Design,implementation, and evaluation of a multi-disciplinary professional development program for research mentors

ABSTRACT

Undergraduate research experience has been shown to enhance student learning and improve persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Researchers studying undergraduate research experiences have largely focused on student outcomes and have seldom investigated the outcomes of graduate and postdoctoral mentors. Here, we report a non-credit, year-long mentor professional development program designed for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and research staff in STEM. Mentors attended a series of six interactive and discussion-based workshops and mentored first-year undergraduate students in independent summer research projects. We report evaluation findings for three mentor cohorts using a combination of qualitative analysis of mentoring philosophies and quantitative assessment of pre- and post-surveys about mentoring objectives and skills. Results indicate that mentors gained self-efficacy in some objectives and skills. However, many other objectives and skills remained unchanged. We explore possible explanations for the lack of more broad-scale gains across survey items and present ideas for program improvement.     

Planning a comprehensive staff development program

Directing an early childhood education program is a backbreaking, stressful endeavor. The successful administrator learns to manage time so as to squeeze the completion of infinite tasks into a finite daily time frame. Budgeting, paper work or unexpected conflict resolution often take priority over work with the staff or the curriculum. Staff development efforts are often limited.Jeffrey Trawick-Smith is an Assistant Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willmantic     

Training teachers in nonverbal sensitivity and nonverbal behavior

An increasing interest in nonverbal communication as an aspect of teacher training reflects the steady accumulation of research evidence regarding its importance for effective teaching. The present review of training research shows that nonverbal behaviors not only serve to communicate teacher expectations and attitudes and to regulate classroom interactions, but also to promote pupils' understanding of verbal material by structuring and illustrating its contents. With few exceptions, nonverbal behavior training programs have employed direct training strategies designed to influence specific rather than global classroom behaviors. The available evidence shows that these programs are effective, while the effectiveness of programs using indirect training is uncertain given its limited research base. By extending this approach to incorporate an indirect-global dimension it should be possible to broaden and deepen the impact of training. This chapter argues that improvisational play and game-like activities constitute one such extension and simultaneously provide for a multidimensional conceptualization of the classroom teacher's role.     

Theory of mind development in deaf children: a nonverbal test of false-belief understanding

Our aim in this study was to investigate whether previous findings pointing to a delay in deaf children's theory of mind development are replicated when linguistic demands placed on the deaf child are minimized in a nonverbal version of standard false-belief tasks. Twenty-four prelingually deaf, orally trained children born of hearing parents were tested with both a verbal and a nonverbal version of a false-belief task. Neither the younger (range: 4 years 7 months-6 years 5 months) nor the older (range: 6 years 9 months-11 years 11 months) children of the final sample of 21 children performed above chance in the verbal task. The nonverbal task significantly facilitated performance in children of all ages. Despite this facilitation, we observed a developmental delay: only the older group performed significantly above chance in the nonverbal false-belief task, even though the younger children were at the average age when hearing children normally pass standard false-belief tests. We discuss these findings in light of the hypothesis that language development and conversational competence are crucial to the acquisition of a theory of mind.     

Genetic and environmental covariation between verbal and nonverbal cognitive development in infancy

Despite cognitive neuroscience's emphasis on the modularity of cognitive processes, multivariate genetic research indicates that the same genetic factors largely affect diverse cognitive abilities, at least from middle childhood onward. We explored this issue for verbal and nonverbal cognitive development in infancy in a study of 1,937 pairs of same-sex 2-year-old twins born in England and Wales in 1994. The twins were assessed by having their parents use a measure of productive vocabulary (the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory) and a novel measure of nonverbal cognitive abilities (Parent Report of Children's Ability). Verbal and nonverbal development correlated .42. A multivariate genetic analysis indicated that genetic factors were responsible for less than half of this phenotypic correlation. Moreover, the genetic correlation between verbal and nonverbal abilities was only .30, which indicates that genetic effects on verbal and nonverbal abilities are largely independent in infancy. These multivariate genetic results suggest that genetic effects on cognitive abilities are modular early in development and then become increasingly molar. The implications of this result for theories of cognitive development are discussed.     

The development of nonverbal working memory and executive control processes in adolescents

The prefrontal cortex modulates executive control processes and structurally matures throughout adolescence. Consistent with these events, prefrontal functions that demand high levels of executive control may mature later than those that require working memory but decreased control. To test this hypothesis, adolescents (9 to 20 years old) completed nonverbal working memory tasks with varying levels of executive demands. Findings suggest that recall-guided action for single units of spatial information develops until 11 to 12 years. The ability to maintain and manipulate multiple spatial units develops until 13 to 15 years. Strategic self-organization develops until ages 16 to 17 years. Recognition memory did not appear to develop over this age range. Implications for prefrontal cortex organization by level of processing are discussed.     

