Search

Although women's representation in STEM fields and occupations has increased, science and math continue to be stereotyped as male domains. This paper links psychological and sociological explanations for gendered disparities in STEM by examining the relationship between the local "micro-situational" female learning environment and the gender gap in academic self-concept in math and science. We applied hybrid models to TIMSS 2015 data comprised of a pseudo-panel of repeated measures for individual student and peer achievement, academic self-concept, utility value, and interest-enjoyment value in math/science (at age 14). We analyzed data from three countries, including a subsample of students who were taught by the same teacher in both math and science, thus eliminating unobserved teacher heterogeneity. Results indicate that female peer climate in the classroom is important for understanding how girls' self-concept in math/science is formed, even though it was unrelated to the gender gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Canada, there are few long-term developmental education studies of adult basic education (ABE) students. This lack of studies impedes the understanding of ABE students' complex motivations, their diverse challenges, and their exceptional achievements. This 5-year cohort longitudinal panel study used interview data augmented by quantitative survey data. Thematic analysis was used to code interviews. This paper focuses on student-described learning preferences and supports that positively influenced student development and success. The most frequently described factors contributing to student success were grouped into four themes: (1) learning, (2) connections, (3) strengths, and (4) supports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, education in Canada has been through a process that led to school choice, targeting the improvement of students' performance through school competition. These policies fostering an education quasi-market became an ideal framework for the expansion of IB schools. Since the Diploma Programme of the International Baccalaureate (IBDP) offers a differentiated international curriculum and is perceived as a program that contributes to students' achievements, it has been increasingly adopted in school districts and schools. This paper explores the marketing strategies developed in schools and districts in response to school competition by tracing the incorporation of the IBDP in high schools in different districts in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Based on interviews with school staff, district officials and IB local association representatives, this study analyzes schools' marketing decisions from a consumer and producer orientation taking into account the macro environment (federal government) and micro-environment (provincial government and districts). Rather than fostering efficiency and improving students' achievement as intended, marketization policies resulted in an increased focus on the recruitment of high achieving students, which led to a competition between schools, between districts and between other programs in the districts or in other words –an 'all against all' competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: National ranking from the triennial Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) often serves as a barometer of national performance and human capital. Though excessive student‐ and school‐level covariates (n > 700) may prove intractable for traditional least‐squares estimate procedures, shrinkage methods may be more suitable for subset selection. Aims: With a focus on the United States, this paper proposes sparse regression for PISA 2012 to discover salient student‐ and school‐level predictor variables for mathematical literacy achievement. Sample: The sparse regression analysis was conducted on 10 top‐tiered OECD countries/economies, Canada, and the United States in mathematical literacy on the 2012 PISA. Two‐ and three‐level hierarchical regression analyses were performed on Canadian and US students (N = 26,522) along with five of the ten top‐tiered countries/economies (N = 58,385). Methods: Using the 'least absolute shrinkage and selection operator' (LASSO) technique, the study (1) identified salient predictor variables of mathematical literacy performance for the top‐tiered countries/economies, Canada, and the United States and (2) used these salient variables to perform two‐ and three‐level hierarchical regression on data from Canada and the United States along with five top‐tiered countries/economies. Weights and replicates were used to account for complex sample design. A weighted, two‐level confirmatory factor analysis was performed to identify latent constructs. Missing data were handled through multiple imputation. Results: Separate two‐level hierarchical models accounted for 32–35% student‐level and 58–70% school‐level variance in Canada and the United States, respectively; three‐level models accounted for 33% of level‐one variance, 62–65% level‐two variance, and 13–44% of level‐three variance for the US/Canada and US/Canada/top‐tiered students, respectively. Following top‐tiered countries/economies, Canadian students had high levels of self‐efficacy, were more likely to encounter advanced concepts in class, were less activity/small group‐centred, and were more likely to consider truancy a learning hindrance. Factor analyses revealed a positive relation with rigour and class organization (teacher‐centred) for top‐tiered countries and Canada, though not for the United States. For all countries, there was a strong relation between rigour and self‐beliefs. Conclusion: Compared to top performers, a less rigorous curriculum, coupled with class and school factors, may explain lag in US performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Transformational School Leadership (TSL) is arguably the most influential model of its kind in the North American context, it is relatively unknown in China. In addition, little research into the applicability of this model has been carried out specifically with regard to the potential differences between the Chinese and North American educational contexts. Therefore, the purposes of this article are (i) to outline a tentative framework for the discussion of TSL in the Chinese educational context and (ii) to discuss areas of potential cultural similarity and dissimilarity between Chinese and Canadian transformational school leadership models. In order to provide a bicultural basis for a discussion of transformational