(An item from ISHN Member information service) Action learning is an educational process whereby people work and learn together by tackling real issues and reflecting on their actions. Learners acquire knowledge through actual actions and practice rather than through traditional instruction. Action learning is done in conjunction with others, in small groups called action learning sets. It is proposed as particularly suitable for adults, as it enables each person to reflect on and review the action they have taken and the learning points arising. This should then guide future action and improve performance (Wikipedia). This AL concept is discussed in several ways a special issue #3, 2012 of Action Learning, Research & Practice. Concepts discussed in the issue include the connection between AL and critical thinking, systems and organizational change, power, the development of personal insights and more. Read more
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(An item from ISHN Member information service) Several articles in Issue #4, 2012 of Evaluation & Program Planning discuss the concept of "collaborative evaluation". The first article in the series defines CE as "Collaborative Evaluation systematically invites and engages stakeholders in program evaluation planning and implementation. Unlike “distanced” evaluation approaches, which reject stakeholder participation as evaluation team members, Collaborative Evaluation assumes that active, on-going engagement between evaluators and program staff, result in stronger evaluation designs, enhanced data collection and analysis, and results that stakeholder understand and use. Among similar “participant-oriented” evaluation approaches CE distinguishes itself in that it uses a sliding scale for levels of collaboration. The second article reviews advances in the use of CE. Two articles then apply CE to schools, one in evaluating a prevention curriculum and the other describing how capacity for CE can be built among school leaders and districts. Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) Scaling up (or diffusing innovations) is a major issue among others related the implementation/operation, capacity-building and systems change. The issue is discussed in an article appearing in Issue #6, 2012 of the International Journal of Education Development. The authors suggest that "Scaling-up their initiatives successfully and sustainably can be an efficient and cost effective way for NGOs to increase their impact across a range of developmental outcomes, but relatively little attention has been paid in the education sector to how best this may be done and debates appear to have stalled. One approach to scaling-up is replication, on which this paper focuses. While there is no one universally applicable path through which an educational NGO can achieve successful replication, more can be done to support choice of the best path to follow, with respect to specific NGO circumstances and the context within which it operates – and hopes to operate in future. This paper presents four known paths to replication alongside new illustrative diagrams to explore their advantages and disadvantages, and highlights the need for a fifth approach that does not appear in current literature. ‘Network replication’ is proposed as new pathway that draws on known strengths of networks and offers a learning-oriented approach to scaling-up". Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #6, 2012 of Policy Development Review describes a shift in thinking about monitoring and evaluation in low income countries. The article is described as "An important first step in any initiative involving M&E capacity development is the diagnosis of the systems' current status. This article presents a diagnostic checklist that captures issues of M&E policy: indicators, data collection and methodology; organisation; capacity-building; participation of nongovernmental actors; and use. It applies it to a review of the PRSP M&E arrangements of 20 aid-dependent countries in sub-Saharan Africa to demonstrate comparative strengths and weaknesses". Read More.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in the November 2012 Issue of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases suggests that school or community-based vaccinations to prevent Schistosomiasis (infections from snails) is more effective than the current WHO treatment guidelines. The researchers report that "Our study used available field data to calibrate advanced network models of village-level Schistosoma transmission to project outcomes of six different community- or school age-based programs, as compared to the impact of current 2006 W.H.O. recommended control strategies. We then scored the number of years each of 10 typical villages would remain below 10% infection prevalence (a practicable level associated with minimal prevalence of disease). All strategies that included four annual treatments effectively reduced community prevalence to less than 10%, while programs having yearly gaps (‘holidays’) failed to reach this objective in half of the communities. Effective post-program suppression of infection prevalence persisted in half of the 10 villages for 7–10 years, whereas in five high-risk villages, program effects on prevalence lasted zero to four years only. At typical levels of treatment adherence (60 to 70%), current WHO recommendations will likely not achieve effective suppression of Schistosoma prevalence unless implemented for longer than years. Read More
