The song remains the same: the selective tradition of technical rationality in adult education program planning theory

The purpose of this study is to depict the historical development of American adult education planning theory. We argue that adult education planning theory represents a ‘selective tradition’ promoting a dominant ‘discourse’ that privileges ‘technical rationality’. Using discourse analysis, we demonstrate how technical rationality emerged in the professionalization movement in the 1930s to dominate planning theory discourse, how technical rational planning theory became codified by 1950, and how little it has varied since. Using relational analysis, we juxtapose this dominant tradition of technical rational planning theory with historical examples of adult education to begin expanding our notions of what could count as legitimate planning practice and theory.     

"PRIME TIME": THE INTEGRATION OF THE CONTENT OF A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER COLUMN ON AGING INTO THE GERONTOLOGY CURRICULUM

This paper provides suggestions for the curricular introduction of materials from a weekly newspaper column on aging (or similar local or nationally syndicated newspaper column - for our purposes, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY) for a period of one year (October 5, 1997 to September 27, 1998). The study provides a content analysis of the column and presents numerous specific suggestions for the inclusion of its content into the curriculum, especially columns with course-related themes (e.g., medical problems, elder abuse, nutrition, and so forth) to show the relationship between theory and practice. In one exemplary activity, students wrote their own aging columns to develop their research and writing skills.     

The One-Man Band by the Quick Lunch Stand: Modeling Audience Response to Street Performance

This paper considers street performance, or busking,focusing on differences between performance in thisenvironment compared with the standard concertsetting. First, in contrast with a set, known ticketprice, the price of street performance isendogenously determined. Second, busking generallyinvolves a joint product: music and charity, wherecharity is produced internally by the audience andhas as its principal input the price paid for music.We show that these facts call into question somegeneral conclusions of conventional public financemodels, which suggest that the major efficiency problemwith busking is its inability to preventfreeriding behavior, and that freeriding, while efficient at the individuallevel, is inefficient at the societal level. In contrast, we argue in thispaper that busking, with freeriding and all, is not unambiguously inferior toconcert hall performance in terms of efficiency.     

A study of the effect of HyperCard and pen-paper performance assessment methods on expert-novice chemistry problem solving

This study investigated HyperCard as a tool for assessment in science education and determined whether or not a HyperCard assessment instrument could differentiate between expert and novice student performance (balancing stoichiometric equations) in science education. Five chemical equations were presented by traditional pen-paper and by a HyperCard (Hyperequation) program. Thirty honors (expert) and 30 regular (novice) chemistry students were randomly divided into HyperCard and traditional pen-paper groups of 15 students each. Scoring was based on five dependent variables: performance scores, number of attempts, rate of attempts, time on task, and correctness. Correlation results indicated that students with high performance scores correctly balanced more equations, required fewer attempts to balance equations, and required less time per attempt than did students with low performance scores. MANOVA results showed that performance scores and correctness scores for both experts and novice were significantly higher on HyperCard compared to pen-paper assessment; the novice scores on HyperCard nearly equaled the expert pen-paper assessment scores. Significant interactions were found for time on task and for correctness. The results suggest that HyperCard can be a suitable tool for assessment in science education and that such an instrument can differentiate between expert and novice student performance.     

Affect and learning: An exploratory look into the role of affect in learning with AutoTutor

The role that affective states play in learning was investigated from the perspective of a constructivist learning framework. We observed six different affect states (frustration, boredom, flow, confusion, eureka and neutral) that potentially occur during the process of learning introductory computer literacy with AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system with tutorial dialogue in natural language. Observational analyses revealed significant relationships between learning and the affective states of boredom, flow and confusion. The positive correlation between confusion and learning is consistent with a model that assumes that cognitive disequilibrium is one precursor to deep learning. The findings that learning correlates negatively with boredom and positively with flow are consistent with predictions from Csikszentmihalyi's analysis of flow experiences.