learned from research and implementation. To begin, we offer articles that provide an overview of the overarching goals of and need for PBIS in restrictive educational settings. Simonsen and Sugai offer a rationale for why PBIS is needed in restrictive educational settings by linking the broader PBIS literature to the needs of high-risk youth in these settings and how interventions can be intensified across the three tiers. To further contextualize this need, Benner and colleagues offer support for how PBIS can be used to bridge the achievement gap between high-risk youth and their typically developing peers through the use of effective instructional practices. Swain-Bradway and colleagues present common facilitators and barriers from stakeholder interviews of administrators and PBIS team members currently implementing PBIS in AE, residential, and JJ settings to guide future implementation of PBIS across these settings. Next, in an effort to provide empirical support and lessons learned from implementing PBIS across the tiers, we offer examples at the primary (tier I), secondary (tier II), and tertiary (tier III) tiers. …