Search results

The significant contribution and relevance of Comparative and International Education (CIE) mainly depends on how closely it studies the interplay between society and education, considering what is dubbed as the global and the local. Many CIE studies including critical reviews seems to dwell on the topic, purpose, conceptual, and methodological aspects of the field, magnifying what appears to be the global. Our understanding of the role particular sociocultural, economic, and political contexts play in education seems inconclusive. Using appropriate analytical frameworks that delineate society–education dynamics, this study further problematizes the comparative and international elements of CIE area studies, with a focus on context analysis. The critical review considers area studies published over the last seven years in leading CIE journals and answers this question: How and to what extent do CIE area studies operationalize context analysis? The aim is not so much to bring consensus but to further highlight tensions and issues in conducting context-sensitive comparative and international education studies. The findings indicate that CIE research over the last seven years does not seem to live up to the expectation of producing meaningfully contextualized knowledge. The role of context analysis in CIE research seems ill defined and practiced. Alternative explanations for this and considerations for further scholarship are discussed.

This chapter sets forth a form of comparative analysis that is explicitly organizational, in the sense that it uses cross-level, contextual or compositional, analysis to explain organizational-level observations, especially comparisons between organizations. Inter-organizational comparisons often surface paradoxical results, in the form of unexpected differences among similar kinds of organizations, or unexpected similarities among different kinds of organizations. The value of using comparative analysis in these cases is that the information required to unravel organizational-level puzzling results is often located at a higher or lower levels. The proposed form of comparative analysis thus extends the conventional top-down, unidirectional form by adding a bottom-up component – making it bi-directional. In addition to introducing an organization-centered form of comparative analysis, the chapter offers suggestions for its practice and speculates about the potential benefits of its broad application within organizational studies.

Multilevel approaches are generally well suited to group communication because what people say and do in groups is a function of intra- and trans-individual mechanisms. This chapter first provides a brief overview of group research as a multilevel problem and then describes more modern approaches to modeling nested data using latent variable models, including multilevel structural equation modeling and latent class analysis. The chapter concludes by addressing conceptual opportunities provided by multilevel latent modeling approaches to group communication.

The very contextual nature of most mitigating evidence runs counter to America’s individualistic culture. Prior research has found that capital jurors are unreceptive to most mitigating circumstances, but no research has examined the capital sentencing decisions of trial judges. This study fills that gap through a content analysis of eight judicial sentencing opinions from Delaware. The findings indicate that judges typically dismiss contextualizing evidence in their sentencing opinions and instead focus predominately on the defendant’s culpability. This finding calls into question the ability of guided discretion statutes to ensure the consideration of mitigation and limit arbitrariness in the death penalty.

Purpose – To provide classroom teachers with an overview of a range of assessments that can be administered either individually or to a group.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter is organized from early literacy skill assessments (both individual and group based) to comprehension and standardized tests.

Findings – Provides detailed information on skills required for each element of reading, design of assessment, intended purpose, and process of administration.

Research limitations/implications – This is not an exhaustive list, the authors strove to highlight the most reliable and practical assessments from a large body of possible choices.

Practical implications – This is a valuable source for classroom teachers who are provided with a wide-range of assessment choices covering the breadth of reading skills with extensive details on each.

Originality/value of paper – Teachers need a range of assessments to choose from to make decisions at the individual, class and school level.

Taking an intersectional approach, this chapter makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to the study of mothers’ movements in the context of social welfare cutbacks in Israel. I argue that the political use of the maternal identity provides an important cultural resource to women’s social movements, yet all women cannot access this advantage equally. By adding an intersectional perspective to the literature on women’s movements and media debates, this empirical study shows that the ability of different groups of women to politically mobilize their maternal identity in the news is impacted by their class and racial backgrounds. I focus on Israel as an ambiguous case that reflects both the political relevance of maternal identity as mobilized by different political actors, as well as the intersectional dynamics of marginalization of women’s movements within contentious media debates about austerity policies. Using critical discourse analysis, I analyzed 268 newspaper articles that discuss the Israeli Single Mothers’ Movement, a welfare rights movement of low-income women of color (Mizrahi). I find two competing frames converging across the newspapers analyzed: the first draws on a nationalist discourse of the “mother of the nation” to present a positive image of a heroic “mothers’ movement”; the second draws on racist and sexist images to negatively frame activists as a “Mizrahi movement” of undeserving poor mothers. I show how the contested construction of the Single Mothers’ Movement in the news media is directly connected to hegemonic Israeli discourse on motherhood and ethnicity, and demonstrate how this shapes the movement’s public image and its political and feminist value.