school leadership, this paper suggests a tentative cultural analysis framework in which TSL practices may be effectively categorised. Twenty-nine Chinese transformational school leadership practices are described, with 12 practices identified as potentially useful for cross-cultural comparison, and 17 practices identified as principally applicable to the Chinese educational context. A cultural analysis is conducted using the tentative cultural analysis framework. The paper concludes that some of the principles and practices considered relate to dimensions of TSL. Relevant values from both cultures are discussed based on their relationships with TSL dimensions [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate whether an individual’s knowledge, skills and capabilities (human capital) are reflected in their compensation.Design/methodology/approach Data are drawn from university academics in the Province of Ontario, Canada, earning more than CAD$100,000 per annum. Data on academics human capital are drawn from Research Gate. The authors construct a regression analysis to examine the relationship between human capital and salary.Findings The analyses performed indicates a positive association between academic human capital and academic salaries.Research limitations/implications This study is limited in that it measures an academic’s human capital solely through their research outputs as opposed to also considering their teaching outputs. Continuing research needs to be conducted in different country contexts and using negative proxies of human capital.Practical implications This study will create awareness about the value of human capital and its contribution towards improving organisational structural capital.Social implications The study contributes to the literature on human capital in accounting and business by focussing on the economic relevance of individual level human capital.Originality/value The study contributes to the literature on human capital in accounting and business by focussing on the economic relevance of individual level human capital. It will help create awareness of the importance of valuing human capital at the individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to studies from the United States and English Canada, student achievement gaps grow over the summer months when children are not attending school, but summer literacy interventions can reduce those gaps. This paper presents data from a quasi-experiment conducted in eight Ontario French language school boards in 2010, 2011 and 2012 for 682 children in grades 1-3. Growth in literacy test scores between June and September are compared for 361 attendees of summer literacy programs and 321 control students. Summer program recruits initially had lower prior literacy scores and grades, and tended to hail from relatively disadvantaged social backgrounds. Yet, summer programs narrowed those pre-existing gaps. Effect sizes from a variety of regression and propensity score matching models ranged from .32 to .58, which is quite sizeable by the standards of elementary school interventions and summer programs. Effects were stronger among students whose parents reported not speaking French exclusively at home. Our paper considers learning opportunity theory in light of the "non-traditional" student in Ontario French language schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper principal interviews are used to determine the degree to which personal and school-based vision are used to impact the student learning experience. In total 27 elementary, middle school and high school principals from Alberta, Canada were interviewed using a semi-structured format. Student learning data were drawn from various standardised tests, surveys, and anecdotal sources. Schools were identified as high achieving or not achieving to the degree that their socioeconomic standing indicated based on data from a variety of publically available sources. Schools categorised as high performing were all led by principals who clearly articulated vision, mission, and goals that emanated from personal beliefs about student learning and the role the school's programme played in helping students to learn. Similarly, schools categorised as not achieving to the degree to which their socio-economic standing would indicate had principals who did not work from a position of clearly identified personal beliefs or vision for the school. This study lends support to findings concerning effective leadership for learning practices and where vision for school has been noted as an essential skill of new and experienced school leaders. Despite the fact that school vision has been noted as an essential requirement of effective school leadership, 12 of the 27 principals interviewed for this study did not have nor follow a personal vision for education or lead their school community in the development and implementation of a vision that would guide the learning process [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canadian assessments of First Nation and Aboriginal education lack any real modelling of reasons for the particular patterns of attainment — it is this void that we wish to fill. This paper examines educational attainment in First Nations communities using combined data from the 1996 Census and Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Education Survey for the school year 1995/1996, aggregated to the band level, for registered and non-registered Indian and Inuit students who live on reserve in Canada. Multiple sequential regression analysis is used to model the educational success of grade 12 and 13 students with community level characteristics, including an isolation variable, school type variable, demographic variables, economic variables, and human capital variables. We use three measures of educational success: the age appropriate rate, graduate rate, and withdrawal rate. It is shown that the community level variables are similar in their explanatory power of educational success; however, the effects of variables within blocks on measures of educational success differ. The demography and human capital blocks play a particularly important role for all three measures of educational success. Additional analysis includes an examination of standardized regression weights. The paper discusses research and policy implications and articulates future avenues for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the educational experiences of African-Canadian youth in Canada. Traditionally, the tendency is to emphasize the poor