David P. Baker

Shadow Education and Allocation in Formal Schooling: Transition to University in Japan

Shadow education is a set of educational activities that occur out-side formal schooling and are designed to enhance the students formal school career. Analyses of data from a longitudinal study of high school seniors in Japan indicate that students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to participate in shadow education and that students who participate in certain forms of shadow education are more likely to attend university. Expanding theories of allocation to incorporate shadow education may enhance the study of how students are allocated to places in formal schooling and how social advantages are transferred across generations.

Creating gender equality: Cross-national gender stratification and mathematical performance.

This study uses data on sex differences in the eight-grade mathematica performance of over 77 000 students in 19 countries, 1964 and 1982 data on such differences in 9 countries, and data on gender stratification of advanced educational and occupational opportunities to explore when and where gender will affect students performance in mathematics. The analyses show that there is cross-national variation in the performance of mathematics and that it is related to variation in the gender stratification of educational and occupational opportunities in adulthood, that sex differences have declined over time, and that school and family factors leading to higher mathematical performance are less stratified by gender when women have more equal access to jobs and higher education

Student Victimization: National and School System Effects on School Violence in 37 Nations:

School violence is a problem in many nations, and rates of school violence in the United States are not among the highest in the world. The authors utilize a section of the TIMSS survey data to (a) explore the amount of school violence among the 37 nations in the study; (b) ascertain whether the traditional national-level predictors of crimes and delinquency explain cross-national variation in school violence; and (c) test whether factors related to the educational system are associated with levels of school violence cross-nationally. The results show that national patterns of school violence are not strongly related to general patterns of violence or lack of social integration in society. However, national systems of education that produce greater achievement differences between high-achieving and low-achieving students tend to record more violence. The authors suggest further studies and testing of one possible remedy for school violence: equalizing the quality of education that all students receive.

The Education Effect on Population Health: A Reassessment

Demographic research frequently reports consistent and significant associations between formal educational attainment and a range of health risks such as smoking, drug abuse, and accidents, as well as the contraction of many diseases, and health outcomes such as mortality—almost all indicating the same conclusion: better-educated individuals are healthier and live longer. Despite the substantial reporting of a robust education effect, there is inadequate appreciation of its independent influence and role as a causal agent. To address the effect of education on health in general, three contributions are provided: 1) a macro-level summary of the dimensions of the worldwide educational revolution and a reassessment of its causal role in the health of individuals and in the demographic health transition are carried out; 2) a meta-analysis of methodologically sophisticated studies of the effect of educational attainment on all-cause mortality is conducted to establish the independence and robustness of the education effect on health; and 3) a schooling-cognition hypothesis about the influence of education as a powerful determinant of health is developed in light of new multidisciplinary cognitive research.

How will we know patients are safer? An organization-wide approach to measuring and improving safety

Objective:Our institution, like many, is struggling to develop measures that answer the question, How do we know we are safer? Our objectives are to present a framework to evaluate performance in patient safety and describe how we applied this model in intensive care units. Design:We focus on measures of safety rather than broader measures of quality. The measures will allow health care organizations to evaluate whether they are safer now than in the past by answering the following questions: How often do we harm patients? How often do patients receive the appropriate interventions? How do we know we learned from defects? How well have we created a culture of safety? The first two measures are rate based, whereas the latter two are qualitative. To improve care within institutions, caregivers must be engaged, must participate in the selection and development of measures, and must receive feedback regarding their performance. The following attributes should be considered when evaluating potential safety measures: Measures must be important to the organization, must be valid (represent what they intend to measure), must be reliable (produce similar results when used repeatedly), must be feasible (affordable to collect data), must be usable for the people expected to employ the data to improve safety, and must have universal applicability within the entire institution. Setting:Health care institutions. Results:Health care currently lacks a robust safety score card. We developed four aggregate measures of patient safety and present how we applied them to intensive care units in an academic medical center. The same measures are being applied to nearly 200 intensive care units as part of ongoing collaborative projects. The measures include how often do we harm patients, how often do we do what we should (i.e., use evidence-based medicine), how do we know we learned from mistakes, and how well do we improve culture. Measures collected by different departments can then be aggregated to provide a hospital level safety score card. Conclusion:The science of measuring patient safety is immature. This article is a starting point for developing feasible and scientifically sound approaches to measure safety within an institution. Institutions will need to find a balance between measures that are scientifically sound, affordable, usable, and easily applied across the institution.

