Critical Literacy,Disciplinary Literacy: Reading the Engineering-Designed World

Globally, many people spend most of their time interacting with the products of engineering design as they wear clothes, drink clean water, use transportation systems, and more. Given the omnipresence of engineering design, whose material results are felt daily in people’s lives, it seems especially important that students learn to recognize and question how certain designs promote the welfare and interests of some while remaining inaccessible to others. In this article, we outline a vision for critical literacy instruction in engineering that simultaneously incorporates and challenges professional standards. We—an associate professor of literacy, an engineer, and a teacher at an engineering-focused high school—illustrate how critical literacy instruction might be enacted in the context of engineering design instruction in high schools. We describe how critical literacy can complement disciplinary literacy instruction in engineering as students use critically-focused, disciplinary lenses to move toward social justice.     

Library Study Behaviors in the Age of Ubiquitous Mobile Devices: An Observational Study in Four Academic Libraries

In this study, researchers observed student study behaviors in the libraries of four post-secondary institutions. In all, 2,773 observations were made. This research replicates and expands an earlier study and addresses its limitations. The results of a logistic regression test indicate whether students had a mobile device readily available and where students chose to study in the library best predicted whether they demonstrated a study, as opposed to a non-study, behavior. Specifically, if students were found in quiet study or computer areas, they were more likely to be performing study behaviors. This research has implications for library stakeholders making decisions about the use of library space. Most importantly, this research demonstrates that library spaces are widely used for diverse purposes.     

Continuing Education Module Transforming Maternity Care: Implementing the Blueprint for Action

In January 2010, Women’s Health Issues published two direction-setting reports from the Transforming Maternity Care (TMC) Project: “2020 Vision for a High-Quality, High-Value Maternity Care System” and “Blueprint for Action: Steps Toward a High-Quality, High-Value Maternity Care System.” This guest editorial summarizes highlights of the implementation phase of what is now known as the TMC Partnership. Major progress has been made in elevating maternity care quality to a national policy priority, increasing the availability and use of maternity care performance measures, and developing shared decision making tools for childbearing women.     

Interrupting situated practices: critical incidents in international partnerships

This paper examines the initial steps of an internationally funded project focused on enhancing teachers’ conceptual and pedagogical knowledge of literacy development in the Western Cape of South Africa. We asked what are the tensions and breakthroughs when engaged in international teacher professional development? Four lines of inquiry support this work: internationalization and production of knowledge, professional development structures, communities of practice, and ethic of care. Resulting themes included initial barriers, localized professional development, and enhancing teacher capacity for change. To explain the themes, we identified four critical incidents. This study has potential to inform the international community of new directions for teacher learning.     

Subject Matter Knowledge in a Master of Arts in Teaching Program: Ensuring candidates’ content knowledge through an arts and sciences/education collaboration

All teacher education programs face the challenge of ensuring that their graduates know their subject matter and can teach it effectively. For graduate level teacher education programs, whose candidates may complete their education in the content area at various institutions, this challenge is even greater. The following article describes one institution’s system of assessing candidates’ content knowledge and efforts to incorporate additional content coursework into a Master of Arts in Teaching program. Also provided is information on a set of courses that the arts and sciences and education faculty team teach, with the course for prospective English teachers described in detail.     

Exploring dynamic assessment as a means of identifying children at risk of developing comprehension difficulties

In this study, the authors explore a newly constructed dynamic assessment (DA) intended to tap inference-making skills that they hypothesize will be predictive of future comprehension performance. The authors administered the test to 100 second-grade children using a dynamic format to consider the concurrent validity of the measure. The dynamic portion of the assessment comprised teaching children to be "reading detectives" by using textual clues to solve what was happening in the story. During the DA children listened to short passages and answered three inferential questions (i.e., one setting, two causal). If children were unable to answer a question, they were reminded what a reading detective would do and given a set of increasingly concrete prompts and clues to orient them to the relevant portion of text until they could answer the question correctly. Results showed that the DA correlated significantly with a standardized measure of reading comprehension and explained a small but significant amount of unique variance in reading comprehension above and beyond vocabulary and word identification skills. In addition, results suggest that DA may be better than the standardized measure of reading comprehension at identifying intraindividual differences in young children's reading abilities.     

University Mathematics and Science Faculty Modeling Their Understanding of Reform Based Instruction in a Teacher Preparation Program: Voices of Faculty and Teacher Candidates

This study was conducted in a reform-based mathematics and science teacher education program in the USA, the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation(MCTP). The goal of the undergraduate program was to prepare upper elementary/middle level specialists in mathematics and science. One significant aspect of the MCTP was the expectation that the program's professors (in mathematics and science) would model a new vision of effective pedagogy based on reform-based recommendations. We determined, in general, that the program's mathematics and science content professors accepted the dual role of modeling effective instruction at the same time they were delivering content. However, this dual responsibility raised in their minds an ‘issue of appropriate balance’ between content and pedagogical foci in their courses. Previously, the professors' had not questioned a focus heavily tilted toward content coverage. We also determined that the program's teacher candidates believed that the mathematics and science professors modeled effective instruction. One of the primary reasons that the teacher candidates believed that their professors were modeling effective instruction was that the focus in the courses was primarily on conceptual understanding, not memorization. A major implication was that the professors' modeling of reform-based instruction prompted the teacher candidates to develop a new vision of mathematics and science teaching shaped by their professors' example.     

USING SELF‐MANAGEMENT INTERVENTIONS TO ADDRESS GENERAL EDUCATION BEHAVIORAL NEEDS: ASSESSMENT OF EFFECTIVENESS AND FEASIBILITY

A comprehensive self‐management intervention was utilized to increase the on‐task behavior of three African American students within an urban middle‐school setting. The intervention was designed to necessitate minimal management on the part of the general education classroom teacher by utilizing an electronic prompting device, as well as a centralized intervention coordinator for the management of training, implementation, and progress monitoring. Results suggested that implementation of the intervention resulted in improvement in on‐task behavior across all three students; however, problems with inconsistent implementation necessitated that modifications be made to the intervention procedures. Implications for the design and implementation of self‐management interventions within general education secondary‐level settings are discussed.