Humanities extension seminars: The development of a program

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University has been presenting noncredit humanities seminars to diverse adult audiences throughout the state since January 1978. The purpose of the program has been to bring small groups of people with college-level intelligence together to discuss humanistic issues in a format that reflects, to some extent, the intellectual background and discipline of a university. The success of the seminars, which involve personal and videotaped presentations by university humanists, has been due primarily to the quality of the faculty involved and the resources of the Cooperative Extension Service. Though this program is best suited for land-grant universities, its basic format could be adapted in various ways to other institutional settings.     

Integrating academic and practical knowledge in a teacher leaders' development program

This study examines an attempt to encourage integration of knowledge learned in the academy with knowledge learned in practice as a means to challenge educational practitioners' — teacher leaders and inservice teacher educators — existing conceptions and beliefs, and promote intellectual restructuring. The article centers on two components of the Manor Program for the development of teacher leaders and educators. The first component focuses on expanding academic knowledge, by helping the participants become acquainted with studies on students' and teachers' conceptions and ways of thinking in mathematics. The second component focuses on the integration of knowledge learned in the academy with knowledge learned in practice by conducting a mini-study.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Facilitating play skills: Efficacy of a staff development program

Staff members of a day care center took part in a year-long training program designed to help them facilitate a child's ability to learn through play. This paper briefly describes the training objectives and methods used in the first two workshops of this program. An evaluation of the effectiveness of those methods is presented, based on pre-training and post-training observation of interactions between caregivers and children in the day care center. Results indicate that the training was very effective in increasing caregiver verbal involvement with children during play, but was less effective in reducing the number of verbal directives delivered by caregivers in interacting with the children. A negative relationship was found between caregiver's level of education and amount of verbally directive behavior after training, but not before training.     

The development of a mentoring program for university undergraduate women

The Women's Center at a university in the United States implemented a mentoring program based on feminist and networking models to improve the educational climate for female undergraduate students. Due to a lack of literature detailing how to develop such a program, an interdisciplinary team of researchers collaborated with the Women's Center to address program development and implementation, including how to institutionalize the program, effective recruitment and retention strategies, how to facilitate formation of mentor relationships and strategies for maintaining those relationships, appropriate interventions and monitoring, and how to ensure that the program met mentees' needs. Among the findings are that success depends on a full‐time and dedicated coordinator, appropriate matching of mentors and mentees, and emphasis during training on continuing communication between mentors and mentees to reassess mentee needs.     

实时数据采集系统中定时程序的设计

Windows和VC中提供了很多关于时间操作的函数,利用它们控制程序能够精确地完成定时和计时操作。本文介绍了VC中基于Windows的七种精确定时方式,通过分析比较,确定了用于某实时数据采集系统的最佳程序设计。     

专业设置的实践与思考

中等职业教育如何设置专业,这些专业又如何服务于当地经济建设,是关系到中等职业教育健康发展的大事.     

Guidance and counseling program development in Botswana

In this article the procedures utilized in developing recommendations for guidance and counseling programming in Botswana are discussed. Initially, the status of guidance and counseling was determined through numerous interviews with individuals in many locations in the country. In addition to the information gained from these interviews, a needs assessment was conducted through reviewing national documents and surveying primary and secondary teachers and secondary students. Questionnaires administered to 106 primary school teachers, 89 secondary school teachers and 405 secondary school students were analyzed.Data from these sources comprised the foundation for recommendations for a sequence of developmental tasks for Guidance and Counseling Program Development in the Botswana Educational System. Six primary counselor roles including 1) Counseling Service, 2) Consulting Service, 3) Information Service, 4) Referral Service, 5) Placement and Follow-up Service and 6) Evaluation and Research Service serve as the basis for these recommendations.     

The irrationality of rationalized program development

Conclusions The core of our argument rests in the nature of the relationship between regional and provincial educational authorities and local schools/communities. In the present situation the relationship is ambiguous. On one hand, the province and the boards issue guidelines and demand that local schools develop programs in conformity with them. At the same time the schools are urged to be innovative and to develop programs to meet local needs. Although the drafters of guidelines apparently see no contradiction between these two directives, we, and many practitioners we have talked with, do.It is our position that the local school/community should be primarily accountable to the community it serves for developing learning environments that fairly reflect the community's educational values, expectations, and priorities. The school should be accountable to central authorities for proper expenditure of monies and for observing basic standards of honesty and fair play in its operations. Finally we wish to stress again the importance of providing help rather than advice to developing programs. Advice coming from a source that in the recent past was primarily a legislative and policing agency cannot help but be construed by school practitioners as a thinly disguised directive. Even if this were not the case, advice is of limited value to people who lack the resources and technical expertise to implement their educational ideas. Real help, in the form of needed resources, technical services, and expert consultation, might inject a new spirit of goodwill and cooperation into what has been at best a guarded relationship between the schools and central educational authorities.OISE