Towards a Cultural Understanding of the Disability and Deaf Experience: A Content Analysis of Introductory Multicultural Education Textbooks

This paper reports the findings of a simple normative content analysis of 11 multicultural education textbooks to determine the extent to which disability and deaf culture are represented. In addition, this study examines multicultural education textbooks to assess the extent to which perspectives of members of the disability and deaf communities are represented in the discourse about disabled and deaf persons. Results indicate that on average less than 1% of the total pages of text reviewed addressed or mentioned disability or deaf culture. Of these, it was found that on average about 6% of the pages addressed disability or deaf culture. In addition, inaccurate information was presented and perspectives were often not informed by a substantial body of literature that has emerged in the field of disability studies. It was found that multicultural education textbooks rely heavily on information about persons with disabilities from Special Education that may not be widely accepted by disabled or deaf persons. A follow-up paper examines the implications of the exclusion of disabled and deaf persons and their perspectives from the discourse about the shared and collective disability and deaf experience in favor of a dominant perspective widely held by the nondisabled professional community. Questions are raised about whether this is consistent with the values and goals of multicultural education and teaching. A rationale and recommendations are proposed for engaging disabled and deaf persons about their shared and collective experience and for promoting cultural competence and proficiency with respect to the disability and Deaf experience in multicultural education.     

A season-long team-building intervention: examining the effect of team goal setting on cohesion

The purpose of the current study was to determine whether the implementation of a season-long team-building intervention program using team goal setting increased perceptions of cohesion. The participants were 86 female high school basketball players from 8 teams. The teams were randomly assigned to either an experimental team goal-setting or control condition. Each participant completed the Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ; Carron, Brawley, & Widmeyer, 2002; Carron, Widmeyer, & Brawley, 1985), which assessed cohesion at both the beginning and end of the season. Overall, the results revealed a significant multivariate effect, Pillai's trace F(12, 438) = 2.68, p = .002. Post hoc analyses showed that at the beginning of the season, athletes from both conditions did not differ in their perceptions of cohesion. However, at the end of the season, athletes in the team goal-setting condition held higher perceptions of cohesion than athletes in the control condition. Overall, the results indicated that team goal setting was an effective team-building tool for influencing cohesiveness in sport teams.     

On metrics matched to the discrete memoryless channel

A sequence of metrics {D_N} is said to be additive and matched to a discrete memoryless channel (DMC) if D_N is the sum on its coordinates of N single letter metrics and if the maximum likelihood decoder for sequences of length N is a minimum D_N-distance decoder. Necessary and sufficient conditions on the transition probabilities of a DMC for the existence of a sequence of additive metrics matched to it are given. In the case of the binary channel these are shown to be equivalent to the channel being symmetric. Explicit transition probabilities are given for a large class of ternary DMCs with an associated sequence of additive matched metrics. The problem solved here may be considered a generalization of the problem of finding the DMCs matched to the Lee metric solved by Chiang and Wolf in 1971 (2).