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Achieving the elimination of racial differences in test performance, as set forth in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), requires education policies that engage the reality that African American test performances are not only about race but also about gender and residential status. In an effort to inform education policymaking with research that explores race–gender and residential inequality, I assess the growth of reading gaps in school and non-school contexts using a national and city sample of children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal, Kindergarten Cohort 1998–1999. I found that inequality in test performances was greater in the city than elsewhere, and African American boys shoulder a disproportionate educational burden related to city residency and enrollment in city schools. Additionally, children in city neighborhoods – where drugs and burglary are big problems – experience large shortfalls in reading in school and non-school contexts. I conclude with a discussion of the study’s implications for future educational policy, practice, and research, especially NCLB, which mandates that public schools achieve parity among racial groups by the end of the 2013–2014 academic year.

Demographic faultlines (i.e., potential subgroup splits based on demographic attributes) have been argued to have effects over and above those of diversity. Yet, faultlines, much like diversity, do not seem to have positive or negative effects on performance per se, but to be affected by contextual variables as well as intermediate outcomes, such as relationship conflict. Relationship conflicts, a major threat to teamwork, are particularly likely to arise between subgroups. Thus, with the objective to shed some light on why and how exactly faultlines impact group outcome, we investigate the effect of faultline strength and distance on performance through relationship conflict as well as the effect of faultline strength on performance via relationship conflict, contingent on the level of faultline distance. To test our hypotheses we used data gathered in a laboratory setting with 267 graduate students. Results provide strong support for the extension of the faultline model.

This chapter reviews recent theoretical developments and empirical research, to examine the causes and consequences of identity processes in relation to collaboration in work groups and group performance. Our central proposition is that identification in work groups can have beneficial as well as detrimental effects, depending on the nature of the shared identity, and the content of distinctive group norms. First, we examine some of the complications stemming from the fact that identification in work settings typically involves groups that can be defined at different levels of inclusiveness and where people can be seen as having multiple cross-cutting identities. Then, we move on to show that processes of identification affect the way people view their co-workers and supervisors, causing the same objective behavior to be interpreted and responded to in a fundamentally different way. Finally, we examine how normative expectations about prototypical group behavior determine group processes and group outcomes, with the consequence that identification and commitment can affect work motivation and collective performance in different ways, depending on the content of distinctive group norms.

In this chapter, we introduce a theoretical model to explain under which conditions different insights or approaches within a team do not necessarily undermine team cohesiveness or prevent the development of a common team identity, and can in fact even reinforce each other. We will review a program of research that examined the formation of a common identity in new collaborations, as well as the extent to which teams accept newcomers who possess unique resources. We show that clarity and congruence determine the likelihood that team members will maintain a common identity while they effectively use the differences among them and accommodate to team changes.

The goal of interfirm contract research is to examine how formal contracts impact transaction success, firm relationships, and ultimately individual and collaborative firm performance when two or more firms interact. Most contract literature uses an economic lens to examine contracts: the property rights perspective, agency theory, and TCE. Property rights-based contract research (Coase, 1960; Demsetz, 1967; Alchian & Demsetz, 1973; Cheung, 1969) examines how efficient property rights assignment mitigates ex ante hazards. Similarly, agency theory-based contract research (e.g., Ross, 1973; Jensen & Meckling, 1976; Harris & Raviv, 1979) investigates how incentive alignment between the principal and agent leads to the mitigation of ex ante hazards. In contrast, TCE-based research (Williamson, 1975, 1985) examines contractual safeguards to mitigate both ex ante and ex post hazards (e.g., Joskow, 1985, 1987, 1990; Crocker & Reynolds, 1993). Because the three economic perspectives dominate, most research addresses how contracts are used to mitigate ex ante or ex post hazards. Therefore, many topics still need to be investigated to enhance our understanding of interfirm contracting.

