Contemporary Scientists and their Interactions with Non-Scientists: Alternative Companion Stories for School Curricula

Research in Science Education - Students learn more than science knowledge in a science classroom; they also acquire important messages about the purposes and contexts of science. Roberts (2011)...     

Inexpensive Options for a High-Tech Learning Environment

Radford University was recently configured with a campus-wide wireless local area network. Using these new capabilities, a classroom-based Honors section of Concepts of Biology was conducted solely using electronic technologies (paper was never transferred from professor to student). To accomplish this, students used common software and freeware. Commercial versions of similar software are designed solely for academic use, however, here the students were trained to use software and technologies that will be available to them once leaving the institution. Overall, students in this course responded favorably to the use of technology and reported that it aided in their learning process.     

Bringing text display digital radio to consumers with hearing loss

Radio is migrating to digital transmission, expanding its offerings to include captioning for individuals with hearing loss. Text display radio requires a large amount of word throughput with minimal screen display area, making good user interface design crucial to its success. In two experiments, we presented hearing, hard-of-hearing, and deaf consumers with National Public Radio stories converted to text and examined their preferences for and reactions to midsized and small radio text displays. We focused on physical display attributes such as text color, font style, line length, and scrolling type as well as emergency alert messages and emergency prompts for drivers, announcer identification schemes, and synchronization of audio and text. Results suggest that midsized, Global Positioning System (GPS)-style displays were well liked, synchronization of audio and text was important to comprehension and retrieval of story details, identification of announcers was served best with a combination of name change in parenthesis and color change, and a mixture of color and flashing symbols was preferred for emergency alerting.     

The Magellan project: Developing global citizens through independent study abroad

Washington & Jefferson College undergraduate Magellan Scholars explore the world on their own. Tori Haring‐Smith describes this unique program and explains why it offers so much more than a traditional study abroad experience.     

Classroom behavior of children and adolescents with learning disabilities: a meta-analysis

Meta-analysis was used to review the results of 25 studies that compared the classroom behavior of children and adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) to children without learning disabilities. The data were analyzed from several different methodological perspectives. Results showed that both methodologically strong and weak studies demonstrated significant behavioral deficits of children with learning disabilities compared to their nondisabled peers in each of five overall areas: on-task behavior, off-task behavior, conduct disorders, distractibility, and shy/withdrawn behavior. Both observational and teacher rating data demonstrated these differences. Effect sizes for both groups of studies seemed to cluster around 1 standard deviation, suggesting noticeable and educationally significant impairment in the behavior of children with disabilities. Analysis of grade-level effect sizes suggests some explanation for the large number of referrals often witnessed during the elementary school years. Educational implications of these behavioral differences in terms of implications for mainstreaming are discussed.     

Recognizing the learning-living gap

Many residence hall staff have attempted to align the academic subculture of the faculty with the opposing extracurricular subculture of students by moving closer to the academic sector. