Visual Agenda-Setting,Emotion, and the BP Oil Disaster

This study seeks to identify the most memorable visual imagery of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill by comparing a content analysis of television images and a survey of the most-remembered images. The study compared visuals from weeks 1 and 6 of the disaster to a survey conducted a year later that asked respondents to freely recall the most memorable images of the disaster. The comparison showed respondents did indeed choose as the most memorable images the visuals coded with greatest frequency in the content analysis. However, the emotions evoked by the oil-soaked animals elevated that set of images to the most memorable—chosen by almost half of respondents. This set of images was number one with the respondents yet number eight in frequency in the content analysis. This study shows a visual agenda-setting effect heightened by emotion.     

Where did the reference desk go? Transforming staff and space to meet user needs

ABSTRACT

A sharp decline in the number of reference queries prompted the library administration at Indiana State University to begin a project to combine the circulation, reference, and IT desks to reduce staffing at a new consolidated service point. All faculty and staff in the reference/instruction and circulation units participated in the project. The new arrangement and subsequent removal of librarians from routine desk duties have expanded instructional opportunities, consistent with the university's goals. Project participants plan further assessments to better determine the impacts of the new service arrangements.     

Perhaps the Decision of Some Students not to Engage in Learning Mathematics in School is Deliberate

A perceived lack of engagement of many students in middle years mathematics classes provides a challenge for educators. In this article we report a project that investigated students' perceptions of the extent to which their own efforts influence their achievement at mathematics and their life opportunities. We conducted 2 hour interviews with over 50 students, as well as collecting other data. The results suggest that a student's orientation to learning mathematics is not predicted by their achievement. Even students who were confident, successful and persistent exhibited short-term goals. It seems that classroom culture may be an important determinant of under-participation in schooling.     

Teaching,learning and the curriculum 1: The influence of content in science

Summary There are already a number of important criteria upon which topics for inclusion in science curricula should be selected and sequenced. We have recommended two additional criteria: the topic's potential for effecting conceptual change, and its potential for generating metacognitive training. Among other things, Science curricula should foster intellectual development. Such development is often a slow process of change, where new experiences, skills and understandings build on, modify and extend existing ones. Thus, topics should be evaluated in terms of their relation to existing Children's Science and to the students' metacognitive abilities. Evaluation of the appropriateness of a particular topic in a curriculum sequence should be based on such factors as its conceptual concreteness, the number and breadth of models which can be invoked, the concreteness of corroboration of results, and its predictive power. Conjointly, evaluation should take into account the nature, scope and complexity of the associated metacognitive demands. If selected carefully, topics in the science curriculum will do more than progressively sample the universe of content areas. They will develop each students ability and desire to engage in effective, independent learning.     

How does completing a dissertation transform undergraduate students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge?

Dissertations are positioned as the capstone of an undergraduate degree, bringing together what students have previously learned from their programmes through a piece of independent research. However, there is limited research into the ways in which engaging in a dissertation has an impact on students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge. In this article, we explore the relations between students’ accounts of sociological knowledge in their second and third years and how they engage with sociological knowledge in their dissertations. We argue that for the work of the dissertation to have an impact on students’ understanding of sociological knowledge, students need to see their discipline as providing a way of answering their research questions. We explore the implications of this argument for both our understanding of the role of dissertations and research-based learning in universities more generally.     

Exploring pre-service secondary teachers’ understanding of care

Care in teaching has been widely investigated; however, little research has sought secondary pre-service teachers’ understandings of caring and their potential responsibility to care for students. Accordingly, semi-structured interviews were employed with four focus groups, involving 12 (2 male and 10 female) participants. Data were analysed within a qualitative paradigm using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and inter-rater reliability. Five overlapping themes were identified, and although many tensions around the ambiguities of establishing appropriate boundaries to care were shown, caring was deemed central by the participants to being effective teachers. Overall, pre-service secondary teachers agreed that neither pedagogy nor discipline strategy would be effective without care. Training implications and suggestions for future research conclude this paper.