Over the last two decades, extensive research has been conducted concerning the legality and effectiveness of teaching opposing viewpoints on controversial topics in science education. However, one of the most important aspects of this dilemma has been disregarded: the effect it has on individual teachers in their unique environments. The purpose of this research was to analyze teachers comprehension of recent state legislation as well as how it impacts their instruction. This quantitative approach took place through an online survey of secondary science teachers in biology, which focuses on their teaching experience, understanding of the Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008, and personal views on how evolution should be taught. The research found that about one-third (31%) of biology teachers in Louisiana thought creationism should be taught alongside evolution. About 3 in 4 biology teachers knew what the Louisiana Science Education Act was, and 1 in 10 said it had an influence on their instruction. These data support the hypothesis that recent state legislation has little impact on the daily instruction of science educators.

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This thesis attempts to provide evidence, based in historical and contemporary research, of the importance of early years education, not only in terms of academic achievement, but of social outcomes as well; to examine the perceptions of teachers in relationship to societal influences and the effects of such on the changing educational needs of the child; and to suggest possible elements for high quality programme development in the early years. Section I attempts to set in context certain apparent key influences on the growth and development of early childhood education. Whilst the main focus of the thesis is a comparison of Britain and Canada, Section I also provides an international context by examining early years programmes in several other countries. Section II addresses the critical nature of familial and community environments with respect to parents' initial involvement as their children's first teachers and their continued involvement in a partnership with schools. This section also discusses the importance of early intervention for children 'at risk' in the context of its broad benefits to society. Section III deals with the methodology and data analysis of a survey of teachers in Britain and Canada. The survey, complemented by interviews with several of the respondents, was designed to gather perceptions and reflections from teachers. Section IV identifies features of successful early childhood programs in terms of what appears to work according to current research and the perceptions of teachers. In addition, it provides illustrations of selected programmes in Canada and Britain that have incorporated many of these features. Since societal changes identified in the thesis are urging educators and policy makers to re-examine their approach to early years provision, the last section suggests elements necessary for high quality early education programmes that will provide opportunities to maximise the individual potential of all children.

The latter part of the twentieth century experienced an increased emphasis in industrialised societies on educational performance, and ongoing efforts are still in progress to enhance levels of performance, particularly to prepare young people for the ever-changing work demands occasioned by the revolution in communications and in the provision of information. Educationalists have been interested in the replicability of successful school systems, and this has resulted in a focus upon decision-making at the various levels of educational governance. At school level the concepts of enabling conditions and development capacity are now well grounded in the theory of school effectiveness and school improvement. Within the IQEA (Improving The Quality of Education for All) Project, schools are encouraged to develop their management and classroom conditions at the same time as they work upon their improvement initiatives. There exist a number of instruments devised within the project to measure the capacity of schools both at management and classroom level to sustain a culture of school improvement. Along with this interest in school-based improvement initiatives, there has been an increasing interest in the part various stake-holders within the school community can play in school improvement. One such group are students, and teachers, particularly within IQEA, have increasingly wished to consult them when undertaking or evaluating policy changes within their schools. To this end teachers have also been interested in comparing their own views with those of their students on the culture of the school and its classrooms. This thesis represents an attempt to provide teachers with just such an instrument of comparison. It first contextualises the notion of Student Conditions within the literature of School Improvement Conditions. In devising, conceptualising and researching a set of Student Conditions which are related to the IQEA Classroom Conditions this work sets out not only to give teachers and senior management a means of triangulating their own views with those of the students in their school, it also provides data for teachers to gauge the capacity of the student body to sustain school improvement. Preliminary results from the piloting of the Student Conditions Survey are presented. The final chapter discusses the implications for teaching and learning, for school improvement initiatives and for the culture of classrooms and schools if these student conditions are to be developed. The Student Conditions are, in the order they appear in the thesis: Self-assessment - The ability of students to reflect upon and to improve the quality of their own work. Independent Learning - The ability of students to access the skills and resources necessary to achieve learning autonomy. Affinity to teachers - The ability of students to maintain a relationship with teachers that enables them to seek and receive help and support when they require it. Learning repertoire - The ability of students to exploit fully the range of teaching and learning strategies encountered in and out of the classroom. Orientation to Learning - The ability of students to be self-motivated, and to enjoy learning. Adjustment to School - The ability of students to learn within a structured environment of rules and behaviour parameters. Along with the two other Conditions Surveys, the Student Conditions Survey is intended to contribute to a battery of research instruments, which will provide useful data and an agenda for a whole-school discussion on how schools can improve. The thesis also presents data from the piloting of the research instrument in over 40 IQEA Schools, and briefly outlines how some of these schools have used the findings in their improvement initiatives.

