Book Review: SOAR to College Success and Beyond

Educational Psychology Review -     

The Dominance Concept Inventory: A Tool for Assessing Undergraduate Student Alternative Conceptions about Dominance in Mendelian and Population Genetics

Despite the impact of genetics on daily life, biology undergraduates understand some key genetics concepts poorly. One concept requiring attention is dominance, which many students understand as a fixed property of an allele or trait and regularly conflate with frequency in a population or selective advantage. We present the Dominance Concept Inventory (DCI), an instrument to gather data on selected alternative conceptions about dominance. During development of the 16-item test, we used expert surveys (n = 12), student interviews (n = 42), and field tests (n = 1763) from introductory and advanced biology undergraduates at public and private, majority- and minority-serving, 2- and 4-yr institutions in the United States. In the final field test across all subject populations (n = 709), item difficulty ranged from 0.08 to 0.84 (0.51 ± 0.049 SEM), while item discrimination ranged from 0.11 to 0.82 (0.50 ± 0.048 SEM). Internal reliability (Cronbach''s alpha) was 0.77, while test–retest reliability values were 0.74 (product moment correlation) and 0.77 (intraclass correlation). The prevalence of alternative conceptions in the field tests shows that introductory and advanced students retain confusion about dominance after instruction. All measures support the DCI as a useful instrument for measuring undergraduate biology student understanding and alternative conceptions about dominance.     

Measures of international collaboration in scientific literature: Part II

This paper continues the attempt of Part I to develop a coherent family of measures of influence between classes of documents, for example, language or nationality classes, as indicated by citation choice. In this paper we focus on situations in which there is some ambiguity as to how to assign items to a class. For simplicity, we change our focus from citations to co-authorship patterns, restricting most of our discussion to papers with two authors. Like the earlier paper, we propose very simple models of the citation decision, and base our measures on the parameters that appear in the model.     

中美制造业质量管理活动的比较研究

对中国和美国制造业的质量管理活动进行比较研究。通过对中美制造业管理人员进行问卷调查以及对问卷结果进行统计分析,发现了中美企业质量管理活动的异同。同时通过对结果的分析得出中美两国企业对质量管理活动的认识的差距在缩小,这一结论也是对中美制造能力的差距正在减小这一观点的支持。质量管理活动的问卷由对顾客的观念、对设备和设施投资的观念、制定全球性决策的观念、管理控制的观念、对供应商整合的观念、工程再造计划、单元式制造、质量改进努力、预防维修、拉动式生产10个方面构成。     

NOSTALGIC NOTES ON MY DAY SCHOOL YEARS

Schools Necessarily reflect the conditions of the society which they represent.¹ As Elazar Notes,² Jewish schools so accurately reflect the ambiguities of American Jewish life that the experience of the schools necessarily creates conflicts within the Jewish community. This paper examines that important relationship between the Jewish school and American Jewish life. In particular, it looks outside the school to the loss of a substantive identity among Jews and to the dissolution of community among Jews. Within the school, it describes a disturbing picture of Jewish education that is reflective of those wider conflicts.