The Tutoring Network: A unique nonprofit educational/civic/professional organization

The Tutoring Network is a nonprofit organization that emphasizes rigorous screening of educational therapists and careful matching of their expertise with the needs of learning-disabled students. It operates a clearinghouse for information pertinent to learning disabilities and strives to facilitate better communication among professionals concerned with the learning-disabled. This paper chronicles the birth and growth of The Tutoring Network and explores possibilities for replication.     

Artful Language: Academic Writing for the Art Student

The task of writing about the process of making and contextualising art can be overwhelming for some graduate students. While the challenge may be due in part to limited time and attention to the practice of writing, in a practice‐based arts thesis there is a deeper issue: how the visual and written components are attended to in a manner that neither is subjugated and both are fully realised. Helping students to revision art and writing as similar creative processes that can be structured around a framework designed to address both processes can override the conception that writing and art are polarising forces. This article describes one such framework that was found to be effective from both the perspective of the professor and the student in fleshing out the heart of both artistic processes and finding an integrating structure that moves a thesis to fruition.     

Schools, ‘ferals’, stigma and boundary work: parents managing education and uncertainty in regional Australia

This paper examines forms of boundary work undertaken by parents in a regional Australian city to negotiate social processes around the school market amidst rising economic insecurity. It outlines structural changes, which have increased economic inequality in Australia and impacted on educational reform, and the specific challenges faced by public schools in regional settings. Drawing on 18 months’ qualitative research in one regional location, it identifies and analyses forms of boundary work undertaken by middle-class families to manage these uncertainties in a field of scarce economic and cultural resources. Theories of class culture, stigma and whiteness are used to show how local social labels such as ‘ferals’ and ‘shiny people’ acted as classed and racialised ways of negotiating this social and economic landscape through the school field. Such practices engendered feelings of security and control and shed light on feelings of class-based resentment and anxiety in regional Australia, specifically a middle-class ‘fear of falling’.     

Health information seeking behaviour: the librarian's role in supporting digital and health literacy

This paper is based on Rachel Butler's dissertation carried out at the University of Sheffield as part of the MA Library and Information Services Management. The study examines people's online health information seeking skills, with the specific aim to identify how libraries and health services can work together in supporting digital and health literacy. A survey approach is used to explore online searching habits as well as librarian and health professionals’ views on health literacy. The key findings indicate that whilst the majority of respondents consider themselves to be health literate, there was an overall agreement that effective education and support could be achieved through the collaboration between libraries and health services, and specifically to signpost information and to provide targeted education. The limitations of the research for dissertation are recognised leading to recommendations that further study focuses on the impact of signposting and education on health literacy.F.J.     

Mini managers: Children strategically divide cognitive labor among collaborators,but with a self-serving bias

Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016–2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions about numbers between two partners. By 7 years, children allocated difficult questions to the skilled partner (Experiment 1, d = 1.42; Experiment 2, d = 0.87). However, younger children demonstrated a self-serving bias, choosing the easiest questions for themselves. Only when engaging in a third-party collaborative task did 5-year-olds assign harder questions to the more skilled individual (Experiment 3, d = 0.55). These findings demonstrate early understanding of strategic collaboration subject to a self-serving bias.     

Strategies that promote historical reasoning and contextualization: a pilot intervention with urban high school students

Reading and Writing - The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of two types of historical problem-solving instruction with advanced urban high school students’...