Robert Wade

Cathy Wylie

Simon Chapple

Max Rashbrooke

Donal Curtin

Max Harris

Bernard Hickey

Brian Easton

Prue Hyman

Gareth Morgan

Susan St John

Hautahi Kingi

Geoff Bertram

Matt Nolan

Tim Hazledine

Few books have had the global impact of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. An overnight bestseller, Piketty’s assessment that inherited wealth will always grow faster, on average, than earned wealth has energised debate. Hailed as ‘bigger than Marx’ (The Economist) or dismissed as ‘medieval’ (Wall Street Journal), the book is widely acknowledged as having significant economic and political implications. Collected in this BWB Text are responses to this phenomenon from a diverse range of New Zealand economists and commentators. These voices speak independently to the relevance of Piketty’s conclusions. Is New Zealand faced with a one-way future of rising inequality? Does redistribution need to focus more on wealth, rather than just income? Was the post-war Great Convergence merely an aberration and is our society doomed to regress into a new Gilded Age?

New Zealand Perspectives

The Piketty Phenomenon

Sally Boyd

This study examined the workloads of academic, general, support, library, and technical staff of New Zealand universities. It focused on current levels of workload, changes in workload levels and content, connections between workload and stress, and staff attitudes towards the effects of workload changes and educational reforms on the quality of their work. A total of 1,181 Association of University Staff members were surveyed through mailed questionnaires. The findings showed increasing workloads and stress for many university staff, and suggest that the overall quality of working life is declining for many university staff. Many of those surveyed felt that their work was often or always stressful; the majority stated that their work had become more stressful recently, and that they saw this trend continuing in the future. One of the major factors involved in the increase in stress levels was increase in workload. Females and recently appointed academics were identified as more likely to experience stress compared with academics in general. Two appendixes provide demographic information about the respondents, additional data tables, and copies of the academic and administrative support personnel questionnaires. (Contains 33 references.) (MDM)

Workload and Stress in New Zealand Universities

Sandra L. Christenson

Amy L. Reschly

For more than two decades, the concept of student engagement has grown from simple attention in class to a construct comprised of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components that embody and further develop motivation for learning. Similarly, the goals of student engagement have evolved from dropout prevention to improved outcomes for lifelong learning. This robust expansion has led to numerous lines of research across disciplines and are brought together clearly and comprehensively in the Handbook of Research on Student Engagement. The Handbook guides readers through the field’s rich history, sorts out its component constructs, and identifies knowledge gaps to be filled by future research. Grounding data in real-world learning situations, contributors analyze indicators and facilitators of student engagement, link engagement to motivation, and gauge the impact of family, peers, and teachers on engagement in elementary and secondary grades. Findings on the effectiveness of classroom interventions are discussed in detail. And because assessing engagement is still a relatively new endeavor, chapters on measurement methods and issues round out this important resource. Topical areas addressed in the Handbook include: Engagement across developmental stages. Self-efficacy in the engaged learner. Parental and social influences on engagement and achievement motivation. The engaging nature of teaching for competency development. The relationship between engagement and high-risk behavior in adolescents. Comparing methods for measuring student engagement. An essential guide to the expanding knowledge base, the Handbook of Research on Student Engagement serves as a valuable resource for researchers, scientist-practitioners, and graduate students in such varied fields as clinical child and school psychology, educational psychology, public health, teaching and teacher education, social work, and educational policy.

Handbook of Research on Student Engagement

Cathy Wylie

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