Education Trifecta: Win Attention,Place Knowledge,Show Understanding

Continuing education for librarians and educating library school students in the areas of technical services are topics often discussed within the field of librarianship. The presenters in this session provided alternatives to “on the job” education for technical services professionals. Two presenters provided strategies for instructing an online continuing education course on acquisitions. The third presenter shared information about the development and teaching of a serials course at a library school.     

CORRESPONDENCE INSTRUCTION FOR THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF PRACTITIONERS IN THE FIELD OF AGING

Institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada are demonstrating an increasing interest in the field of social gerontology. However, many practitioners already working in the field find it difficult, if not impossible, to enter “full‐time” formal programs of graduate study. Correspondence instruction could prove to be one of the most effective means of providing educational opportunities about aging to individuals either working or contemplating working with the aged. This paper summarizes the results of a study conducted to determine what is available in the field of aging through correspondence instruction at accredited institutions in the United States and Canada. There were 85 institutions offering correspondence instruction surveyed; 51 of these institutions (60%) offer correspondence instruction courses that are related, in one way or another, to the field of aging. A total of 99 aging or aging‐related correspbndence courses are identified.     

Digital Discernment: An E‐Commerce Web Site Evaluation Tool

Students entering the business workforce today may well share some responsibility for developing, revising, or evaluating their company's Web site. They may lack the experience, however, to critique their employer's Web presence effectively. The purpose of developing Digital Discernment, an e‐commerce Web site evaluation tool, was to prepare students for this work. The tool provides them with a listing of criteria with which to assess e‐commerce sites, lets them evaluate pre‐selected sites qualitatively and quantitatively, and allows them to compare their evaluations with their peers. In this article, we discuss and examine the effectiveness of this tool and consider the ways in which it can help students in their future business careers.     

The Organizational Tension of Othering

In this paper narratives submitted to this issue are reviewed and critiqued using the feminist lenses of othering and organizational irrationality. Four emergent themes in the narratives are identified and discussed, with the themes and the feminist critique of them used to provide a set of recommendations for developing researcher-IRB working relationships.     

Electronic health record: integrating evidence-based information at the point of clinical decision making

The authors created two tools to achieve the goals of providing physicians with a way to review alternative diagnoses and improving access to relevant evidence-based library resources without disrupting established workflows. The “diagnostic decision support tool” lifted terms from standard, coded fields in the electronic health record and sent them to Isabel, which produced a list of possible diagnoses. The physicians chose their diagnoses and were presented with the “knowledge page,” a collection of evidence-based library resources. Each resource was automatically populated with search results based on the chosen diagnosis. Physicians responded positively to the “knowledge page.”     

Engaging Introductory Writing Students Through Facebook Assignments

Elyse D'nn Lovell, mentored by Betsy Palmer, harnesses her Highlands College students' enthusiasm for social networking to increase their feelings of connectedness and improve critical thinking and writing skills.     

Interprofessional partnerships involving school counsellors for children with special needs: a broad based systematic review using the PRISMA framework

Interprofessional educational partnerships can include a diverse group of helping professionals involved in consultation at both the school and community levels. Central to these partnerships should be school counsellors; this systematic review sought to understand the dynamics of these partnerships using the PRISMA framework. The review found that the role school counsellors can play on these teams varies from leader to convener but the specificity in terms of outcomes was missing. Noteworthy is the number of conceptual pieces, which is interpreted as researchers developing models that need additional testing. Future research should put the conceptual models available to directional testing; authors should include more information about the team’s development and each person’s role; and more attention should be paid to the outcomes of these team-based approaches.     

Gender and science achievement: A reanalysis of studies from two meta-analyses

Data from 30 studies of the magnitude of gender differences in science achievement previously examined in two separate reviews were synthesized using modern methods for meta-analysis. Two meta-analysis methodologies were used: analyses of effect sizes (standardized mean differences) and vote-counting estimation procedures. Analyses revealed that magnitudes of gender differences in science achievement varied according to the subject matter under study. Males showed significant advantages in studies of biology, general science, and physics, but significant differences were not found for studies of mixed science content, and geology and earth sciences, or in a single study of chemistry. However, in all cases the numbers of effects examining each subject-matter area were quite small (seven or less). Also, studies which had focused on gender differences evidenced larger gender differences than other studies. Other possible predictors of the magnitudes of gender differences, such as grade level of the subjects and test length, did not account for significant amounts of variation among these study outcomes. Consequently, they also did not provide as strong an explanation of the patterns of gender differences as did subject matter and focus on gender.