Teachers’ Work: Institutional Isomorphism and Cultural Variation in the U.S., Germany, and Japan

Policy debates in the U.S. are increasingly informed by use of internationally generated, comparative data. Many arguments revolve around whether or not such comparison makes “cultural sense” or whether specific educational activities that appear successful in one nation are “culturally appropriate” in another. These arguments clash with the work of anthropologists and sociologists who demonstrate that global cultural dynamics influence national patterns of schooling around the world. Using both the survey and case study data from the Third International Math-Science Study (TIMSS), we examine the working conditions and beliefs of teachers in Japan, Germany, and the U.S. in order to assess the relative merits of competing theoretical perspectives. We find some differences in how teachers’ work is organized, but similarities in teachers’ belief patterns. We find that core teaching practices and teacher beliefs show little national variation, but that other aspects of teachers’ work (e.g., non-instructional duties) do show variation. We show that models of national cultures of learning or “national teaching scripts” may overemphasize cultural differences and underestimate the impact of institutional isomorphism in schooling. We argue that rather than change values, educational policy will be best served by identifying specific features of teacher work and analyzing how to improve these working conditions.

GENDER STRATIFICATION IN THE SCIENCE PIPELINE A Comparative Analysis of Seven Countries

This study uses a “science pipeline” model and cross-national data to examine womens participation in science education and occupations in seven countries. Gender stratification in later science education and in science occupations is found in every country examined. Young womens participation in science education decreases with each stage in the science pipeline, but there is considerable cross-national variation in the extent of gender stratification in science. Findings show greater gender stratification in science occupations than in science education, suggesting factors other than training help maintain inequality in high-status science occupations.

Developmental shifts in fMRI activations during visuospatial relational reasoning

To investigate maturational plasticity of fluid cognition systems, functional brain imaging was undertaken in healthy 8-19 year old participants while completing visuospatial relational reasoning problems similar to Ravens matrices and current elementary grade math textbooks. Analyses revealed that visuospatial relational reasoning across this developmental age range recruited activations in the superior parietal cortices most prominently, the dorsolateral prefrontal, occipital-temporal, and premotor/supplementary cortices, the basal ganglia, and insula. There were comparable activity volumes in left and right hemispheres for nearly all of these regions. Regression analyses indicated increasing activity predominantly in the superior parietal lobes with developmental age. In contrast, multiple anterior neural systems showed significantly less activity with age, including dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal, paracentral, and insula cortices bilaterally, basal ganglia, and particularly large clusters in the midline anterior cingulate/medial frontal cortex, left middle cingulate/supplementary motor cortex, left insula-putamen, and left caudate. Findings suggest that neuromaturational changes associated with visuospatial relational reasoning shift from a more widespread fronto-cingulate-striatal pattern in childhood to predominant parieto-frontal activation pattern in late adolescence.

The Worldwide Explosion of Internationalized Education Policy

Conventional wisdom has it that policymakers rationally approach an ongoing or potential problem, carefully consider the reasons for the problem, and then sensibly debate the information and research on this problem. The final stage of this ideal vision of the educational policymaking process is that the policymakers decide how to solve specific problems based on their consideration of all of the relevant data and possible options (Vickers, 1994). This is rarely, if ever, the case.

The Educational Transformation of Work: Towards a New Synthesis.

Formal education not only educates individuals, it reconstitutes the very foundations of society through a pervasive culture of education with a legitimate capacity to reconstruct work and its central components such as ideas about human productive abilities, new organisations and management, widespread professionalism and expertise, and the emerging educated workplace. The ubiquitous massive growth and spread of education has transformed the world into a schooled society, and in turn the schooled society has transformed work. The implications of the educational revolution and empirical findings from a range of recent research studies are applied to – the narrow version of human capital theory and education‐as‐myth sociological theory – two widely employed theories of education and work over the past 40 years. And a new theoretical synthesis that takes into account the empirical realities of the schooled society is proposed.