academic performance of black students or issues and problems related to reasons for academic failure or to stereotype them as ‘loud, lazy, muscular, criminal, athletic, dumb, deprived, dangerous, deviant, and disturbed’. In contrast, this paper looks at those who have achieved in spite of considerable adversity. The data show that factors such as pride in one's heritage and knowledge of one's culture contribute to academic success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afterschool and community science programs have become widely recognized as important sanctuaries for science learning for low-income urban youth and as offering them with "missing opportunities." Yet, more needs to be known about how youth, themselves, perceive such opportunities. What motivates youth to seek out such opportunities in the nonschool hours? How do youth describe the doing and talking of science in such programs? Given such descriptions, how do youth perceive the role of these programs in their lives? This paper relies on stories from three youth drawn from a multisited ethnographic study, one site being an afterschool girls-only science program at the elementary level in Canada and the other an Upward Bound Math and Science program in the USA. The paper concludes with a discussion about the ways these programs offered youth a meaningful way to relate to science in concordance with their own lived experiences, resulting in "I will" and "I can " attitudes and a sense of hope for the future within which science becomes a tool for action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The InterProfessional Initiative at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, provides learning strategies to be effective health care team members for over 800 undergraduate students in 14 health professions. This paper traces the evolution of the initiative over the past decade and describes future directions. Particular attention is given to the administrative and academic structures and processes required to launch, develop and sustain an initiative of this scale in a major research-intensive university. The paper concludes by reviewing the evaluative work underway and reflecting on the key success factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider whether certain countries are particularly adept (or particularly poor) at getting children from disadvantaged homes to study for a bachelor's degree. A series of university access models are estimated for four English-speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia and the USA), which include controls for comparable measures of academic achievement at age 15. Our results suggest that socioeconomic differences in university access are more pronounced in England and Canada than Australia and the USA and that cross-national variation in the socioeconomic gap remains even once we take account of differences in academic achievement. We discuss the implications of our findings for the creation of more socially mobile societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Well-organized administrative data with large numbers of cases (building on linked files from several government departments) and a population registry facilitate new studies of population health and child development. Analyses of family relationships and a number of outcomes—educational achievement, health, teen pregnancy, and receipt of income assistance—are relatively easy to conduct using several birth cohorts. Looking both at means/proportions and at sibling correlations enriches our study of opportunity and wellbeing in late adolescence. With observational research possibly exaggerating the causal effects of risk factors, sibling comparisons involving individuals sharing both many family characteristics and many genes help deal with such criticisms. Methods This paper uses a rich dataset from one Canadian province (Manitoba) covering a wide range of geographical areas (cities to rural regions). Influences on opportunity and well-being are analyzed looking at both means/proportions and sibling correlations. We measure a variety of outcomes that may reflect different causal influences. A creative application of linear programming advances the use of data on residential location. Results Predicting educational achievement using available variables was much easier than predicting adolescent health status (R-square of .200 versus R-square of .043). Low levels of educational achievement, high levels of teenage pregnancy, and high sibling correlations outside Winnipeg and within Winnipeg's lower income areas highlight inequalities across socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds. Stratifying our analyses by different variables, such as income quintiles, reveals differences in means and correlations within outcomes and across groups. Particular events—changes in mother's marital status and in place of residence—were associated with less favorable outcomes in late adolescence. Conclusion Our findings suggest a paradox: Canadian developmental outcomes through late adolescence appear quite similar to those in the United States, even though intergenerational mobility in Canada is closer to mobility in the Nordic countries than to that in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education policy should be informed by research that distinguishes school-based learning from learning that occurs during non-school time. American studies find that socio-economic disparities in learning tend to widen over the summer months, the longest continuous stretch of non-school time. This paper analyzes the first large-scale Canadian study of summer learning. We collected data on literacy growth for a non-random sample of 1,376 Ontario children in Grades 1-3 during the summers of 2010 and 2011. Summer learning was widely dispersed with a mean of zero, and equal proportions of children had substantial learning gains and losses. There were strong disparities by family socio-economic status (SES), as affluent children gained literacy while those from poorer families lost literacy. We attributed 25 percent of the gap between the top and bottom SES quartiles at the start of the school year to the previous summer. We discuss implications for Canadian education policy and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the Grade 3 and 6 assessments conducted in Ontario schools to examine the association between student achievement and both strikes and work-to-rule campaigns by teachers. Between 1998/99 and 2003/04 approximately 5 percent of schools in Ontario were exposed to strikes (including one lockout) and over 10 percent of schools experienced a work-to-rule campaign (the withdrawal of many school activities normally carried out by teachers). This study finds large reductions in academic achievement associated with strikes at disadvantaged schools in both Grade 3 and Grade 6, and substantial reductions in results associated with work-to-rule campaigns. The reductions associated with work-to-rule campaigns vary across schools with the largest reductions at disadvantaged schools in Grade 3 and at advantaged schools in Grade 6. