Tweet Up? Examining Twitter's Impact on Social Capital and Digital Citizenship in Higher Education

Twitter is a highly accessible communication venue that is embraced by great numbers of traditionally aged and ethnically diverse college students. Danielle Morgan Acosta challenges us to turn our research and teaching attention to the potential of Twitter to support student learning.     

Measures used in assessing outcomes of school‐wide positive behaviour support

School‐Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) is increasingly becoming a popular approach to managing challenging behaviour in schools. However, several issues still have to be addressed facilitate successful implementation of this approach in schools. One of these issues pertains to the appropriateness of the different measures used to determine the efficacy of the approach. Because many schools are using indirect measures to assess the effects of SWPBS implementation, determining which measures more accurately reflect the effectiveness of the SWPBS components may increase the effectiveness of school measurement systems. The purpose of this study was to examine the measures used in evaluating the efficacy of positive behaviour support. The paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of outcome measures regarding problem behaviour, prosocial behaviour, and implementation fidelity.     

Contrasting the Effectiveness of Fluency Interventions for Students with or At Risk for Learning Disabilities: A Multilevel Random Coefficient Modeling Meta‐Analysis

This study had two purposes. First, we sought to compare the overall effectiveness of different types of fluency interventions for students with learning disabilities (LD). Second, we attempted to identify how individual‐ and class‐level characteristics moderated each intervention's effectiveness. We used multilevel random coefficient modeling to analyze results from 30 single‐subject studies involving 107 students with or at risk for LD. Doing so allowed us to assess the intervention's impact in terms of both intercept‐ (i.e., mean difference between study phases) and slope‐level (i.e., rate of growth) changes. Results indicated that two motivation‐focused interventions were significantly more effective than other types of interventions across gender, age, and placement. The least effective intervention was word recognition training; this finding was consistent across all levels of analyzed variables.     

A Comparative Demographic Study of Student Teachers from the North and South of Ireland

90.4% of the 1977 entrants to concurrent general Teacher Education courses in Ireland North and South responded to a demographic questionnaire. The results are analysed and the two regions contrasted with respect to personal, professional and geographical variables. These indicate that some interesting differences exist but that there are many overall similarities.     

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: ETV IN AN AUSTRALIAN COLLEGE

This paper is a case‐study of the development of educational television in a college of advanced education in Australia. It describes the key decisions in that development, and explores the significant variables which affected them, including both pragmatic factors, such as the availability of equipment and finance, and the skills and preferences of the people involved, and theoretical factors, such as the way in which certain attributes of the media interact with the individual differences of learners to effect particular types of learning

Implicit in the discussion is a number of philosophical questions, to do with the relationship between science and technology, with the notion of science and research, and with the nature and power of the human mind     

Bias in content validity on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts for White and Mexican-American children

Item bias on Forms A and B of the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts was examined for a sample of White and Mexican-American kindergarten children. The method employed to detect biased items, as defined by an items-by-group interaction, was a two-way analysis of variance with followup being conducted with a Bonferroni-type procedure. Bias-in-item difficulty occurred for both groups, which does not conform to the current popular press view that bias is against ethnic minorities and not against the White majority. The finding that on some items the Mexican-American group out-performed the White group indicates the need to examine carefully the question of bias and to reconsider popular conceptualizations of the many issues of bias in educational and psychological testing.     

Semi‐automating the manual literature search for systematic reviews increases efficiency

Background: To minimise retrieval bias, manual literature searches are a key part of the search process of any systematic review. Considering the need to have accurate information, valid results of the manual literature search are essential to ensure scientific standards; likewise efficient approaches that minimise the amount of personnel time required to conduct a manual literature search are of great interest. Objective: The objective of this project was to determine the validity and efficiency of a new manual search method that utilises the scopus ? database. Methods: We used the traditional manual search approach as the gold standard to determine the validity and efficiency of the proposed scopus method. Outcome measures included completeness of article detection and personnel time involved. Using both methods independently, we compared the results based on accuracy of the results, validity and time spent conducting the search, efficiency. Results: Regarding accuracy, the scopus method identified the same studies as the traditional approach indicating its validity. In terms of efficiency, using scopus led to a time saving of 62.5% compared with the traditional approach (3 h versus 8 h). Conclusions: The scopus method can significantly improve the efficiency of manual searches and thus of systematic reviews.