The purpose of this chapter is to present a summary of the literature related to homework. First, information on the search procedures is provided, including the criteria for inclusion in this review. Second, a historical overview of homework in the United States is provided, including definitions and major changes in public opinion over time. The third section addresses the difficulties experienced by students with emotional disabilities in regard to homework. The fourth section reviews the homework policies presently in place at local school districts across the U.S. The fifth section discusses the effects of homework when basic classroom strategies, cooperative homework teams, self-management and goal setting, and assignment completion strategies are used. The sixth section describes the homework practices used, as reported by teachers and students. The seventh section describes the problems experienced by students with disabilities, from the perspective of teachers, parents, and students. A final section describes the kinds of problems associated with home-school communication.

Lawrence Angus is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne. Much of his work has been conducted in relation to educational policy and institutional restructuring, which he connects with issues of social formation, culture and equity. Angus’s current interest is in the part played by schools in the construction and legitimation of various forms of culture and knowledge associated with the use of new technologies, and the implications of these for educational practice, inclusion/exclusion and (dis)advantage. Angus has a strong research and publication record in socio-cultural analysis of processes of schooling, and a record of strong policy work including participation in government advisory committees. His analyses of educational processes and practices and what these mean for the conceptualisation of educational policy and educational reform have been especially influential. His most recent book, with Terri Seddon, is Reshaping Australian education: Beyond nostalgia (Australian Council for Educational Research, 2000). He has extensive experience of qualitative research and has published internationally on methodological debates and innovations in critical ethnography.Karin Aronsson is a professor at the Department of Child Studies, Linkööping University. Much of her research concerns multiparty conversations in institutional settings, e.g. family therapy talk, pediatric interviews, and classroom conversations. Other investigations concern codeswitching in bilingual children’s play, and language shift phenomena in relation to sibling caretaking. Several of her studies map the social choreography of talk-in-interaction along specific continua; e.g. formality-informality and alignment-disalignment. A series of recent studies concern classrooms dialogues as arenas for informal learning.Dennis Beach is a senior research fellow and associate Professor at the Department of Education Gööteborg University, Sweden. His main responsibilities are for the development of ethnographic research methods at the department, the supervision of Ph.D. research and teaching within the sociology of education. Together with Marie Carlson from the Department of Sociology at Göötborg University, Beach is currently leading a recently funded Research Council project on the restructuring of adult education and the collective renewal of Swedish For Immigrants Education (SFI). His previous research projects have been in the restructuring of upper-secondary education and of various programmes within university-based vocational education.Shereen Benjamin has worked as a class teacher of young children in primary and special schools, and as a learning support teacher in the secondary school in which her doctoral research was based. Her Ph.D. was completed at the London University Institute of Education, with the support of an Economic and Social Research Council studentship. She is currently lecturing in the Inclusive and Special Education division of the University of Birmingham. She is interested in the intersection of gender/sexuality, social class and ‘special educational needs’, and is researching inclusive school cultures in collaboration with practising teachers and with colleagues from The Open University and Leeds Metropolitan University.Jeff Bezemer (1976), MA, studied Language and Culture at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In 1999, he graduated with a specialisation in Dutch as a Second Language. Since 1999, he is affiliated to Babylon, Center for Studies of Multilingualism in the Multicultural Society at Tilburg University. After having been involved in empirical-analytical studies on school achievements of islamic school pupils, and adult lingua-franca-interaction, he is currently engaged in an international-comparative, empirical-interpretative Ph.D. project on multilingualism and education in a multi-ethnic, Dutch primary school.Diann Eley is currently a Research Associate at Loughborough University in the Department of Physical Education, Sport Science and Recreation Management. Her main research interest is the social-psychology of volunteerism and leadership in young people and sport.Laura Dawn Greathouse received her doctorate, from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2000, for her dissertation dealing with refugee and immigrant students in English for Speakers of Other Languages classrooms. Her research focus remains on inequality and education, especially in linguistic minorities. In her current position as assistant professor of anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, she is responsible for the administration of the credentialing of students with a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology to teach at the elementary or secondary educational levels. She is currently working on social acceptance of Middle Eastern descent students in a post-September, 2001 America.Caroline Hudson’s research interests include basic skills provision for offenders; the