Cultural Well-Being in Classroom Communities in Australia

Well-being is an increasingly important topic of schooling policy and research internationally. While the concept of well-being is understood in various ways, little attention has been given to its cultural aspects. The convergence between culture, well-being, and learning is being realized, and the concept of cultural well-being presents new insights relevant to ongoing school reform efforts. Cultural well-being is a nascent concept in education considered to relate to students’ sense of connection to school, people, places, and cultures. A typology of cultural well-being produced from an Australian study of teachers’ perceptions depicts three prominent interpretations of culture: (a) school culture, (b) processes of recognition, and (c) cultural participation and production. The typology of cultural well-being enables the interrogation of complex power relations, revealing some of the ways that schools continue to reproduce social and cultural inequalities. The application of a typology of cultural well-being illustrates the interplay between school culture, recognition, and cultural participation and can support international initiatives to reform schooling with a greater emphasis on the well-being of all students, potentially addressing and reducing inequalities.

Trust in Schooling System Governance and Reform

Since the 1980s there has been significant reform in the development, delivery, and evaluation of all areas of public policy and services provision, including schooling. The reforms are prompted by a general “turn” from direct government determination and provision of public services to indirect governance undertaken by a mixture of public, private, and philanthropic actors. Orthodoxies about public sector governance and schooling system reform have shifted over this time from a preference for bureaucracy to preferences for markets, contracts, and most recently social networks. Schooling system governance in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries has seen devolution of substantial statutory powers, responsibilities, and accountabilities to local parent communities or shared-interest coalitions, both for-profit and not-for-profit. Schooling policy, governance, and services provision work is now distributed across multiple state, parastatal, and nongovernmental actors. Trust in the actions of others within devolved and distributed systems is identified as an essential social lubricant of contemporary schooling governance and reform. Studies of the role played by trust in schooling systems remain relatively rare.

How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis

Intelligence test scores and educational duration are positively correlated. This correlation could be interpreted in two ways: Students with greater propensity for intelligence go on to complete more education, or a longer education increases intelligence. We meta-analyzed three categories of quasiexperimental studies of educational effects on intelligence: those estimating education-intelligence associations after controlling for earlier intelligence, those using compulsory schooling policy changes as instrumental variables, and those using regression-discontinuity designs on school-entry age cutoffs. Across 142 effect sizes from 42 data sets involving over 600,000 participants, we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education. Moderator analyses indicated that the effects persisted across the life span and were present on all broad categories of cognitive ability studied. Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence.

How much does education improve intelligence? A meta-analysis

Intelligence test scores and educational duration are positively correlated. This correlation can be interpreted in two ways: students with greater propensity for intelligence go on to complete more education, or a longer education increases intelligence. We meta-analysed three categories of quasi-experimental studies of educational effects on intelligence: those estimating education-intelligence associations after controlling for earlier intelligence, those using compulsory schooling policy changes as instrumental variables, and those using regression-discontinuity designs on school-entry age cutoffs. Across 142 effect sizes from 42 datasets involving over 600,000 participants, we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities, of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education. Moderator analyses indicated that the effects persisted across the lifespan, and were present on all broad categories of cognitive ability studied. Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence.