Advantages of upper-class backgrounds: Forms of capital, school cultures and educational performance

In this article, we chart connections between class and educational performance in comparatively egalitarian Norway. While viewing various forms of capital as integral parts of class background, we assess how educational performance is differentiated across the class structure. We use survey and register data to assess differences in grades in three school subjects – mathematics and spoken and written Norwegian – at the individual and school level. We focus on the year of graduation of students at lower-secondary schools in Bergen, Norway’s second largest city by population. Lending credence to Bourdieu’s model of the social space, we find differences according to both capital volume and capital composition. Students from class backgrounds rich in overall capital perform comparatively better than those from humbler class backgrounds. There are also differences within the upper class: those from homes rich in cultural capital perform comparatively better than those from homes rich in economic capital. Although between-school differences are low within the ‘unified’ Norwegian school system, the analysis indicates that grades are associated with the class composition of schools: a high proportion of upper-class students positively correlates with higher grades. In addition, there is some evidence of a collective form of class bias: in one of the school subjects, spoken Norwegian, there is a connection between individual grades and teachers’ perceptions of the culture pervasive at the school in question; this connection is contingent upon a school’s class composition. The analysis thus draws attention to the way in which class bias in grading varies between school subjects.

Medical Students’ Knowledge and Attitudes Regarding Justice-Involved Health

Despite the demonstrated need for sustainable and effective carceral health care, justice-involved medical education curricula are limited, and it’s unclear if informal clinical education is sufficient. Investigators aimed to quantify medical student involvement with carceral populations and explore how students’ knowledge of and attitudes towards justice-involved patients changed over the course of their training. A survey was designed by the investigators and sent to all current medical students at a single United States medical school. Stata 14.0 was used to compare results between the years of medical school. Differences between groups were tested using linear regression. Most 4th year students reported working in a carceral health setting. An increase in overall knowledge of justice-involved patients was observed as carceral medicine education (ptrend = 0.02), hours worked in a jail (ptrend < 0.01), and substance abuse training (ptrend < 0.01) increased. Overall attitude score increased with the students’ reported number of hours working in a jail (ptrend < 0.01) and the amount of substance abuse training (ptrend < 0.01). Finally, we found a trend of increasing knowledge and attitude scores as the year of standing increased (ptrend < 0.01). Our data suggest that most USC medical students work in a carceral setting during medical school. Didactic and experiential learning opportunities correlated with improved knowledge of and attitude toward justice-involved patients, with increases in both metrics increasing as the year in medical school increased. However, senior medical students still scored poorly. These findings underscore the need for a formal curriculum to train our healthcare workforce in health equity for carceral populations.

The Influence of School Context Factors on the Induction Support as Perceived by Newly Qualified Teachers

This study explores the relationship between school demographic characteristics and the amount of provided induction activities, as perceived by beginning teachers (BTs), with special attention for Professional Development Schools and non-Professional Development Schools. The aim is to provide information that is useful to improve induction arrangements to particular school contexts. Data were collected in a Dutch national induction program in which qualified BTs are supported in their first 3 years of professional practice. The support monitor measures multiple induction activities with regard to the implementation of workload reduction, school enculturation, professional development plans and lessons support. 1,670 BTs working in 195 schools reported on these activities. Linear regression analyses revealed that less induction activities were associated with schools with multiple locations, more enrolled students and number of BTs employed, and with schools with older male teaching staff. No significant differences were found between the amount of support perceived by BTs in PDSs and non-PDSs. Yet school characteristics revealed stronger predictive values for the amount of support provided in non-PDS settings. These insights are relevant for mapping school differences in induction arrangements in order to enhance the equity of support across schools to assure the development of teaching skills of BTs.

Macro-level Criminological Perspectives and School Delinquency: A Meta-analysis

School delinquency in public elementary, middle, and high schools has decreased in recent years, but is still a major issue that has negative mental health and academic implications for adolescents. Although research has focused on both individual-level and school-level explanations of school delinquency, it is not yet clear which macro-level criminological perspectives best explains it. Using 656 effect sizes nested within 75 studies and 30 unique datasets, this study addresses two questions using meta-analytic methods: Which macro-level criminological perspectives explain between-school differences in delinquency? Are effect sizes invariant across samples and research design? Results indicate that only concentrated disadvantage and social cohesion are significantly related to school delinquency. With the exception of concentrated disadvantage, effects are homogenous. This suggests that some school-level explanations are useful and future research should not exclude these factors. Practical implications suggest that improving social cohesion in schools may be more effective at preventing violence than target-hardening efforts.