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the impact of a classroom-embedded professional learning (PL) program for mathematics teaching in two contrasting districts in Canada, and investigates the relationship between teacher efficacy and student achievement. Before the PL, District A had lower teacher efficacy and student achievement than District B, but after the PL, this situation was reversed. Qualitative analysis revealed that the two districts reported learning very different things from the PL opportunity. The complexities of context, prior learning experiences, goal setting, and persistence of participants all factored into what and how teachers learned. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The purpose of this paper is to discern the likely impact of recent changes in the structures of educational systems in the U.S. and Canada on diversity and unity within these nations. Nine types of school choice are identified, a marked increase from two decades ago. Reasons for these changes are linked to shifting educational regimes. Although choice of public and private schools has been promoted as a way to ensure competition and better academic performance, the clients of schools often seem to desire alternative outcomes, including a particular cultural or religious identity for their children. National frameworks for accountability driven by concerns about global capitalism provide a common framework that promotes national unity while choice facilitates diversity. Although this social outcome was not the focus of those designing accountability systems, it may be these systems most important function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The `Willis thesis' has two component claims. The first is that class inequalities in educational outcomes occur in part through working-class misbehaviour in schools, and that underachievement is associated with male and female forms of gender traditionalism. The second claim is that this misbehaviour constitutes a working- class cultural resistance. In this paper the first component is operationalized and tested in a statistical model of student plans in Ontario, Canada. Results show that misbehaviour is a weak conduit for differential class outcomes, though expected gender patterns emerge. While noting that findings may reflect British/Canadian differences and that recent de-industrialization may mute traditional class-related student responses, I argue that Resistance theorists have over-extended their claims, and that gender, rather than class background, is a more durable source of cultural reproduction through school underachievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The strongest predictor of visible homelessness was child welfare involvement. • Being Indigenous was a significant predictor of visible and hidden homelessness. • University education not preventative against homelessness for Indigenous peoples. Existing evidence suggests that child welfare involvement has a deleterious impact on Indigenous peoples in Canada in terms of increasing their risk of becoming a visible or hidden homeless individual. Visible homelessness is generally understood as those individuals found sleeping in parks, cars, shelters, or on the streets and other locales such as in abandoned buildings or under bridges. Whereas the hidden homeless are those who find interim accommodations with friends, family members, and acquaintances. Although in saying this, many of the visible homelessness scenarios can also be considered hidden. Regardless, all situations of homelessness reflect uncertainty, lack of safety, and an increased vulnerability to abuse and exploitation. The pathways to homelessness are rooted in structural deficits in the society, which are multiplicative and intersectional in nature. They include housing affordability, oppression, conditions of physical and mental well-being, employment and employability, as well as family support and community connection. On the other hand, the greater the educational achievement experienced by Indigenous peoples the less the risk of being subjected to homelessness. The premise of this paper is that Indigenous peoples are multiplicatively oppressed and that these intersecting sites of oppression increase the risk of Indigenous peoples in Canada becoming homelessness. Hypotheses were tested using the 2014 panel of Canada's General Social Survey, including 1081 Indigenous peoples and 23,052 non-Indigenous white participants. Indigenous identity, involvement in the child welfare system, and level of educational achievement were all significantly associated with experiences of hidden and visible homelessness, p <.001. As hypothesized, the odds associated with being involved in the child welfare system (odds ratio [OR] = 4.15) were stronger than that associated with identifying as Indigenous (OR = 1.47). As predicted, achieving a university education served as a protection against becoming homelessness (OR = 0.27). The hypothesized relationship between ethnicity and child welfare system involvement interaction was not observed. However, Indigenous participants (7.1%) were nearly four times as likely to have been involved with the child welfare system than were non-Indigenous white people (1.9%). Thus, at the population level, Indigenous peoples are at far greater risk of having been involved in the child welfare system, and consequently experiencing homelessness than non-Indigenous peoples. Of note, the hypothesized ethnicity by educational attainment interaction was observed. Among white people in Canada, a university education likely prevents most (83%) of visible homelessness otherwise experienced by those who did not complete high school (OR = 0.17) and prevents a significant amount (18%) of hidden homelessness. Startlingly, no such prevention was associated with completion of university among Indigenous peoples in Canada. Implications and future research needs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]