Partnering with the Public Library for Health Care Education: An Evaluation of Affordable Care Act Messages

Despite implementation of most of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by 2014, the public still has questions about the health care law. To assess the potential of using the library as a hub for ACA education, we tested existing and new culturally relevant messages about the health care law with twenty-seven community members. Participants discussed the message prototypes, including the visual components and promotional content, and provided advice to modify content and design to best reach target audiences. Future research can follow this example to engage libraries and community members in developing and evaluating culturally relevant health messages.     

First-Person Engaging Narration in the Picture Book: Verbal and Pictorial Variations

This article explores what effects pictures have on the concepts of immediate-engaging, distant-engaging, and distancing first-person narration. The basic premise is that a pictorialized (as opposed to an illustrated) narrative involves different dynamics of engagement than a purely verbal narrative. The effects of these dynamics are explored in Louise Fitzhugh's I Am Five, Kay Thompson's and Hilary Knight's Eloise, Jeannie Baker's Where the Forest Meets the Sea, Michael Bedard's and Les Tait's The Clay Ladies, and in Ellen Raskin's Nothing Ever Happens on My Block. In all of these books the verbal narrative is immediate-engaging, but the pictures vary. Some are third-person limited, which allows for various forms of irony; others are third-person objective, which largely eliminates irony and a broader perspective of what is going on; while others are interspersed with moments that are, or come close to being, first-person viewpoints and therefore draw the reader in more actively.     

Evaluating Measures of Optimism and Sport Confidence

The psychometric properties of the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R), the Sport Confidence Inventory (SCI), and the Carolina SCI (CSCI) were examined in a study involving 260 athletes. The study aimed to test the dimensional structure, convergent and divergent validity, and invariance over competition level of scores generated by these instruments. Exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) supported the measurement models for the SCI and CSCI but favoured a two-dimensional model for the LOT-R. ESEM analyses of the total pool of 33 items indicated satisfactory divergent validity among these optimism and sport confidence measures with the only overlap occurring between the LOT-R and CSCI measures of optimism. The SCI discriminated among athletes participating at different competitive levels and emerged as the most suitable instrument for measuring individual differences in sport confidence. The CSCI emerged as a better measure of optimism in a sporting context than the more general LOT-R.     

Taking a Long Look at Art: Reflections on the Production and Consumption of Art in Art Therapy and Allied Organisational Settings

This article draws on experiences of looking at art to consider the influence of social context on the production and consumption of art. I draw on art historical discourses and relate these to looking at art in art therapy and related organisational settings. I suggest that professional socialisation profoundly influences how practitioners look and think about what they see. I propose that attention to tacit knowledge about art, extending practices of looking to include contemporary discourse about audiencing, curating and display, and taking time for a long look at art and at the art made in art therapy and allied settings, can enliven and sustain practitioners' ‘ways of seeing’.     

Varieties of hybrid systemic governance in European Higher Education

Over the last 30 years, governments have continuously adjusted their Higher Education policies to make universities more efficient (achieving more by spending less) and more effective (by increasing the percentage of graduates, by reducing the number of university dropouts and by focusing more on the third mission). At the core of governmental endeavours to reform Higher Education lies the redesign of the actual governance mode: governments have not only changed the general principles of Higher Education governance but also continuously changed the mix of those policy instruments they have chosen to adopt. The steering at a distance/supervisory/supermarket model appears to be unable to cover these differentiated trends; in fact, scholars have underlined that each country has designed its own hybrid interpretation of the common template. This paper focuses on this issue, describing how governance has been hybridised at the systemic level and detailing the content of these changes, operationalised with regards to policy instruments together with two financial dimensions. It emerges that three types of hybrid systemic governance modes are actually present in Europe: a performance‐based mode, a re‐regulated mode and a systemic goal‐oriented mode.     

Comparing paper-based and electronic multiple-choice examinations with personal devices: Impact on students' performance,self-efficacy and satisfaction

Nowadays the size of university classes along with the growing number of students to be tested for final examination raise unprecedented challenges relating to the management, monitoring and evaluation of learning. Technology may provide some solutions that deserve to be investigated. This paper explores the potentialities and limitations of Computer-Based Testing (CBT), specifically BYOD e-test, compared to traditional Paper-Based Testing (PBT) to verify whether, and to what extent, an electronic mode of assessment can become a suitable alternative to PBT. It is based on a study carried out at the University of Florence during 2016/17. 606 students participated in the study, of whom 443 opted for CBT using their own devices, while 163 preferred PBT. Participants who experienced CBT also answered a survey on perceptions, self-efficacy and satisfaction. The results show that students' performances were better with CBT, and that a positive relationship exists between the perceived level of self-efficacy and the propensity to adopt digital tests. In addition, students greatly appreciated the electronic system, especially for the possibility of immediate feedback. Some critical issues emerged relating to on-screen reading, which suggests the need for careful design of testing tools.