relationships between basic skills, offending behaviour and social exclusion; school attendance and truancy; evidence-based policy; the effectiveness of basing police officers in schools; and the literacy demands of the secondary school curriculum. Her doctoral ethnography was of young people’s perceptions of the relationships between their family structure (intact nuclear, reordered nuclear and single-parent) and their experience of family and schooling. Formerly a secondary school English teacher, Caroline has worked as a Research Officer at the University of Oxford, and is currently Basic Skills Development Advisor at the Home Office National Probation Directorate.Bob Jeffrey is a research fellow in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University. He was a primary teacher for twenty years before joining The Open University as a project officer on an Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) research project concerned with creative teaching in primary schools directed by Professor Peter Woods. Under the same direction he gained another ESRC research award focusing on the effects of Ofsted inspections on primary teachers. He has continued his research in three areas, creative teaching and learning, primary teacher’s work and research methodology, publishing extensively both individually and with a team within his university faculty. He has also established extensive European connections in the area of creativity and ethnography through the administration of email discussion lists, co-ordinating an ethnography network at the European Conference of Educational Research, submitting European Union research proposals, and organising a Special Interest Group within BERA. He has been invited to give papers at Padua University, Italy and to run methodology workshops in Tallinn, Estonia.Allyson Julé (Ph.D., University of Surrey Roehampton, London, U.K.) currently teaches in the TESL Certificate Program at Trinity Western University, Langley, British Columbia and at the English Language Institute at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests include gender in ESL; the Punjabi Sikh experience in Canada; ethnography in education; and classroom talk analysis in teacher education.David Kirk is with the Department of Physical Education, Sports Science and Recreation Management at Loughborough University. His research interests include educational reform and curriculum development in physical education, young people in sport, and situated learning in physical education and sport. His most recent book is ‘Schooling Bodies: School Practice and Public Discourse, 1880–1950’ (Leicester University Press, 1998).Eamonn McKeown is a Senior Research Fellow in Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at University College London. His background is in Social Anthropology having completed both his first degree and Ph.D. at Queen’s University, Belfast and he has previously been employed as a Research Fellow and tutor at Queen’s University, Belfast and University College Swansea. He has published on a range of educational research issues (selection in Northern Ireland, male recruits to primary school teaching, gender and science teaching, occupational sex-typing among primary school children) and has conducted extended fieldwork in Papua New Guinea examining the relationship between formal education and local culture and in New York investigating the nature of contemporary Irish-American identity. He is currently completing a book on literacy appropriation in a Papua New Guinean highlands community.Ann MacPhail is currently a lecturer in the Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, University of Limerick. Her main interests revolve around young people in sport and curriculum development in PE During the past three years Ann has been involved in a number of projects involved with school PE and sport, including model-based teaching and learning in school PE and an ethnography of junior sport participation.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Anna Sparrman has a professional background as a museum curator. She received her Ph.D., in 2002, from the Department of Child Studies at Linkööping University, Sweden. The thesis was concerned with images and visuality in children’s culture as well as commercial childhood. Her main research interest is visual culture in everyday life. She now works as a researcher at the Department of Child Studies.Wendy Sutherland-Smith is a research associate at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, where she is undertaking doctoral studies in Internet literacy practices of tertiary English as a Second Language (ESL) students. She teaches international students entering tertiary studies, where she focuses on writing processes and issues of intellectual property. In her doctoral work, Sutherland-Smith is particularly interested in Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic violence, cultural capital, habitus and field, and applies these critically in analyses of international students and their interactions with academic culture, print-centred and internet learning styles, and issues of intellectual property. She has published articles in The Reading Teacher and Prospect on her research of international students’ reading practices in paper-text compared to hyper-text environments.Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Education Policy at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham. His recent books include: Affirming the Comprehensive Ideal (Falmer, 1997, edited with Richard Pring), Doing Research about Education (Falmer, 1998, editor) Durkheim and Modern Education (Routledge, 1998, edited with W S F Pickering), Policy and Politics in Education (Ashgate, 2000) and Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001). His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, choice of schools, religiously-based schools and ethnographic research methodology. He recently directed a Spencer Foundation funded comparative project on faith-based schools in England and the Netherlands.