Hip-hop as a resource for understanding the urban context A review of Christopher Edmin’s: Science education for the hip-hop generation, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2010

This review explores Edmin’s “Science education for the hip-hop generation” by documenting how he frames hip-hop as a means to access urban student culture. He argues that hip-hop is more than a mere music genre, but rather a culture that provides young people with ways of connecting to the world. Two primary ideas emerged as central to his work. First, he contends that students develop communal relationships and collective identities based on the common experiences expressed in hip-hop. Second, he identifies how the conscious recognition of institutional oppression serves a central feature in urban schools. Emdin’s rich, and personal call for a greater understanding of hip-hop culture provides the text with an unmatched strength. He skillfully uses personal narratives from his own experience as well as quotes and references from hip-hop songs to make the nuances of hip hop transparent to science educators. Conversely, the limitation of this text is found in its unfulfilled promise to provide pragmatic examples of how to engage in a hip-hop based science education. Emdin’s work is ultimately valuable as it extends our current knowledge about urban students and hip-hop in meaningful ways.     

Intellectual innovation or intellectual retrofitting: on agency, culture and access to science education

A great challenge in education research involves the difficulty of differentiating between studies that apply commonly understood theoretical perspectives and recognizing studies that merely rename old theoretical frameworks. This conflict between intellectual innovation and intellectual retrofitting emerges as central to Basu, Calabrese-Barton, Clairmont, and Lock’s exploration of the relationship between critical agency and student identity development in science.

The influence of equipment variations on sliotar–hurley impact in the Irish game of hurling

The game of hurling is ranked as one of the fastest and most skilful field games in the world. It is played by a stick, hurley, made of ash wood and a ball, sliotar, made of a cork core or similar viscoelastic materials. Better standardisation of the game equipment requires analysing impacts to quantify precisely the effect of variations in equipment design on the resultant impact force at low and high striking speeds. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to use a high-speed camera to (1) characterise the impact dynamics in term of impact force magnitude and duration, and (2) investigate whether a relationship exists between the game equipment and the magnitude of the impact force. An air cannon unit (ACU) test rig was set up to cause the sliotar to strike the hurley at predetermined speeds. A high-speed camera operating at 12,500 frames per second (fps) was used to capture 32 experimental impacts covering a range of sliotar and hurley brands, impact locations and impact speeds. The factor ??sliotar brand?? was identified as the most significant factor for the impact force among other main factors and two-factor interactions at a constant speed and it had a significant effect with up to 27?% difference between sliotar brands. It was demonstrated that, at higher impact speeds, the force?Cdeformation curves of the sliotar brands varied significantly, even though similar force?Cdeformation curves have been reported at quasi-static compression and similar COR values at low impact speeds using the standard free-drop test. This is the first known study to characterise the unique, highly non-linear and anisotropic sliotar?Churley impact using high-speed camera technology. It highlights the need for a tighter standard for sliotar materials and manufacturing to increase uniformity between different brands and strongly suggests that the standard free-drop test is not sufficient to characterise and compare game equipment.     

Evaluating risk for targeted violence in schools: Comparing risk assessment,threat assessment,and other approaches

In the wake of recent school shootings, fear over violence in schools has prompted increased requests for psychologists, educators, and law enforcement professionals to assist in preventing future school violence incidents. We attempt to lay a foundation for developing effective assessment and prevention approaches by first distinguishing planned school‐based attacks from other forms of school and youth violence. We then review the three assessment approaches that have been advocated and used in some jurisdictions (profiling, guided professional judgment, automated decision‐making) and demonstrate why they are inappropriate—and potentially harmful—in preventing planned school‐based attacks. We then describe the contours of the threat assessment approach, developed by the U.S. Secret Service to prevent assassinations, and examine its utility for responding to communications or behaviors of concern that students may present in school settings. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Observing complex systems thinking in the zone of proximal development

Our paper builds on the construct of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Vygotsky in Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1978) to analyze the relationship between students’ answers and the help they receive as they construct them. We report on a secondary analysis of classroom and interview data that was collected with 1st and 2nd grade students completing a short scaffolded inquiry project designed to help them learn about how honeybees collect nectar. We explore how the progression of questions reveal students’ understanding of complex systems by examining how students’ progression through the questions tended to become more sophisticated as we increased support. We further compare two complex-systems perspectives, Component-Mechanism-Phenomena and agent-based approaches, to see how each would categorize students’ explanations. Findings demonstrate the value of the ZPD as an analytic framework in exploring students’ systems understanding in terms of the nature of questions (e.g., sequencing, type of question) and multiple conceptual models (e.g., component-mechanisms-phenomenon, single agent or aggregate behaviors), and how this might impact students’ groupings according to their ability and subsequent instructional support.     

How might Native science inform “informal science learning”?

This article examines the literature on Native science in order to address the presumed binaries between formal and informal science learning and between Western and Native science. We situate this discussion within a larger discussion of culturally responsive schooling for Indigenous youth and the importance of Indigenous epistemologies and contextualized knowledges within Indigenous communities.

An Adapted Structurational Framework for the Emergence of Communication Networks

Although structuration theory (ST) has endured a considerable influence in communication research across various domains, there remains a paucity of quantitative empirical research using ST as a viable framework. The purpose of this article is to develop an adapted structurational framework to explain the emergence of communication networks. The adapted framework distinguishes between relational states/events and internal/external structural rules. For analysis, we introduce multipanel relational event modeling, a technique using processual inference that can empirically demonstrate the recursive nature of system and structure. As an introductory example of both the framework and method, we examined communication, using cell-phone data, of students living in the same dormitory from September 2008 through February 2009. Our results demonstrated how different structures (i.e., perceived social relations and internal/external structural rules) are reproduced and transformed over time. Our research has implications for communication research dealing with recursivity, event-driven network analysis, the changing nature of the phone call, and the promise of computational communication science.