This case study analyses the implementation of the Food and Nutrition Policy for New Brunswick Schools. This policy was developed by the New Brunswick Department of Education and adopted in the legislature in 1991. Its goal was to enhance the nutritional status of provincial school children. Policies like this one represent a new direction for both education and health promotion and warrant investigation because of their potential benefits to student health and learning. In this case, a top-down approach to policy development and implementation proved largely ineffective, so the purpose of this research was to analyse the policy process in order to identify the factors that influenced implementation and to recommend future actions to enhance the processes involved. The analytical constructs were "capacity" and "will," the ability and desire to implement a policy. The combined macro-and micro-level analyses involved investigating the history and current status of the policy obtained through an examination of government and other documents, 66 interviews with provincial, district, and school-based participants, and observations of six schools in two districts. The results indicate that four factors influenced implementation: (a) the nature of the policy, (b) the organisational milieu, (c) the approach to policy development, and (d) the approach to implementation. The analysis of these factors combined with an examination of implementation at the local level indicate that if the Food and Nutrition Policy is to be more successfully implemented in future, 'capacity' and 'will' need more attention. The Department of Education must recognise that implementation requires a significant investment of time, money, and expertise, and the re-organisation of school food services to promote health; and that the process of change needs to be more collaborative and participative to encourage educators to see nutrition as more integral to their professional roles.

Most of us can empathise with feeling stressed. Each of us has our own unique interpretation of what stress is and our own understanding of what stress feels like. We each feel stress from a variety of sources and for a variety of reasons. We all have different coping strategies, which may or may not be effective. It is likely we learned our coping strategies in childhood; children who cope successfully with stress are likely to become adults who cope with stress successfully. Stress is not necessarily a 'bad thing': it can have many positive benefits. But too much stress, or coping ineffectively with repeated stress over long periods of time can have harmful effects on physical and psychological well being. This research investigates stress in school children, focusing specifically on school stress and everyday stressors inherent in schooling. It lets the pupils taking part in the research define their own stress and set the agenda for the research. How the pupils define their stress, their assessment of what is stressful for them in their life at school and how it makes them feel are all accepted unconditionally, and I have endeavoured to be non-judgemental in processing the information about stress disclosed to me by these pupils. The research was conducted over a two year period (1993-1994), at the eleven to sixteen comprehensive school where the author is employed. The data were collected by means of questionnaire, semi-structured interview and pupils' own personal writing and 'stress diaries'. After piloting, the first questionnaire was issued in January 1993 to one hundred and eighty volunteers in every form and every year group in the school (six questionnaires to each of the thirty tutor groups in the school). Of these questionnaires, 167 were returned (92.8%). The questionnaire asked respondents who would be prepared to be interviewed at a later stage, to identify themselves. Forty-five pupils volunteered. From these volunteers I selected pupils who had indicated that they had experienced feeling stress at school at some time on their questionnaire. I tried to keep a balance between males and females wherever possible, and to choose volunteers from across the age range. There were ten male and eleven female interviewees in the final selection one male and one female from year seven; one male and two females from year eight; two males and two females from year nine; and three males and three females from years ten and eleven respectively. The process was repeated again in 1994. Of the one hundred and eighty questionnaires issued in 1994, one hundred and forty three were returned (79%). Possible explanations for the difference in the number of questionnaires returned are discussed in Chapter 6. The same volunteers were interviewed in 1994 as in 1993, with the addition of two new volunteers, one male and one female, from year seven. The questionnaires and interviews were issued and conducted during the same time periods in both years. This was deliberately done to maintain consistency, to confirm the data collected in 1993 and to highlight any periods during the school year when pupils reported feeling more stress than at other times. This was successful as much of the data collected in 1994 does confirm the findings of 1993, and helps to build up a remarkably consistent picture of how pupils perceive stress at school. Originally, the author had planned to repeat the research method for a third year, but it was felt unnecessary to do this due to the corroborative nature of the data already collected. I have presented the results of each year separately rather than amalgamated the two sets of data, not only to emphasise this correlation but also because I wished to present as detailed a picture as possible of the stressful aspects of school life as perceived by the pupils, and although much of it is similar, none of it is the same. Each pupil has offered their own unique interpretation of the stressful school experiences he/she has encountered, and I felt it was important to include them all as equally important and valid in order to preserve the aims and integrity of the research. It would be impossible to amalgamate the data without trivialising the disparity of the experiences being disclosed to me. The main findings of this research suggest that there is a diverse, but ultimately exhaustive, range of school experiences pupils describe as being stressful for them. Most of these experiences can be categorised into domains relating to stressors which are curriculum generated; stressors which are the result of conflict in relationships with peers, teachers and/or family members; everyday life stressors not necessarily associated directly with school and a range of individually unique ‘one off’ stressors ...

This thesis reports a case study of the final years of compulsory schooling in a multi-ethnic inner-city school (City Road Comprehensive). Data was collected during two years of intensive ethnographic field work, principally via informal interviews and participant observation. Pupils in two mixed ability form groups were studied as they moved through the subject options process of the third year, throughout their fourth year and into the final year of compulsory education. A third mixed ability form group were also studied during the subject options process. The thesis explores some of the school-based influences which shaped the pupils' experience of City Road. Following a consideration of my research methodology, and a brief description of the social composition and academic organization of the school, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 offer a detailed -analysis of the subject options process. Although the pupils' gained access to a majority of their original option choices, it was the senior staff who came to dominate the options system. However, form tutors and subject teachers also retained some influence over pupils' decisions. The options process represented a form of academic selection, resulting in significant differences between pupils' upper school curricula. Gender and the senior staff's perception of pupils' 'ability' were particularly important. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the pupils' experience of the upper school. In a modified form the processes of differentiation and polarization, described in previous case studies (Hargreaves, 1967; Lacey, 1970; Ball, 1981), were seen to operate within City Road. The complex, negotiated character of pupil adaptations is examined, analysing the factors in the teacher-pupil relationship which placed West Indian pupils in a relatively disadvantaged position within the pupil population. I conclude by considering aspects of the 'micro-macro' problem and highlighting the need for further research arising from this study.

