Educational Research

If indeed we live in what Brian Massumi (2002) describes as image-saturated late capitalism, where Billboard’s ‘Woman of the Year’, Katy Perry, cheerily disclaims being a feminist while championing ‘the power of women’ (Berlatsky, 2012), and where learning and living interface more rapidly within digital and virtual media spaces, educational research is in dire need of some new tools. As curricular and feminist scholar, Janet L. Miller (2013), notes, as ‘mass migrations, mass media, fragmentations, interdependencies and hybridities’ shape postmodernity, our research methodologies must, following Whitlock (2006), similarly remain ‘in transit’ potentially ‘build[ing] upon and utiliz[ing], for example, the extensive and unprecedented power and speed of cultural exchanges in the present’ (Miller, 2013). How do we get up to speed in our readings of the complex interplays of media, pedagogy, and gender, and how do we map their movements and effects within educational theory and policy? Putting to work an array of feminist, poststructural, psychosocial, and posthumanist theorists, particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1984, 1987), as well as an impressive coalition of educational scholars, Jessica Ringrose (2013) has begun to assemble such a toolkit in this book, Postfeminist Education? Girls and the sexual politics of schooling. Ringrose’s book offers ‘new sociological/philosophical tools for mapping the intricacies of flow of affect and ruptures of normative capture, offering new ways of thinking about, researching and interpreting feminine subjectivity’ (p. 69). The Deleuze– Guattarian figuration of the assemblage that she deploys throughout her book is an apt conceptual framework to describe her own compilation of media and cultural analysis, policy critique, empirical work on teenaged girls, and the digital and virtual worlds they navigate, and the ways these disparate forces ‘plug into’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) educational discourses.

Involvement of software in teaching is provide a batter support, more clear and visual operation of complex circuits and waveforms to the faculty of power electronics in classroom teaching. The software packages available for simulation of power electronic circuits are MATLAB, PSPICE and PSIM and many more. Use of the software in classroom teaching is provide an additional support to the faculty and its better then the time consuming black board practice. This paper provides a case study of power electronics circuits in PSIM software. Different power electronics converters model are prepared on PSIM software and generate simulation waveforms. This paper is helpful for the faculty of electrical engineering to find the applications of PSIM in teaching.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

A review of the Archaeology Departments, at a number of Britain’s top Universities, reveals that Cambridge graduates account for around fifty percent of their academic staff. This paper argues that this statistic is potentially harmful for British Archaeology at a number of important and intrinsic levels.

We thank Joseph Maxwell (this issue of Educational Researcher, pp. 28–31) for accepting our invitation to examine the roles and expectations of dissertation literature reviews. We agree that most are inadequate but disagree why. Maxwell argues that dissertations should emulate research articles and include a conceptual framework that only discusses relevant literature. Candidates need not present a thorough analysis and synthesis of the scholarship and research, Maxwell argues, or justify claims made about the literature. Finally, he asserts that we misunderstand the relationship between literature and research, leading to an accusation of “foundationalism.” However, these specific disagreements ignore fundamental differences about the purposes of the doctoral dissertation and the relationship between those purposes and doctoral program goals. In this rejoinder, we briefly explore these conceptual and normative differences.

"The authors analyze the policy discourse on the utility of games for society at the
level of the European Union, and for five EU countries, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Norway. The ongoing study is part of a Research Roadmap developed within the GALA Network of Excellence on Serious Games (2010-2014, EU FP7).
The authors identify four policy discourses on the utility of serious games that they label as Technology Enhanced Learning; Creative Innovation; Social Inclusion and Empowerment."

This case study examines how technology can be used to support an active learning strategy within face-to- face Chemistry classes. Both in-class polling software and online lectures are used as part of a comprehensive teaching strategy, designed to enable students to develop critical thinking and analytical skills. While in- class polling is not an online process, it is included within this case study to highlight how different types of technology can be used together to effectively support classroom teaching, when integrated with a carefully considered pedagogical approach.

In their influential review, Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, and Vohs (2003) concluded that self-esteem— the global component of self-concept—has no effect on subsequent academic performance. In contrast, Marsh and Craven's (2006) review of reciprocal effects models from an explicitly multidimensional perspective demonstrated that academic self-concept and achievement are both a cause and an effect of each other. Ironically, both reviews cited classic Youth in Transition studies in support of their respective claims. In definitive tests of these counter claims, the authors reanalyze these data—including self-esteem (emphasized by Baumeister et al.), academic self-concept (emphasized by Marsh & Craven), and postsecondary educational attainment—using stronger statistical methods based on five waves of data (grade 10 through 5 years after graduation; N = 2,213). Integrating apparently discrepant findings under a common theoretical framework based on a multidimensional perspective, academic self-concept had consistent reciprocal effects with both achievement and educational attainment, whereas self-esteem had almost none.

This article describes a project that developed collaborative relationships between science and mathematics education researchers in South Africa and the USA. Significant features of the collaboration included a Liaison Committee with members drawn from both countries, exchange visits for pre- and post-doctoral researchers between the two countries, and the establishment of Research Schools in South Africa. An historical overview of the project focuses on both its functioning and its evolving structure. Summaries of assessments of two of its activities and their outcomes point to the project's influence on building research capacity at individual, structural, and community levels. Two aspects of sustaining the project-funding and structures-are discussed.

"""Postfeminist Education? challenges a contemporary postfeminist sensibility grounded not only in assumptions that gender and sexual equality has been achieved in many Western contexts, but that feminism has gone ‘too far’ with women and girls now overtaking men and boys - positioned as the new victims of gender transformations. The book is the first to outline and critique how educational discourses have directly fed into postfeminist anxieties, exploring three postfeminist panics over girls and girlhood that circulate widely in the international media and popular culture. First it explores how a masculinity crisis over failing boys in school has spawned a backlash discourse about overly successful girls; second it looks at how widespread anxieties over girls becoming excessively mean and/or violent have positioned female aggression as pathological; third it examines how incessant concerns over controlling risky female sexuality underpin recent sexualisation of girls moral panics. The book outlines how these postfeminist panics over girlhood have influenced educational policies and practices in areas such as academic achievement, anti-bullying strategies and sex-education curriculum, making visible the new postfeminist, sexual politics of schooling.

Moving beyond media or policy critique, however, this book offers new theoretical and methodological tools for researching postfeminism, girlhood and education. It engages with current theoretical debates over possibilities for girls’ agency and empowerment in postfeminist, neo-liberal contexts of sexual regulation. It also elaborates new psychosocial and feminist Deleuzian methodological approaches for mapping subjectivity, affectivity and social change. Drawing on two UK empirical research projects exploring teen-aged girls’ own perspectives and responses to postfeminist panics, the book shows how real girls are actually negotiating notions of girls as overly successful, mean, violent, aggressive and sexual. The data offers rich insight into girls’ gendered, raced and classed experiences at school and beyond, exploring teen peer cultures, friendship, offline and online sexual identities, and bullying and cyberbullying. The data illuminates how and when girls take up and identify with postfeminist trends, but also at times attempt to re-work, challenge and critique the contradictory discourses of girlhood and femininity. In this sense the book offers an opportunity for girls to ‘talk back’ to the often simplistic either wildly celebratory or crisis-based sensationalism of postfeminist panics over girlhood.

This book will be essential reading for those interested in feminism, girlhood, media studies, gender and education."""