Cultural Competence and Cultural Identity: Using Telementoring to Form Relationships of Synergy

This study addresses the following research question: How does telementoring urban high school students by English teacher candidates develop candidates' cultural competence and impact mentees' cultural identity development? Mentee-mentor exchanges were analyzed to uncover how mentees used writing to develop cultural identity, how mentors' responses demonstrated cultural competence, and how cultural competence enhanced cultural identity development. Data analysis revealed two themes of synergy, where mentor-mentee exchanges enabled mutual learning. As mentors demonstrated cultural respect through cultural exploration, mentees broadened identity through cultural sharing. As mentors exhibited cultural affirmation through cultural empathy mentees shifted from silenced to spoken anger. Detailed excerpts illustrate how mentees grappled with cultural identity development and how mentors challenged personal assumptions and began to develop ideological clarity.     

Staying engaged: the role of teachers and schools in keeping young people with health conditions engaged in education

It is well known that having a chronic or traumatic health condition can seriously impact on a young person’s educational trajectory, as well as placing the young person at higher risk of experiencing mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, and increasing their likelihood of participation in risky behaviours. This paper reports on research examining best practice by schools in mitigating the impact of having a health condition by keeping students engaged with education in the post-compulsory years of schooling. The research project was designed to examine the strategies, both formal and informal, which are enacted by schools, individual teachers, families and students in ensuring an ongoing connection with educational pathways in the senior years. We describe an interconnected set of critical success factors for retaining these vulnerable young people in education, and reflect on the implications of these for educational policymakers and school administrators.     

Preparing teachers as allies in Indigenous education: benefits of an American Indian content and pedagogy course

The study explores relationship building and improvements in knowledge, skills, and dispositions of pre-service teachers enrolled in an Indigenous education content and pedagogy methods course. The Teaching American Indian Students in the Elementary Classroom course stands alone from other diversity education offerings at the University of Minnesota Duluth and is a required learning experience. Pre-service teachers are provided with essential knowledge and learning opportunities that facilitate success in working with Indigenous students, and helping mainstream students learn about Native history, peoples, and communities. The evaluation study was conducted by an Indigenous faculty member interested in learning how non-Native teacher education students felt they were achieving target knowledge, skills, and dispositional goals. Three separate groups of teacher education students completed both pre and post online surveys as a part of a three-year mixed methods evaluation study. The study shows significant gains made by pre-service teachers in each of the target areas, and affirms that methods coursework in American Indian education can lead to more interculturally competent teacher candidates. Helping teacher education students develop the requisite abilities and dispositions to fulfill Native American education objectives is contributory to developing future teachers as competent professionals and allies in Indigenous and diversity education.     

Convergence of deaf children's sociometric scores and teachers' behavioral ratings

Twenty-four deaf children judged each other, using a standard sociometric technique, and were rated by their teachers. The correlations between the two sources at four assessment periods replicated previous findings of substantial convergence of teachers' behavioral ratings and children's sociometric scores, thereby extending this relationship to the population of language-impaired deaf children in residential school settings.     

Whose nature of science?

Science education literature explicitly and implicitly advocates basic tenets (criteria) for “the nature of science.” The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the science education tenets are also held by philosophers of science (those who study purported tenets of science), and furthermore, to reveal possible related philosophical positions underpinning differences in responses among the philosophers. The philosophers of science expressed significant disagreements with the tenets, and different philosophers of science varied on their views about the tenets. In addition, relationships were found among the philosophers' views of the nature of science, their views of philosophy of space, and with their philosophy of science in general. Therefore, the tenets that are advocated as basic criteria for science education's “the nature of science” must be reconsidered so that more accurate criteria may be developed for future nature of science research. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34 : 39–55, 1997.     

The Generalizability of Scores for a Performance Assessment Scored with a Computer-Automated Scoring System

When performance assessments are delivered and scored by computer, the costs of scoring may be substantially lower than those of scoring the same assessment based on expert review of the individual performances. Computerized scoring algorithms also ensure that the scoring rules are implemented precisely and uniformly. Such computerized algorithms represent an effort to encode the scoring policies of experts. This raises the question, would a different group of experts have produced a meaningfully different algorithm? The research reported in this paper uses generalizability theory to assess the impact of using independent, randomly equivalent groups of experts to develop the scoring algorithms for a set of computer‐simulation tasks designed to measure physicians’ patient management skills. The results suggest that the impact of this “expert group” effect may be significant but that it can be controlled with appropriate test development strategies. The appendix presents multivariate generalizability analysis to examine the stability of the assessed proficiency across scores representing the scoring policies of different groups of experts.     

Measuring a year of child pornography trafficking by U.S. computers on a peer-to-peer network

We used data gathered via investigative “RoundUp” software to measure a year of online child pornography (CP) trafficking activity by U.S. computers on the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. The data include millions of observations of Internet Protocol addresses sharing known CP files, identified as such in previous law enforcement investigations. We found that 244,920 U.S. computers shared 120,418 unique known CP files on Gnutella during the study year. More than 80% of these computers shared fewer than 10 such files during the study year or shared files for fewer than 10 days. However, less than 1% of computers (n = 915) made high annual contributions to the number of known CP files available on the network (100 or more files). If law enforcement arrested the operators of these high-contribution computers and took their files offline, the number of distinct known CP files available in the P2P network could be reduced by as much as 30%. Our findings indicate widespread low level CP trafficking by U.S. computers in one peer-to-peer network, while a small percentage of computers made high contributions to the problem. However, our measures were not comprehensive and should be considered lower bounds estimates. Nonetheless, our findings show that data can be systematically gathered and analyzed to develop an empirical grasp of the scope and characteristics of CP trafficking on peer-to-peer networks. Such measurements can be used to combat the problem. Further, investigative software tools can be used strategically to help law enforcement prioritize investigations.     

Motion Pictures: Theory and Criticism

Richard Taylor, The Politics of Soviet Cinema, 1917 - 1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 -- $19.95)

S.S. Prawer, Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980 -- $19.95)

Thomas Sobcheck and Vivian C. Sobcheck, An Introduction to Film (Boston: Little Brown, 1980 -- $10.95 with instructor's manual)

Brian Henderson, A Critique of Film Theory (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980 -- $8.95 paper)

Two more volumes have appeared in the Wisconsin/Warner Bros. Screenplay Series (both Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980 -- $12.50/ $4.95 paper)

Paul Seydor, Peckinpah: The Western Films (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980 -- $12.95 hardcover)

Vivian Carol Sobcheck, The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film ( South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1980 -- $14.50)

Richard Meyers in The World of Fantasy Films (South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1980 -- $17.50)

Michael Chanan, The Dream That Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 190-- $32.50)     

School-based assessment in the 1986 NSW higher school certificate

The paper reports an evaluation of the introduction of a school-based assessment component into the 1986 NSW Higher School Certificate. A research team from Macquarie University and the University of Sydney monitored the processes of assessment policy development in eight Sydney schools during 1985 and 1986. These case studies of process and product were supplemented in 1986 by studies in ten NSW country high schools. A survey of teachers and students in a random sample of 58 high schools in NSW was completed towards the end of 1986. The results of the case studies and the survey are discussed within the following framework: Information Flow from the Board of Senior School Studies to the Schools; Policy Development in Schools; Features of Assessment Policies and their Implementation; and the Impact of Assessment on Classroom Practices and Relationships in the Classroom.