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This chapter examines a development of the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) material into a programme designed to empower schools to work in partnership with parents to help children and young people to be happy and successful in school. It provides evidence to suggest that the programme called Family Works has a significant impact on children's learning and consequently their attainment. There is also evidence that children's behaviour improves across all contexts and that there are positive gains in the development of social and emotional skills of the children engaged in the programme. Aspects of the programme are described in action within primary schools.

This chapter explores the work of a library adult literacy programme working closely with other education providers in Risdon Prison in Australia. The Literacy Service operates as a form of outreach to the prison population who have low literacy levels and are not yet engaged in education or using the prison library. In this context, it is a form of radical inclusion, creating opportunities for those most disadvantaged to access learning. The library services help to create a literate environment for prisoners and provide opportunities for prisoners to increase their engagement in lifelong learning and everyday literacy practices, giving them a better chance of developing their literacy skills. Strategies explored for engaging this cohort include a range of creative projects, small group work and one to one tutoring. The Literacy Service has developed best practice approaches to deliver effective literacy support using strategies and approaches that align with research and these are adapted for work in the prison context. The Literacy Service approach is aligned with the wider prison goals of rehabilitation and reintegration and the chapter explores a theory of change to identify how prison education may be most effective in supporting rehabilitation (Szifris, Fox, & Bradbury, 2018). The library Literacy Service offers safe spaces, opportunities to create social bonds, reshape identity, engage in informal learning and set new goals – key elements found to be critical in rehabilitation. The Prison Library Impact Framework, developed by Finlay and Bates (2018), connects these elements with the theory of change model to propose a tool that may be useful to evaluate prison library services in the future.

Bertil Ohlin was a most active commentator on current economic events in the interwar period, combining his academic work with a journalistic output of an impressive scale. He published more than a thousand newspaper articles in the 1920s and 1930s, more than any other professor in economics in Sweden.

Here we have collected 10 articles by Ohlin, translated from Swedish and originally published in Stockholms-Tidningen, to trace the evolution of his thinking during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These articles, spanning roughly half a decade, bring out his response to the stock market crisis in New York in 1929, his views on monetary policy in 1931, on fiscal policy and public works in 1932, his reaction to Keynes’ ideas in 1932 and 1933 and to Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, and, finally, his stand against state socialism in 1935.

At the beginning of the depression, Ohlin was quite optimistic in his outlook. But as the downturn in the world economy deepened, his optimism waned. He dealt with proposals for bringing the Swedish economy out of the depression, and reported positively on the policy views of Keynes. At an early stage, he recommended expansionary fiscal and monetary policies including public works. This approach permeated the contributions of the young generation of Swedish economists arising in the 1930s, eventually forming the Stockholm School of Economics. He was critical of passive Manchester liberalism, ‘folded-arms evangelism’ as well of socialism while promoting his own brand of ‘active social liberalism’.

This chapter looks at the role qualitative evaluation can play in the external review of the Probation Service, the development of an evaluation framework for ongoing assessment and how it can be used to develop new elements of the service. How is this different from the use of existing data by the service?

This takes us to the kind of information that is used by the probation service, to make judgements about the effectiveness of its programmes and the impact on offenders. The main contention is that this is in the main quantitative data, and reports on levels of re-offending. The data is standardised so that it can be used to make comparisons between different types of sentence and criminal justice intervention.

Our contention is that this information is limited in what it says for two main reasons. Firstly, quantitative data tends to report on impact, that is whether an offender has committed another crime after engagement with the probation service, or whether there are patterns of behaviour between offences, individual circumstances and the likelihood or re-offending. In short, the data is a snapshot of whether an offender has changed his or her behaviour or not. However, this chapter will illustrate how quantitative data misses an understanding of how behaviour changes and why behaviour does not change. As a result, this leaves the service with a limited understanding of how it is working.

Secondly, the chapter will argue that the existing probation framework itself creates quite specific definitions of which data is relevant and which data is not relevant. We will give examples of narratives that offenders offer in group sessions that provide rich material about their lives, pressures and offence. But evidence suggests that this information is not used to inform programmes, re-assess and review an offender's own progression towards re-offending or a life without crime.

The chapter considers the change of position of the Home Office on the value of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in England and Wales which took place around 2003 after the end of the Crime Reduction Programme (CRP). Before the CRP Home Office researchers had shown little interest in RCTs; after it, they came close to arguing that no other kinds of evaluation research were worth doing. This represented a reversal of a position that had dominated Home Office thinking on the issue for almost 30 years – that RCTs were in general impractical and unlikely to produce clear-cut results. This view was based in part on the experience of RCTs in the 1970s, which led influential researchers to conclude that the method could not be transferred from medicine to criminal justice. But, disappointed with the lack of definite results from the CRP, the Home Office turned back to RCTs as a potential source of certainty about what works. The chapter considers two recent scholarly exchanges on the question, in relation to an evaluation of a community crime reduction programme, for which an experimental design was attempted but not achieved, and to Lawrence Sherman's recent advocacy of RCTs and his use of research on restorative justice as an example of the successful use of the method. The chapter argues that the restorative justice research, while of very high quality, does not provide as clear an example of the use of an RCT as Sherman claims, and concludes with some reflections on the inherent difficulties of criminal justice evaluation, and on the lack of a predictable, rational relationship between research quality and policy influence.

This chapter describes our innovative approach to the teaching of computer programming and writing; professors worked with students across classes united by a theme of narrative. A year-long study examined if using Alice, a three-dimensional microworld programming software that allows users to create interactive narratives, was more effective than Visual Basic (VB) in developing problem-solving abilities in first-year college students in introductory computer programming courses. Results revealed that although both the Alice and VB group showed a statistically significant (p<0.05) increase in performance for problem-solving questions related to computer programming, only the Alice group showed a significant increase in problem-solving abilities not directly related to computer programming, and an increase in student retention.

In the second half of the 1980s, together with Perestroika in the Soviet Union, a process took place to end the Cold War as a confrontation between the United States of America and the Soviet Union. At the same time, this process caused the collapse of the Soviet Union and socialist system and thereafter the separation and independence of the many nationalities that constituted the Soviet socialist system in the East and South Europe. However to our regret, such nationalities could not enjoy freedom by independence, but went to brutal wars between separated nationalities. Even after many local wars and brutalities we cannot yet find the final solution through peace and justice for peoples.

This is a case study on the opportunities provided by Open Source library systems and the experience of delivering these systems through a shared service.

This chapter derives from desk research, interviews, and direct involvement in the project. The format is a case study, setting out a detailed timeline of events with information that can be applied in other settings.

This chapter presents reflections on the value and limitations of collaboration amongst libraries and librarians on an innovative approach to library systems and technologies. It also presents reflections on lessons learned from the processes and detailed discussion of the success factors for shared services and the reasons why such initiatives may not result in the outcomes predicted at the start.

Libraries and IT services considering Open Source and shared service approaches to provision will find material in this study useful when planning their projects.

The nature of collaboration and collaborative working is studied and observations made about the way that outcomes cannot always be predicted or controlled. In a genuine collaboration, the outcome is determined by the interactions between the partners and is unique to the specifics of that collaboration.

The case study derives from interviews, written material and direct observation not generally in the public domain, providing a strong insider’s view of the activity.