This research argues that the formative assessment of student coursework in free-form, diagram-based domains can be automated using CBA techniques in a way which is both feasible and useful. Formative assessment is that form of assessment in which the objective is to assist the process of learning undertaken by the student. The primary deliverable associated with formative assessment is feedback. CBA courseware provides facilities to implement the full lifecycle of an exercise through an integrated, online system. This research demonstrates that CBA offers unique opportunities for student learning through formative assessment, including allowing students to correct their solutions over a larger number of submissions than it would be feasible to allow within the context of traditional assessment forms. The approach to research involves two main phases. The first phase involves designing and implementing an assessment course using the CourseMarker / DATsys CBA system. This system, in common with may other examples of CBA courseware, was intended primarily to conduct summative assessment. The benefits and limitations of the system are identified. The second phase identifies three extensions to the architecture which encapsulate the difference in requirements between summative assessment and formative assessment, presents a design for the extensions, documents their implementation as extensions to the CourseMarker / DATsys architecture and evaluates their contribution. The three extensions are novel extensions for free-form CBA which allow the assessment of the aesthetic layout of student diagrams, the marking of student solutions where multiple model solutions are acceptable and the prioritisation and truncation of feedback prior to its presentation to the student. Evaluation results indicate that the student learning process can be assisted through formative assessment which is automated using CBA courseware. The students learn through an iterative process in which feedback upon a submitted student coursework solution is used by the student to improve their solution, after which they may re-submit and receive further feedback.

There is much current interest in children's problem-solving, both within education, and within psychology. The present study explores the development of young children's problem-solving abilities, and the cognitive factors which might be related to this. Such development is conceptualised in terms of the emergence of increasingly sophisticated and powerful cognitive strategies. In a previous study (Whitebread, 1983), which involved 20 children aged 5 and 6 years, a strong interaction was revealed between underlying cognitive factors, strategy use and performance on a reclassification task. The present work is an extension of that study with a more complex task, and with a wider age-range of children. On this occasion, children's performance on an inductive reasoning task (the multidimensional discrimination learning task) was examined. The sample consisted of 72 Leicestershire Primary school children, comprising three equal groups of 24 children aged 6, 8 and 10 years. The children were tested on a number of cognitive factors theoretically predicted to influence performance on reasoning and problem-solving tasks. These predictors included working memory capacity, metacognitive awareness and control, style of attribution, and two measures of cognitive style (cognitive tempo and field dependence-independence). Cluster analysis of strategic components revealed a pattern of 7 clusters of increasingly complex strategic behaviours used by the children on the MDL task. These Strategy Clusters appeared to be principally differentiated by an increasing ability to integrate information gained from different trials. Two stylistic variations were also identified which were related to the number of hypotheses verbalised on each trial. Further investigation involving multiple regression analyses revealed that the major factor which predicted strategic behaviour and performance on the MDL task was metacognitive awareness and control. However, correlational analyses of subgroups revealed interactions between predictors, and between predictors and strategies, in relation to performance. No significant effects were revealed relating to gender, but age effects in relation to predictors, strategies and performance were indicated. The implications for future research and for the development of children's thinking and problem-solving skills within educational contexts is discussed.

The concept of personal autonomy as an educational ideal is analysed from its etymological roots of autos and nomos. The autos is shown to be most closely associated with authenticity and this concept is explored from existentialist roots. Authenticity's points of contact with reason are examined and the authentic individual is shown to be a deep, reflective evaluator of his own motives but existentialist radical choice of self is shown to be essentially incoherent. The nomos is linked to reason and the criteria it picks out. The limits upon reason are considered but its significance to personal autonomy is shown to be considerable; reason is argued to embrace feeling and a dimension of practical reason. The adjective, personal, is not redundant within personal autonomy as an educational ideal and is held to have significant moral implications for autonomy. A Millian analysis of the 'endowment' of a person is considered and perspectives from both developmental psychology and an ancient tradition embracing persons and virtues are shown to relate to autonomy. The second part of the thesis considers the relationship of personal autonomy to three related concepts in education: authority, freedom and paternalism and points of contact are clarified. The final part examines a place for personal autonomy within educational activities in schools. It is argued that personal autonomy should be exercised in school- based education as its exercise is the only sure way to develop it. Therefore a perspective of education as a series of practices in which the learner should be enabled to engage exercising a measure of personal autonomy is the theme of the final part. However, the purpose of the thesis is a clarification of fundamentals; it does not purport to present a curriculum for personal autonomy.