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There is an interesting line up of topics in this issue. Martin Davies takes a close look at the increasing popularity of intensive teaching formats in university level education within the context of current economic and political changes. The paper draws some tentative conclusions about the advantages and disadvantages of intensive teaching formats.
Amanda Keddie's article re-articulates the issue of gender inequality in our society and points to the need to continue re-envisioning pedagogy and curriculum at the school level to emphasise justice and equality for girls and women.
There are two papers from Canada in this issue. The first discusses the relationship between bullying and social skill development in primary schools. The authors conclude that children who bully their peers usually lack prosocial skills to effectively manage interpersonal relationships.
In the second Canadian article, doctoral candidate Alireza Moghaddam examines coding issues in developing grounded theory. He explains how grounded theory is generated from the data and specifically how the different phases of coding produce different levels of theory.
It is pleasing to note that four of the papers in this issue, including the one mentioned above, were written by post graduate students.
Mary Delfin Pereira and her doctoral supervisor Roger Vallance discuss the issues involved in multiple site action research undertaken in English language classes in four Singapore schools.
The ubiquitous issue of pedagogical change in schools is examined by Suzanne Perillo and the use of a set of guiding principles for cultivating a school environment that enables pedagogical change is proposed. Suzanne is also completing her PhD and this paper emerged from her research.
The role of intrapersonal intelligence in self directed learning is examined by PhD candidate Maura Sellers. Working with low achievers in a primary school English class, her research introduced them to a program specifically designed to foster their knowledge of their own cognition, and thus increase their learning skills.
Given the relatively small number of copies of IIER that are printed, dissemination of the journal and its research articles is very dependent upon its Internet presence. Naturally we maintain a watching brief, as best we can. For example, in response to a hypothetical question, "How would IIER be found if the printed version were retired?". We emphasise that the question is hypothetical. As stated in Editorial 15(2), "... we expect to continue the printed version of IIER in the foreseeable future" [1]. The uncertain, indefinite part is "the foreseeable future". Anyway, to tackle the question, we have done some searches.
If a reader or potential author is searching for an educational research journal featuring open access, one very likely path is a search for all of the words "educational research journal open access". Using a Google search [2], we found the following.
Results 1 - 10 of about 68,900,000 for educational research journal open access. (0.24 seconds)Being ninth in "Results 1 - 10 of about 68,900,000" is fine for our purposes. It's interesting to note that in the same search two well-known lists of open access journals in education, those of the AERA SIG Communication of Research [3] and of the DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals [4], appeared as results 1 and 14 respectively. Also in the same search, the Australian Educational Researcher [5] appeared as result 13, though surely it is a better known journal than IIER.
[Result 9 was:]
IIER: Issues In Educational Research
In September 2004 the Queensland Journal of Educational Research merged with IIER.
... Vol 13, 2003 - Vol 12, 2002 - Access to all volumes 1991-2005 ...
education.curtin.edu.au/iier/iier.html - 6k - Cached - Similar pages
Incidentally, we do whatever we can to build IIER's Internet presence using international avenues, such as the AERA and DOAJ lists cited above [4, 5], and Australian lists such as the NLA's Australian Journals OnLine [6] and ACER's Core Journals indexed in AEI [7]. For a recent addition to IIER's Internet presence, see Open WorldCat [8], in which we have entered IIER's URL [9]. We made our entry of IIER details, appearing under the headings "Table of Contents" and "Notes", using a wiki [10] style interface provided by WorldCat. Evidently WorldCat's operators are expecting or hoping that editors and readers will contribute frequently, facilitated by the wiki interface. However, rather than becoming committed to doing several updates per year on the WorldCat entry for IIER, we inserted a hypertext link to IIER's home page. That link also overcomes this problem. However, the outcome from using WorldCat to find an Australian library that holds IIER is "Sorry, no libraries with the specified item were found near the location you entered. Please try another location." [11] That's a bit hard for us Aussies!
Another likely path, more traditional, is to search the library catalogue in one's own university. We checked this approach with 20 university libraries in NSW, WA, SA and NT (the states with Institutes of Education that participate in IIER). Although very few of the 20 libraries we checked subscribe to IIER, in 16 cases we found IIER quite readily. Nearly all of the cases of IIER being 'found' in a catalogue contained a reference to DOAJ [12], presumably as the library's source of manually or automatically obtained information about IIER.
Unfortunately, it's not sufficient to have encouraging answers about "Finding IIER". We need also some information about whether individual articles in IIER are being found, read and, perhaps most importantly, cited. We checked IIER volumes 13 (2003) and 14 (2004) using two kinds of Google searches [2].
However, we hasten to add that searches of this kind are very incomplete, for two reasons. Firstly, most citations of academic articles are in journals that are not open access and therefore are not searchable by engines such as Google. Secondly, many authors and editors omit URLs from references, thereby rendering that reference invisible as far as Google's "link" operator is concerned. Both of these are factors upon which we can have very little influence. All that we can do is be very diligent in copy editing of reference lists in the online versions, to ensure that wherever possible a verified, public access URL is cited, even if the author did not cite it or did not know of its existence. Previous experience indicates that the incidence of incorrect, broken and missing URLs in raw articles is quite substantial [15].
We hope that the discussion above has given you an illustration of some aspects of the "watching brief" that we are maintaining as a part of the preparation for the potential or eventual retirement of the printed version of IIER, even though there is no formalised plan at present.
Clare McBeath, IIER Editor
Roger Atkinson, IIER Business Manager and Website Editor
| Please cite as: Atkinson, R. and McBeath, C. (2006). Editorial 16(1). Issues In Educational Research, 16(1), v-ix. http://www.iier.org.au/iier16/editorial16-1.html |