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #6, 2012 of Education & Urban Society adds to our ongoing discussion about school connectedness and substance use. The authors note that "Research has found strong linkages between adolescent substance use and attitudes toward school. Few studies of this relationship, however, consider the different dimensions of students’ school attitudes, separating perceptions of the importance of school from the quality of students’ affective experiences therein". Using a sample of 301 urban adolescents, evenly divided into substance users and nonusers, this study examines the relationships between these two dimensions of school attitudes and substance use. Findings highlight a subset of adolescent substance users who see school as the most important place in which they routinely spend time and who differ significantly from other users, but not from nonusers, in their expressed satisfaction with school. Results also call attention to the ubiquity of urban adolescents’ dissatisfaction with their teachers, showing such dissatisfaction as unrelated to their rates of substance use. In other words, this study may mean that most students don't really care about their teachers, but this does not lead to substance use. It may be more important that students see school as an important step towards their future, so life goals may be more important than the typically vague definitions of school connectedness. Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #4, 2012 of Disaster provides an excellent overview of the costs, cost effectiveness and cost-benefits of disaster preparedness. Schools are part of the discussion. The article notes that "Some 60,000 people worldwide die annually in natural disasters, mostly due to the collapse of buildings in earthquakes, and primarily in the developing world. This is despite the fact that engineering solutions exist that can eliminate almost completely the risk of such deaths". The solutions are expensive and technically demanding, so their cost–benefit ratio often is unfavourable as compared to other interventions. Nonetheless, there are various public disaster risk reduction interventions that are highly cost-effective. That such interventions frequently remain unimplemented or ineffectively executed points to a role for issues of political economy. The article goes on to examine the cost-benefits of retrofitting or building safer schools and even compares those strategies with simpler and less expensive ways to save lives such as malaria control, sanitation and other public health interventions. For the full text of the article, read more
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #6, 2012 of Health & Social Care in the Community reports on changing sexual attitudes and behaviours among teens in China. The authors report that "A literature review was conducted between 2000 and 2010, using both English (Medline, CINAHL, PsycINFO, ASSIA) and Chinese language databases (China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang database). Thirty-six studies were included and reviewed. It was found that young people reported poor sexual knowledge, especially in relation to reproductive matters and sexually transmitted infections. The media, such as television, magazines and the Internet, were seen as their main sources of information on sex. Despite the frequently reported liberal attitudes to sexual behaviour, only a small number of young people had already lost their virginity or been involved in pregnancies. Young men were more likely than young women to report having had sex, while respondents at vocational high schools were less likely to remain virgins than those at common/key high schools. Although the prevalence of sexual intercourse among Chinese teenagers was still lower than that reported in studies conducted in most western countries, the findings do reflect some changes in sexual values and behaviour of young people within the country. They also suggest the need to develop more comprehensive sex education programmes". Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) There has been an increasing number of research articles published recently that are describing the perceptions of teachers. These studies help us to understand the concerns, professional norms, normative and sociological factors that will determine how teachers approach various health, social and environmental issues in their classrooms. An article in Issue #5, 2012 of Environmental Education Research is an example of this trend. The study examined the perceptions or pre-service teachers of using outdoor settings as a learning environment. The researchers report that "Based on the results of 110 participants, this study suggests preservice early childhood educators perceive parks as the most conducive outdoor setting for achieving educational outcomes, specifically structured learning about nature, and that they are more inclined to use maintained outdoor settings than natural outdoor settings. The strongest predictors of intention to use natural outdoor settings were perceived difficulty in using natural settings, participants’ level of nature relatedness, and the degree to which they agreed that experiences in nature were important for young children’s health and wellness. Barriers to address include perceived lack of access to natural settings and safety concerns. Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #5, 2012 of Environmental Education Research draws from the experience of a Queensland Environmentally Sustainable Schools Initiative Alliance in Australia – "to argue that while network participants were engaged and committed to participation in this network, ‘old’ forms of top-down engagement and relationships needed to be unlearnt. This paper thus proposes that for participation in decentralized networks to be meaningful, new learning about how to participate needs to occur." The authors suggest that the assumption that we automatically know how to work within networks needs to be challenged and that we need to specifically identify the problems inherent in the process. Read more.
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