Meritocracy in Singaporean Educational System: Inequality in Admission to Secondary Schools

This paper explores the fairness of meritocracy concerning admission to secondary schools based on the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) in Singapore. The Ministry of Education has consistently adopted the ideology of meritocracy as so to select talented students, stimulate effort, and optimize the allocation of rewards. The PSLE results can largely determine students’ educational tracks and even career orientation in Singapore. The paper shows how the principle of meritocracy works and how the government uses meritocratic belief in the education system. The paper argues that meritocracy has posed a threat to equality in admission to secondary schools in Singapore. The findings indicate that the meritocratic policy does not recognize both the importance of family SES and the gap between elite schools and neighbourhood schools in the Singapore education system. Students with wealthy and well-educated parents and students in elite schools are more likely to acquire better educational attainment, since they tend to gain more cultural capital from family and social capital from school. The principle of meritocracy fails to allocate opportunities fairly to students and can lead to inequality in education and exacerbate educational stratification.

Infrahumanization and affective prejudice as drivers of teacher discrimination against Romani students: A conceptual replication of Bruneau et al. (2020)

Bruneau’s work repeatedly focused on the Roma minority, worldwide, one of the most dehumanized ethnic groups. In a preregistered design, we replicated one of his previous studies (Bruneau et al., 2020) in a different national context (i.e., Germany) in testing the hypotheses that pre-service teachers make biased educational-track recommendations discriminating against Romani students and that infrahumanization drives this behaviour. In line with Bruneau et al.’s work, pre-service teachers judged placing self-identified Romani students into lower educational tracks as more appropriate than self-identified Turkish-origin and German students, despite equal academic performance. Although participants infrahumanized Romani students at greater levels compared to non-Romani students, in contrast to the Bruneau et al.’s study, educational-track recommendations were positively associated with affective prejudice but not with infrahumanization. These findings extend Bruneau’s insights on dehumanization, prejudice, and discrimination against people of Romani background, highlighting the role of the social context in which these associations are studied.

Differences in Adolescents’ Alcohol Use and Smoking Behavior between Educational Tracks: Do Popularity Norms Matter?

Explanations about differences in drinking and smoking rates between educational tracks have so far mainly focused on factors outside the classroom. The extent to which these behaviors are rewarded with popularity within a classroom—so called popularity norms—and their interaction with individual characteristics could explain the observed differences in risk behavior. 1860 adolescents (Mage = 13.04; 50% girls) from 81 different classrooms reported three times during one academic year about their own and their classmates behavior. Overall, in vocational tracks popularity norms for alcohol and smoking were more positive and predicted classroom differences in alcohol and smoking. Knowledge about classroom processes can advance the field in unraveling the functional aspects of risk behavior in adolescence. Preregistration: The hypotheses and the analytical plan of this study were preregistered under number #39136 (https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=gx77p6).

Civic understanding mediates of the effect of educational tracks on voting intentions in German schools

Across democracies, education predicts electoral participation and political interest. Here, German students on the pre-vocational and pre-academic educational tracks are compared to show how these differences emerge, and thus indicate how they can be addressed. In a Preliminary Study, a large dataset (3747 participants) revealed that there is a gap in political interest between the tracks, and that this predicts a gap in voting intentions. Study 1 (228 participants) tested three mediators of the relationship between educational tracks and voting intentions. Differences in civic understanding primarily explained the link between educational track and voting intentions. Lastly, in Study 2, 23 semi-structured interviews explored how limited civic understanding constrains political engagement among students on the pre-vocational track, indicating that a narrow understanding of power and a lack of sociological imagination are key. The finding that the gaps emerge due to differences in civic understanding, which is teachable, suggests that schools can play an effective role in addressing them. Limitations and implications are discussed.

Visualisation and network analysis of physical activity and its determinants: Demonstrating opportunities in analysing baseline associations in the Let’s Move It trial

PEER REVIEWED VERSION NOW OPEN ACCESS AT https://doi.org/10.1080/21642850.2019.1646136. Supplementary website: https://git.io/fhxvu. Background: Let's Move It is a complex whole-school system intervention aiming to reduce sedentary behaviours (SB) and increase physical activity (PA) among adolescents in vocational schools, by targeting their environmental and psychosocial determinants. This paper describes participants' baseline characteristics in a cluster-randomised trial testing the Let's Move It intervention, and explores possibilities for visual data presentation, making use of recent developments in software and network analyses. We provide an example of a comprehensive research report with all analysis code and results in a readily accessible format, allowing other researchers to apply these tools to their own data. Methods: At baseline, 1166 adolescents in 57 classes at 6 school clusters, distributed across four educational tracks, participated the study. We measured PA and SB (with 7-day accelerometry), psychological and social constructs hypothesised to affect the intervention's effects on outcomes (with questionnaires), and body composition (with bioimpedance measurement). Data were visualised using various techniques, e.g., combining ridge plots and diamond plots. Network analysis was used to explore relations between psychological/social variables and outcomes. Results: Participants' mean age was 18.5 (Median = 18.0) years. On average, participants engaged in moderate-to-vigorous daily PA for 1h 5min(CI95: 0h 57min - 1h 13min), SB for 8h 44min(CI95: 8h 4min - 9h 24min), and interrupted their sitting 25.8 times (CI95: 23.5 - 28.0) per day on average. Cluster randomisation appeared to result in balanced distributions for baseline characteristics between intervention and control groups, but differences emerged across the four educational tracks. Self-reported behaviour change technique (BCT) use was low for many but not all techniques. A network analysis revealed direct relationships between PA and behavioural experiments, planning and autonomous motivation. Several BCTs were connected to PA via autonomous motivation. Conclusions: Data-visualisation and data exploration techniques (e.g. network analysis) can help reveal the dynamics involved in complex multi-causal systems -- a challenging task with traditional data presentations. The benefits of presenting complex data visually should encourage researchers to publish extensive analyses and descriptions as website supplements, which would increase the speed and quality of scientific communication, as well as help to address the crisis of reduced confidence in research findings.