Introduction of vertical integration and case-based learning in anatomy for undergraduate physical therapy and occupational therapy students

The purpose of the present pilot study was to evaluate the benefits of innovative teaching methodologies introduced to final year occupational and physical therapy students in Christian Medical College in India. Students' satisfactions along the long-term retention of knowledge and clinical application of the respiratory anatomy have been assessed. The final year undergraduate physical therapy and occupational therapy students had respiratory anatomy teaching over two sessions. The teaching involved case-based learning and integrated anatomy lectures (vertical integration) with the Anatomy department. Pretest and immediate and follow-up post-tests were conducted to assess the effectiveness of the innovative methods. A feedback questionnaire was marked to grade case-based learning. The method of integrated and case-based teaching was appreciated and found to be useful in imparting knowledge to the students. Students retained the gained knowledge adequately and the same was inferred by statistically significant improvement in both post-test scores. Vertical integration of anatomy in the final year reinforces their existing knowledge of anatomy. Case-based learning may facilitate the development of effective and clinically sound therapists.     

The Rhetorical Dynamics of Gender Harassment On-Line

This article compares two extended interactions that took place recently on the Internet, one from a recreational Internet Relay Chat (IRC)channel, and the other from an academic listserv discussion group. The two interactions exhibit similar gender dynamics, which can be characterized as harassment of female by male participants. This harassment takes different forms, in keeping with the possibilities inherent in the two modes of computer-mediated communication. Whereas female participants on IRC are kicked off the channel, in the discussion group harassers must rely exclusively on language to intimidate and silence. This "rhetoric of harassment" crucially invokes libertarian principles of freedom of expression, constructing women's resistance as "censorship." A rhetorical analysis of the two harassment episodes thus sheds light on the means used to construct and maintain asymmetrical gender and power dynamics in different modes of CMC.     

Redesigning children's services: mapping interprofessional social capital

This paper presents an analysis of the policy themes of service integration, social justice and social inclusion which underpin the integrated community schools policy initiative in Scotland. That initiative is identified as an important vehicle for the Scottish Executive Government's aim of integrating children's services with the overarching goal of creating greater inclusion and social justice. The main argument in the paper is that it is at the level of the school 'hub' that integrated work amongst practitioners and across children's public services needs to be effective if the policy aims of social justice and inclusion are to be achieved. The concept of social capital is applied to the issue of how practitioners from other agencies, now charged to work in schools, construct new professional ties and networks. The conclusion suggests that a mapping of types and levels of social capital offers a fruitful conceptual framework to examine changing interprofessional ties.     

Elementary teachers’ use of content knowledge to evaluate students’ thinking in the life sciences

Science learning environments should provide opportunities for students to make sense of and enhance their understanding of disciplinary concepts. Teachers can support students’ sense-making by engaging and responding to their ideas through high-leverage instructional practices such as formative assessment (FA). However, past research has shown that teachers may not understand FA, how to implement it, or have sufficient content knowledge to use it effectively. Few studies have investigated how teachers gather information to evaluate students’ ideas or how content knowledge factors into those decisions, particularly within the life science discipline. We designed a study embedded in a multi-year professional development program that supported elementary teachers’ development of disciplinary knowledge and FA practices within science instruction. Study findings illustrate how elementary teachers’ life science content knowledge influences their evaluation of students’ ideas. Teachers with higher levels of life science content knowledge more effectively evaluated students’ ideas than teachers with lower levels of content knowledge. Teachers with higher content exam scores discussed both content and student understanding to a greater extent, and their analyses of students’ ideas were more scientifically accurate compared to teachers with lower scores. These findings contribute to theory and practice around science teacher education, professional development, and curriculum development.     

Change in Thinking Demands for Students Across the Phases of a Science Task: An Exploratory Study

Science education communities around the world have increasingly emphasized engaging students in the disciplinary practices of science as they engage in high levels of reasoning about scientific ideas. Consistently, this is a critical moment in time in the USA as it goes through a new wave of science education reform within the context of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). We argue that the placement of high demands on students’ thinking (i.e., a high level of thinking) in combination with positioning students to use disciplinary practices as they try to make sense of scientific ideas (i.e., a deep kind of thinking) constitute critical aspects of the reform. The main purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the kinds and levels of thinking in which students engage when they are invited to think and reason as demanded by NGSS-aligned curricular tasks. Our analysis of video records of classrooms in which an NGSS-aligned, cognitively demanding task was used, revealed many ways in which the aspirational level and kind of student thinking will not be met in many science classrooms. We propose a way of characterizing and labeling the differences among these kinds and levels of thinking during the implementation of a reform-based biology curriculum. These categories, which focus on two important features emphasized in the NGSS, can help us to better understand, diagnose, and communicate issues during the implementation of high-level tasks in science classrooms.