Experimental evidence for diagramming benefits in science writing

Arguing for the need for a scientific research study (i.e. writing an introduction to a research paper) poses significant challenges for students. When faced with these challenges, students often generate overly safe replications (i.e. fail to find and include opposition to their hypothesis) or in contrast include no strong support for their hypothesis (i.e. relevant, valid evidence). How can we support novice scientists in generating and defending high quality hypotheses? A long history of research supports the affordances provided by structured representations of complex information. More recently, argument diagramming has gained traction in instruction for philosophy, social studies, and law. However, its effectiveness for supporting students in science is relatively untested. The purpose of the current study was to test the effectiveness of a simple argument diagram optimized for supporting students’ research writing in psychology. Two groups of undergraduate students in research methods lab courses were randomly assigned to diagramming support or no support. In the research papers, those given diagramming support were more likely to argue for an appropriately ‘risky’ hypothesis and wrote more about the relevance and validity of cited studies. Some of these gains show signs of transfer to a second paper written later in the course that did not require use of the diagramming tool.     

New and rare lignicolous hyphomycetes from Zhejiang Province, China

Sporidesmiopsis zhejiangensis sp. nov. and Spadicoides americana were found on submerged wood from streams in Zhejiang Province, China. Sporidesmiopsis zhejiangensis is characterized by obclavate to fusiform, 5-6-distoseptate, versicolorous, verruculose conidia with an apical mucilaginous sheath. Spadicoides americana is a new record to China. These taxa are described and illustrated, and morphological differences between these species and their similar species were summarized.     

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF PUBLIC SCHOOL ACCOUNTABILITY?

A bstract .  In this review essay, Michael Gunzenhauser and Andrea Hyde consider three recent edited collections that address the potential value of public school accountability policy: Kenneth Sirotnik's Holding Accountability Accountable: What Ought to Matter in Public Education ; Martin Carnoy, Richard Elmore, and Leslie Santee Siskin's The New Accountability: High Schools and High-Stakes Testing ; and Linda Skrla and James Scheurich's Educational Equity and Accountability: Paradigms, Policies, and Politics. Taken together, the texts provide a snapshot of current scholarly discourse about the phenomenon of accountability policy and provide educators with conceptual tools for analyzing and responding to accountability pressures. While these conceptual distinctions help advance scholarly discourse on accountability, ultimately the texts demonstrate the conceptual poverty of accountability policy for guiding educational improvement. Gunzenhauser and Hyde argue that current state accountability systems are not likely to encourage the broad, systemic capacity building that these three volumes describe as fundamental to achieving the requirements of federal policies.     

Controlling response shift bias: the use of the retrospective pre‐test design in the evaluation of a master's programme

Traditionally the measures used to evaluate the impact of an educational programme on student outcomes and the extent to which students change is a comparison of the student's pre‐test scores with his/her post‐test scores. However, this method of evaluating change may be problematic due to the confounding factor of response shift bias when student self‐reports of change are used. Response shift bias occurs when the student's internal frame of reference of the construct being measured, for example research ability or critical thinking, changes between the pre‐test and the post‐test due to the influence of the educational programme. To control for response shift bias the retrospective pre‐test method was used to evaluate the outcomes achieved from students completing a research module at master's level. The retrospective pre‐test method differs from the traditional pre‐test–post‐test design in that both post‐test and pre‐test perceptions of respondents are collected at the same time. The findings indicated that response shift bias was evident in that the programme had significantly greater impact on outcomes than identified using the traditional pre‐test–post‐test design leading to the conclusion that students may overestimate their ability at the commencement of an educational programme. The retrospective pre‐test design is not a replacement for the traditional pre‐test–post‐test measures but may be a useful adjunct in the evaluation of the impact of educational programmes on student outcomes.     

Students' perceptions of clinical attachments across rural and metropolitan settings

For many years, medical students at the University of Sydney undertook their clinical clerkships in traditional metropolitan teaching hospitals, which were regarded as the ‘gold standard’ for clinical training. In 2001 the university established a rural clinical school at which increasing numbers of students now complete a significant proportion of their medical education. The aim of the study reported here is to examine students’ perceptions of what facilitates their learning in clinical settings and to compare their perceptions across rural and metropolitan settings. Focus groups were conducted to collect students’ views on their experiences of learning in clinical settings. The findings were used to generate a questionnaire with items designed directly from focus‐group data ensuring content validity. The questionnaire was sent to all students in the 2004 cohort. Exploratory factor analysis was used to provide evidence of construct validity. The internal consistency reliability of the questionnaire was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha. Factor scores were computed to compare students’ perceptions across the two settings. Four factors were extracted: (1) clinical teachers’ orientation to teaching; (2) opportunities to develop clinical skills; (3) supportiveness of the clinical setting; and (4) student confidence and sense of self‐efficacy. Students rated the rural experience more highly and positively than the metropolitan hospital experience with regard to all four factors. This study highlights the positive role that rural attachments can play in providing an educationally sound learning experience. The findings are important in the context of both the drive, among medical programs worldwide, to seek out additional and alternative settings for clinical education and the national agenda to foster student interest in rural careers through positive rural training experiences.     

Developing healthcare practice through action learning: individual and group journeys

Action Learning is now a well established strategy for reflective inquiry in healthcare. Whilst a great deal is know about action learning there has been inadequate research on the process of learning that takes place, and the impact that this holds for individuals, groups or organisations. This article reports on the findings of 15-month action learning program based in a special care nursery. A realistic evaluation of the program uncovered individual and group journeys and provide evidence that action learning is an effective strategy in practice development.     

A novel approach to standardizing landing and balancing tasks in netball using single-leg horizontal jumps

This study aimed to establish the reliability of a novel netball task using a single-leg horizontal jump (SLHJ). Twenty-five females 18–39 years performed SLHJs for maximal displacement and ground-reaction forces. Participants completed two trials for each leg on two occasions separated by 6 weeks of pre-season netball training. Paired sample t tests highlighted no significant differences within trials for either limb. Significant (p ≤ .05) changes are reported for displacement, and dominant and nondominant X and Y forces, after 6-week netball training. SLHJ displacement showed excellent within-session reliability at baseline for dominant (intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC(2,1)) = 0.922, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.826–0.966) and nondominant (ICC(2,1) = 0.925; 95% CI 0.832–0.967) landings. At 6 weeks, within-session reliability remained excellent for dominant (ICC(2,1) = 0.967, 95% CI 0.926–0.985) and nondominant ICC 0.968 (95% CI 0.929–0.986) landings. The reliability of the single-leg horizontal jump task for netball remained strong after 6 weeks of netball training.