Editorial: Improving schools

Editorial : Schools as enabling environments

Improving the Schools of Today Inventing the Schools of Tomorrow

Perham (2010) describes the “irrelevant sound effect (ISE)” – or the presence of sound that is irrelevant to the task at hand. According to his research, sounds that exhibit “acute changing states” or acoustical variations impair outcomes when performing a memory or linear task, such as recalling a string of numbers. Sounds with little acoustical variation, or “steady state sounds” don’t impair...

Leadership in improving schools: a qualitative perspective

This paper presents findings from the first year of school-based case studies investigating the ‘Impact of School Leadership on Pupil Outcomes’. The case study component of this study involved twenty schools (ten primary and ten secondary), all of which were selected on the basis of their sustained improvement (over at least three consecutive years) in terms of pupil outcomes. Interviews were c...

Editorial: Improving visual deficits with perceptual learning

The capability of improving performance on visual tasks with practice has been a matter of intense investigation during the last 40 years (Fiorentini and Berardi, 1980; Sagi, 2011). This phenomenon, called perceptual learning, has been proven to occur with virtually any visual skill or stimulus characteristic (Fahle and Poggio, 2002), and to be long-lasting, thus involving neural plasticity at ...

Editorial: Improving Animal Welfare through Genetic Selection

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts that the projected massive global increase in demand for livestock products will continue for several decades. According to Delgado et al. (1999), it is appropriate to term the course of these events a " Livestock Revolution, " which, as opposed to the Green Revolution, is driven by demand. While more precise production techno...