Scholarly communication trends — voices from the vortex: a summary of specialist opinion

The views of specialists (academics, librarians, publishers and information scientists) on trends in scholarly communications were canvassed by means of structured questions. A greater commonality of views was found than might have been expected.     

Anti-racist moral education: A review of approaches,impact and theoretical underpinnings from 2000 to 2015

Racism is a moral issue and of concern for moral educators, with recent social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter highlighting how far we are from obliterating racial oppression and the unearned privilege whiteness confers. To contribute to a more formalised approach to anti-racist moral education, this article systematically reviews 15 years of peer-reviewed scholarship concerned with anti-racist education, to establish the definitions and aims of anti-racist education drawn on, the theoretical frameworks underpinning these, the methods used in education efforts, and their intended impact. It also considers the geo-political aspects of knowledge production in the field, such as author country location and implementation context of empirical studies. It concludes with implications for moral education in classroom and community contexts and advocates for anti-racist moral education that comprise three interconnected components—making visible systemic oppression (visibilising), recognising personal complicity in oppression through unearned privilege (recognising) and developing strategies to transform structural inequalities (strategising).     

On‐screen print: the role of captions as a supplemental literacy tool

Children living in poverty are 1.3 times as likely as non‐poor children to experience reading difficulties and lack key oral experiences that contribute to early literacy development. The purpose of this research was to study the effects of viewing commercially available educational television with closed captions. Seventy second‐ and third‐grade economically disadvantaged children living in urban locations participated in this experimental research design. Children were randomly assigned to view videos with or without closed captions. Captions helped children recognise and read more words, identify the meaning of those words, generate inferences regarding programme content and transfer these skills to a normative code‐related skill task. Risk status moderated word recognition performance: those at risk benefited from captions while those who were not at risk recognised more words when captions were absent.     

Beyond Framing

Visual news media's framing has been well studied; however, production factors and cultural conditions involved in photographer–subject interactions have attracted less scholarly attention although they are no less influential in determining the depiction. Guided by social constructionism theory, in-depth interviews with staff photojournalists at a daily community newspaper in the Midwest and an analysis of their work revealed 22 variables that impact how and why images look the way they do. Photojournalists have complete control of only two of these variables, share partial control of 13, but have no control over the remaining seven. The photographers also shared insights into how to improve their journalism's verisimilitude when dealing with reactive subjects. The results support concepts of social constructionism that the subjects of photographs are most comfortable with photographers who share similar characteristics, but that some characteristics can have greater influence. The results also highlight areas where photographers might focus in pursuit of authenticity in journalistic photographs.     

Back pain/discomfort in pregnancy: invisible and forgotten

This paper is a comprehensive literature review of original research on the nature of back pain/discomfort in pregnancy. The causes of back pain/discomfort in pregnancy are reviewed and discussed, and the clinical manifestations and implications are explored. This analysis revealed that approximately 50% of pregnant women experience back pain/discomfort with little or no intervention from their health care providers. Thus, back pain/discomfort in pregnancy seems to be invisible and forgotten in contemporary antenatal care. Evidence-based guidelines are provided for both women and health professionals as a way of increasing attention to the prevention of unnecessary back pain/discomfort during pregnancy.     

A study of the validity of four types of student ratings of college teaching assessed on a criterion of student achievement gains

The purpose of the study was to investigate relationships between student ratings of college teaching using four types of student rating instruments and pre- vs. post-student achievement gains in 36 sections of an undergraduate analytic geometry and calculus course. Student rating instruments used varied according to type of items (high vs. low inference) and focus (students rating their own perceived growth vs. rating the instructor). Data were collected on 799 students (66% freshmen; 16% sophomore; and 15% juniors) at the University of Florida, and relationships were analyzed using the Pearson product-moment correlation technique. Significant relationships were not found between student ratings and student achievement.     

Effects of segmenting,signalling, and weeding on learning from educational video

Informed by the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, this study examined the effects of three multimedia design principles on undergraduate students' learning outcomes and perceived learning difficulty in the context of learning entomology from an educational video. These principles included segmenting the video into smaller units, signalling to direct students' attention to relevant information, and weeding to remove any non-essential content (SSW). It was hypothesized that the SSW treatment would decrease perceived learning difficulty and facilitate the transfer of knowledge and the structural knowledge acquisition. Results of the study demonstrate that participants in the SSW group outperformed the non-SSW group on the tests of knowledge transfer and structural knowledge acquisition and reported lower levels of learning difficulty. These findings support the use of SSW to help novice learners organize and integrate knowledge from complex, dynamic audio-visual media like video.