Sesame Street and the Reform of Children's Television

Television inheritance effects, inordinately high levels of audience duplication between programs scheduled back-to-back, have helped broadcasters manage audience flow for decades. This study uses 2004 national peoplemeter data collected by Nielsen to replicate a study of inheritance effects done 20 years earlier. It finds the same predictors explain either 96% or 58% of variance in the duplicated audience, depending upon the measure of duplication that is used. The research resolves discrepancies in the literature on inheritance effects and casts serious doubt on the common practice of inferring audience duplication from the strength of correlations between lead-in and lead-out program ratings.     

Helicopter Parenting: The Effect of an Overbearing Caregiving Style on Peer Attachment and Self‐Efficacy

Helicopter parenting, an observed phenomenon on college campuses, may adversely affect college students. The authors examined how helicopter parenting is related to self‐efficacy and peer relationships among 190 undergraduate students ages 16 to 28 years. Helicopter parenting was associated with low self‐efficacy, alienation from peers, and a lack of trust among peers. Implications are provided for counselors and psychologists in college‐ and university‐based counseling centers to help them to understand and provide assessment and treatment for adult children of helicopter parents.     

Infusing Authentic Inquiry into Biotechnology

Societal benefit depends on the general public’s understandings of biotechnology (Betsch in World J Microbiol Biotechnol 12:439–443, 1996; Dawson and Cowan in Int J Sci Educ 25(1):57–69, 2003; Schiller in Business Review: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (Fourth Quarter), 2002; Smith and Emmeluth in Am Biol Teach 64(2):93–99, 2002). A National Science Foundation funded survey of high school biology teachers reported that hands-on biotechnology education exists in advanced high school biology in the United States, but is non-existent in mainstream biology coursework (Micklos et al. in Biotechnology labs in American high schools, 1998). The majority of pre-service teacher content preparation courses do not teach students appropriate content knowledge through the process of inquiry. A broad continuum exists when discussing inquiry-oriented student investigations (Hanegan et al. in School Sci Math J 109(2):110–134, 2009). Depending on the amount of structure in teacher lessons, inquiries can often be categorized as guided or open. The lesson can be further categorized as simple or authentic (Chinn and Malhotra in Sci Educ 86(2):175–218, 2002). Although authentic inquiries provide the best opportunities for cognitive development and scientific reasoning, guided and simple inquiries are more often employed in the classroom (Crawford in J Res Sci Teach 37(9):916–937, 2000; NRC in Inquiry and the national science education standards: a guide for teaching and learning, 2000). For the purposes of this study we defined inquiry as “authentic” if original research problems were resolved (Hanegan et al. in School Sci Math J 109(2):110–134, 2009; Chinn and Malhotra in Sci Educ 86(2):175–218, 2002; Roth in Authentic school science: knowing and learning in open-inquiry science laboratories, 1995). The research question to guide this study through naturalistic inquiry research methods was: How will participants express whether or not an authentic inquiry experience enhanced their understanding of biotechnology? As respondents explored numerous ideas in order to develop a workable research question, struggled to create a viable protocol, executed their experiment, and then evaluated their results, they commented on unexpected topics regarding the nature of science as well as specific content knowledge relating to their experiments. Four out of five participants reported they learned the most during authentic inquiry laboratory experience.     

Fostering students’ evaluation behaviour while searching the internet

A program for teaching 9th graders course content (history) and how they should evaluate information found on the WWW was designed and tested. Goal of the program was to teach content, evaluations skills, and to achieve transfer of these skills to a different domain. In the design of the program the principles of two transfer theories were combined using a design-based research approach. Results revealed that the program improved students’ evaluation behaviour. Compared to the students of the control condition, the evaluation skills of students in the experimental condition improved to a higher level, but did not lead to transfer. Students in the experimental classes scored higher on the final content exam than students in the control class.     

Leadership Strategies for a Competitive Environment

ABSTRACT

The Community College Futures Assembly convenes annually as a national policy forum for key opinion leaders to work as a “think tank” in identifying critical issues facing the future of community colleges and to recognize Bellwether Finalist colleges as trend-setting institutions. Ten Bellwether finalists in each of the three award categories are competitively selected and featured as presenters at the Assembly. Finalists then share the lessons they have learned with representatives of colleges interested in replicating their programs.     

Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

I begin this review with a brief overview of the book itself, followed by a discussion of its pedagogical usefulness as a text in Philosophy of Sport and Philosophy of Religion courses. I then move on to discuss a few points in the book that I take to be especially interesting and/or problematic from a philosophical point of view     

Examining the engagement of career academy and comprehensive high school students in the United States

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare the levels of student engagement of career academy students to those at a traditional comprehensive high school using propensity score matching and structural equation modeling. We found that academy students had significantly higher levels of emotional engagement and significantly lower levels of behavioral engagement than those at comprehensive schools. We also found no statistically significant differences in the levels of cognitive engagement of academy students compared to comprehensive school students. We believe the academy model has the promise of transforming the high school experience for students as it relates to their attachment to the school, their relationships with peers and teachers, and their sense of belonging and safety. However, academies need to work with students to create and develop co-curricular and extracurricular activities of interest to engage students in their schools at a higher level.