High‐speed hypotheses!

This article presents engaging interactive hypothesis tests which can be conducted with students very efficiently.     

Crafting cosmopolitan nationalism: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s rhetorical leadership*

This essay analyzes the rhetoric of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of post-conflict Liberia, for how it transformed national citizenship into cosmopolitan citizenship. Specifically, she promoted cosmopolitan values to global and regional audiences; codified cosmopolitan values into national policies and initiatives; and enabled Liberian women as citizens whose cosmopolitan practices fortified national, regional, and global communities. Through these concrete cosmopolitan practices, Liberian women performed as ideal citizens of the new democracy. Thus, this essay demonstrates how rhetorical scholars can turn to cosmopolitan theory to explain how rhetorical leaders can transform how and what it means to belong, especially for women.     

Re-Examination of Traditional Admissions Criteria in Predicting Academic Success in a Counselor Education Program

The purpose of this study was to re-evaluate the validity of traditional admissions criteria—UGPA and GRE scores—in predicting academic success for students admitted to a counselor education program in the United States. In contrast to prior research, we also included the newer GRE-Analytical Writing scores in our analyses. In general, we found that both UGPA and GRE scores were useful for predicting both graduate grade point averages (GGPAs) and students’ scores on the Counselor Preparation Comprehensive Exam (CPCE). We also found that a discriminant model that included all four admission variables was useful for predicting program completion outcomes: successfully graduated, dropped out, or dismissed from the program. Implications for the admissions and screening process are presented.     

Two-year impacts of a universal school-based social-emotional and literacy intervention: an experiment in translational developmental research

This study contributes to ongoing scholarship at the nexus of translational research, education reform, and the developmental and prevention sciences. It reports 2-year experimental impacts of a universal, integrated school-based intervention in social-emotional learning and literacy development on children's social-emotional, behavioral, and academic functioning. The study employed a school-randomized, experimental design with 1,184 children in 18 elementary schools. Children in the intervention schools showed improvements across several domains: self-reports of hostile attributional bias, aggressive interpersonal negotiation strategies, and depression, and teacher reports of attention skills, and aggressive and socially competent behavior. In addition, there were effects of the intervention on children's math and reading achievement for those identified by teachers at baseline at highest behavioral risk. These findings are interpreted in light of developmental cascades theory and lend support to the value of universal, integrated interventions in the elementary school period for promoting children's social-emotional and academic skills.     

Understanding Student Attempts to Find a Line of Fit

The least squares method of fitting a line is not one that naturally occurs to students. We present three tasks to understand student views on how lines may be fit.     

Individual Perseverance: A theory of home tutors’ management of schooling in isolated settings

This article reports a study of parents’ management of the education of primary school‐aged children in their care in remote and rural locations of Western Australia. It presents a theory of the ways in which these parents, in the role of home tutors, “manage” the schooling of their children in a distance education regime in isolated settings. The home tutors in this study were mothers in families isolated by physical distance from centres in Western Australia, which usually provide educational, medical, financial, and retail services. In this environment, at the time of data collection, schooling was supported by print, that is, “sets” of learning materials, and by a regular schedule of interactive lessons through Schools of the Air when atmospheric conditions permitted. The conditions of outback Western Australia “present some of the worst conditions for use of electronic equipment” (Tomlinson, Schooling in rural Western Australia: The ministerial review of schooling in rural Western Australia. Perth, Australia: Education Department of Western Australia, 1994 Tomlinson, D. 1994. Schooling in rural Western Australia: The ministerial review of schooling in rural Western Australia, Perth, , Australia: Education Department of Western Australia.  [Google Scholar], p. 91). Moreover, the nature of station life on isolated sheep or cattle properties (stations) is such that mothers frequently have multiple and sometimes conflicting roles (that is, cook, housekeeper, station hand, business partner, accountant, first aid officer, wife, mother, and teacher). This qualitative study was concerned with how parents “manage” their schoolroom work as “home tutors,” using grounded theory techniques for gathering and analysing data. The term “manage” comes from the theoretical framework of symbolic interaction (Blumer, Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969 Blumer, H. 1969. Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.  [Google Scholar]), and in this article refers specifically to the ways in which the home tutors juggle their multiple roles.     

Design,implementation, and evaluation of an innovative anatomy course

Starting in 2004, a medical school gross anatomy course faced with a 30% cut in hours went through an extensive redesign, which transformed a traditional dissection course into a course with a clinical focus, learning societies, and extensive on‐line learning support. Built into the redesign process was an extensive and ongoing assessment process, which included student focus groups, faculty development, surveys, and examinations. These assessments were used formatively, to enhance the course from year to year, and summatively, to determine how well the course was meeting the new learning objectives. The assessments from focus groups and faculty development prompted changes in support structures provided to students and the training and preparation of faculty. Survey results showed that, after student satisfaction declined the first year, satisfaction increased steadily through the fourth iteration as the course gained acceptance by students and faculty alike. There was a corresponding increase in the performance of students on course examinations. An additional examination given to students one and a half and three years after their anatomy course ended demonstrated the redesigned course's long‐term effectiveness for retaining anatomical knowledge and applying it to clinical cases. Compared to students who took the original course, students who took the shorter, more clinical course performed as well, or better, on each section of the examination. We attribute these positive results to the innovative course design and to the changes made based on our formative assessment program. Anat Sci Educ, 2010. © 2010 American Association of Anatomists.     

Picturebook Endpapers: Resources for Literary and Aesthetic Interpretation

In this article, we explore one of the important peritextual features of picturebooks—the endpapers. In order to represent the rich diversity of form and function displayed by endpapers, we group examples along two dimensions: whether the endpapers are illustrated or unillustrated, and whether the front and back end papers are identical or dissimilar. Within the four categories delineated by these two dimensions, we further articulate the various roles that endpapers can play in the construction of meaning from picturebooks. We present quotations from young children that show how they use endpapers as resources for literary and aesthetic interpretation, and provide suggestions for the integration of talk about endpapers within classroom literature discussions.