The precarious existence of the academic development unit

Abstract

With increasing numbers and types of students, more flexible courses and technological innovation, there is a growing need to understand the student experience in detail, and to gain a clear, unbiased account of the effects of course design and delivery on their learning. At the same time, academic staff are increasingly under pressure to be active researchers, to teach more students and to quality‐assure their practice. Within this context there is a growing need for educational and staff development which is both effective in supporting academic staff and promoting innovative course design and yet efficient in the use of scarce resources. In this difficult context a great deal is asked of a professional academic development service. How best can such a service be offered? What should the basic service consist of?

In this paper we advocate an approach to academic development which we have called Consultancy Style Action Research (CSAR). We introduce the rationale and background to the development of CSARand briefly describe one case example. We go on to discuss the contribution of this approach to developing the developers.     

A “conditional” sense of fairness in assessment

Standardizing aspects of assessments has long been recognized as a tactic to help make evaluations of examinees fair. It reduces variation in irrelevant aspects of testing procedures that could advantage some examinees and disadvantage others. However, recent attention to making assessment accessible to a more diverse population of students highlights situations in which making tests identical for all examinees can make a testing procedure less fair: Equivalent surface conditions may not provide equivalent evidence about examinees. Although testing accommodations are by now standard practice in most large-scale testing programmes, for the most part these practices lie outside formal educational measurement theory. This article builds on recent research in universal design for learning (UDL), assessment design, and psychometrics to lay out the rationale for inference that is conditional on matching examinees with principled variations of an assessment so as to reduce construct-irrelevant demands. The present focus is assessment for special populations, but it is argued that the principles apply more broadly.     

Challenges to quality of English medium instruction degree programs in Taiwanese universities and the role of local accreditors: a perspective of non-English-speaking Asian country

As the numbers of international students have grown, higher education institutions in Asia have offered a growing range of English medium instruction (EMI) degree programs. But Asian governments and higher education institutions have not thought deeply about how to ensure quality of English medium instruction degree programs. At the same time, their accreditors have not been fully aware of how to establish an external quality assurance mechanism to measure the quality of these programs. This study’s main purpose is to put the quality of the EMI degree programs of Taiwan higher education institutions into the perspective of the Taiwan’s institutions and one local Taiwan accreditor. With both qualitative and quantitative approaches, a survey targeting Taiwan’s colleges and universities and interviews of Higher Education Evaluation & Accreditation Council of Taiwan international reviewers and Asian higher education experts are used to examine the challenges of EMI implementation in Taiwan universities and the role of local accreditors playing in reviewing the English medium instruction degree programs.     

Information Literacy and Global Readiness: Library Involvement Can Make a World of Difference

The need for information literacy continues to increase as colleges and universities begin to globalize their curricula and include global readiness in institutional missions. This article reports pretest and posttest data collected during a librarian–faculty collaboration to determine the effect of information literacy instruction on students participating in an anthropology class focused on global understanding. The results suggest emphasis on teaching specific skills can produce an increase in students’ information literacy levels. Also, emerging global curricula may provide an avenue for librarians to pursue the promotion of information literacy. Changes in students’ information literacy skills, successful teaching strategies, and their connection to global readiness are discussed.     

Applying Library of Congress Demographic Group Characteristics for Creators

Abstract

This research project explores how to ethically, efficiently, and accurately add demographic terms for African American authors to catalog records. A Department of History graduate student located evidence of self-identification as African American for authors, and catalogers added the demographic term to bibliographic records and are in the process of creating work level Name Title Authority Records for titles written by those authors. This work is the beginning of systematically enhancing catalog data with author characteristics to support making such information available in faceted results.     

Cost and competition in the adoption of satellite news gathering technology

This study finds that many local stations subscribe to satellite news networks to obtain material for news broadcasts but that the high cost of satellite news gathering vehicles stops most from obtaining such vehicles. The study also finds that intensity of competition in the local market is a primary reason for acquiring such equipment.     

Historical Dramas,Current Political Choices: Analyzing Partisan Selective Exposure With a Docudrama

This study investigates the docudrama hypothesis—the idea that fiction based on real stories can influence audience members’ perception of political reality—in the context of current debates on partisan selective exposure and reinforcement effects. It does so by analyzing the influence of an Oscar-nominated docudrama on viewers’ attitudes and behavioral intention using propensity score matching. By means of a representative survey, we find strong evidence of partisan selective exposure and avoidance. Furthermore, among respondents with a similar likelihood of film attendance, actual attendance has a strong association with positive retrospective evaluations of the political coalition glorified in the movie, and an indirect relationship—via retrospective evaluations—with voting intentions. Discussion of the findings shed light into potential real-world political effects of partisan selective exposure using content other than news.     

The Historical Development of the Bulgarian Collection at the Library of Congress, 1894 to the Present

This article describes the development of the Bulgarian collection at the Library of Congress from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the present. It covers international exchanges, approval plans, special purchases, and federal library transfers. In addition to the chronological narrative, there are separate sections for the newspaper, rare book, and émigré collections. The article relates the growth of the Bulgarian collection to overall trends within the Library of Congress and discusses the contributions of key individuals.     

Should great lakes city build a new power plant? How youth navigate socioscientific issues

There is a growing consensus that simply learning enough science to decipher public debates on socioscientific issues will not make citizens better equipped to handle the complex and ill‐structured problems these controversial issues present. This study highlights the interaction and complex interplay between youth authored and appropriated frames for making sense of socioscientific issues. To do so, we analyze how two middle‐school aged youth, in an after‐school program focused on green energy technologies, made sense of and took a stance on whether their city should build a new hybrid power plant over the course of a 13‐week unit. Using critical sociocultural perspectives on learning and qualitative case study, we examined how the two youth navigated the issue and the resources, scientific and otherwise, they leveraged in defining the problem spaces involved in whether their city should build a new power plant. Our findings indicate that the scientific knowledge youth brought with them and acquired over the course of the investigation influenced how they made sense of the issue, but their knowledge was deeply connected to a range of personal and public discourses that influenced how they defined the issue and why it mattered to them. In particular, it was through how they framed their range of knowledge and experiences that they were able to recognize the multi‐dimensional nature of the problem and propose complex solutions resonant with the science they understood. Our study offers conceptual tools for teaching and learning socioscientific issues. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 541–567, 2012