Home Environment of Adolescents Studying in Eighth Class in Schools of Jammu District

The present study attempts to examine the home environment of adolescents studying in eighth class in relation to some selected variables. The study is quantitative in nature. Sample of the study consists of 200 adolescents of eighth class (100 males and 100 females) randomly selected from 5 government and 5 private schools of Jammu. Home Environment Inventory (HEI) developed by Misra (1989) has been used for collection of data. Results show that adolescents from rural residential background have perceived their home environment as better in comparison to adolescents from urban residential background. However, there were no significant gender and type of school differences in the perceived home environment of adolescents studying in eighth class. The combined effect of gender and type of school on perceived home environment was found to be significant in favour of female students studying in government schools in comparison to private schools. Significant combined effect was obtained among gender, residential background and school type on perceived home environment of adolescents.

Predicting EFL Learners’ Achievement from Their Two Faces—FLE and FLCA

Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) and Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) are a Janus-faced concept (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014). This study adopted a mixed-method approach to investigate how FLE interacts with FLCA to predict and be predicted by Foreign Language (FL) achievement among 589 undergraduate learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) at a key and a non-key university in Northwest China. Participants reported more FLE than FLCA. Significant school differences were found regarding the investigated variables. FLE regulated the debilitating aspect and positively predicted the facilitating aspect of FLCA, whereas facilitating anxiety, in turn, increased FLE via motivation and sense of success. FLE and FLCA significantly predicted FL achievement and vice versa. Qualitative analysis revealed that learner-internal variables were major sources of FLE and FLCA. Facilitating anxiety was reported to significantly and positively connect with FL achievement in both quantitative and qualitative data, although debilitating anxiety exerted a more influential role.

Fitness, PA, Perceived Competence, Parental Support, and Literacy Outcomes in the REACH After-School Sports Program

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the REACH program in increasing physical activity (PA) levels, cardiorespiratory fitness, perceived competence, self-efficacy, parental support, and literacy across a year-long after-school PA intervention. Participants (N = 78) were students who volunteered from after-school program at either one of the two intervention schools or the control schools. Data are presented from two time points: Baseline (Aug/Sep 2017), and Post (end of the school year in May 2018). Data consisted of PA levels measured by PAC-Q, PACER test, Harter’s Perceived Competence questionnaire, parental support, and literacy tests. School differences in post-intervention scores were found in three (parental support, literacy, PACER) of seven intervention-related measures. Most notably parental support was higher in intervention schools over the control and PACER scores were higher in one intervention school than the control. The results demonstrate that data collection methods may need to be reconsidered in diverse low-income schools. The dramatic amount of missing data and lack of student effort points to students perhaps being overwhelmed with standardized tests and performing tasks for researchers. This leads to a dilemma in data collection in after-school programs in low-income schools: researchers need data to understand what is happening but how are students being served by the data collection process? Researchers should consider new approaches to collect data in low-income urban after-school programs to limit loss of data and to make the data collection meaningful to student participants.

Determinants of the transition to upper secondary school: differences between immigrants and Italians

The determinants of the transition from lower secondary to upper secondary school of Italian and immigrant teenagers (16-19 age range) were identified joining the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and the Italian Survey on Income and Living Conditions of Families with Immigrants in Italy (IM-SILC) for 2009. A set of individual, family, and contextual characteristics was selected through the Lasso method and a Bayesian approach to explain the choice of upper secondary schooling (yes/no). The transition from the low secondary to upper secondary school showed a complex pattern involving many variables: compared to men, women did not prove to have any differences, many components of income entered the model in a parabolic form, education level and income of parents proved to be very important, as was their occupation. The contextual factors revealed their importance: the latter included the degree of urbanisation, the South macro-region, household tenure status, the amount of optional technological equipment, and so on. Differences between Italians and immigrants disappeared when family background and parental characteristics were taken into account.