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.     

History and Habit in the Mobilization of ICT Resources

A healthy civil society has long been held as vital to a healthy democracy and there is interest in whether the Internet affects this linkage. This paper explores the relationships between offline and online modes of associational life and also analyzes offline and online interactions with local governments in the US context. Based on our empirical analyses of 1,203 respondents, we show that online participation is not simply an extension of offline participation, but can be distinguished in important ways. First, we find that political and community-oriented engagements cluster separately from more private-regarding engagements. Second, participants of online democratic engagement are not characterized by the SES markers associated with offline democratic engagement who are older, have higher incomes, and have lived in the community longer. Finally, we find significant links between democratic engagement with the political system and involvement with political associations (but not social and community-oriented associations).     

Disciplinary and interdisciplinary affiliations of experienced researchers

This article reports on a study of senior academics’ views of their disciplinary and interdisciplinary affiliations. It questions the idea that academics have a firm and fixed disciplinary identity from which they then act and suggests that academic work in the contemporary university challenges and changes how individuals view their disciplinary affiliation. The article provides empirical data that lends weight to critical questioning of anthropological metaphors, which have tended to dominate discussions of disciplinarity. It suggests that contemporary understandings of disciplinary and interdisciplinary identity need more fluid metaphors and models; ones that can capture the shifting and questioning uncertainties that give expression to the rhetorical and reflexive nature of academics’ disciplinary affiliations. The article explores the implications of a dominant emphasis on disciplinary relationships for understanding disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and examines the practical implications for structures and systems that are designed to enhance and evaluate research and teaching within higher education.     

The Delhi dilemma: media representation of the 2010 Commonwealth Games

Developing nations increasingly use sporting mega-events to demonstrate capacity, staking a claim to a place on the ‘world map’ by participating in what has been referred to as the ‘global circus’, or alternatively, the ‘prestige model’. The 2010 Commonwealth Games, hosted by India, provide an example of a mega-event which had mixed results in terms of signalling global modernity. This study extends existing media analysis research that found that the Western media’s interpretation of the event was critical overall and employed negative stereotypes that served to undermine India’s status as a modern power. This study employed a comprehensive textual analysis of relevant articles from eight major daily newspapers to reveal that the Australian print media coverage often focused on the inadequacies of India as an appropriate host nation for the Commonwealth Games.     

Deaf children in regular classrooms: a sociocultural approach to a Brazillan experience

Inclusion of deaf children in regular classrooms is often described as unsuccessful. The present article shows how communicative and metacommunicative strategies used in teacher(s)-deaf students(s) interactions may facilitate inclusion. A fourth-grade classroom was investigated where a coteaching approach--a master teacher working with a teacher trained in Brazilian Sign Language (BSL)--was used. The class, 7 deaf and 19 hearing students, was selected because of the teacher dyad's effectiveness with these students. The teachers' interactive styles and strategies are highlighted, along with communicative and metacommunicative processes that occurred between them and the deaf students. The authors show that meanings are co-constructed not only through words or BSL but through nonverbal actions. Relational metacommunicative strategies make integration more effective and learning easier and more pleasant; therefore, dialogue with deaf children entails more than the mere use of words, either vocally or with signs.     

A Multilevel Analysis of Learning Environments and Student Attitudes

An investigation of relationships between students’ attitudes towards chemistry and their perceived laboratory environments was carried out using a sample of 1592 final year secondary school students in 56 chemistry classes in 28 randomly selected co‐educational government schools. This study is distinctive in that it marks the beginning of science classroom environment research in Singapore and because it pioneers the use of the Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM) in learning environment research. The Chemistry Laboratory Environment Inventory (CLEI), a modified version of the Science Laboratory Environment Inventory, was used to assess students’ perceptions of the learning environment in chemistry laboratory classes. Students’ chemistry‐related attitudes were assessed using the Questionnaire on Chemistry‐related Attitudes (QOCRA), which is based on the Test of Science‐related Attitudes. Environment‐attitude relationships were examined using conventional multiple regression analysis and the more rigorous HLM. Positive associations emerged between the nature of the chemistry laboratory classroom environment and the students’ attitudinal outcomes     

A progression in first-grade children’s thinking about variable and variable notation in functional relationships

Recent research suggests that children in elementary grades have some facility with variable and variable notation in ways that warrant closer attention. We report here on an empirically developed progression in first-grade children’s thinking about these concepts in functional relationships. Using learning trajectories research as a framework for the study, we developed and implemented an instructional sequence designed to foster children’s understanding of functional relationships. Findings suggest that young children can learn to think in sophisticated ways about variable quantities and variable notation. This challenges assumptions that young children are not “ready” for a study of such concepts and raises the question of whether difficulties adolescents exhibit might be ameliorated by an earlier introduction to these ideas.     

“Nothing is impossible”: characteristics of Hispanic females participating in an informal STEM setting

Cultural Studies of Science Education - Factors that influence the underrepresentation of females in STEM careers begin early in childhood when gender biases and stereotypes emerge. Stereotypes...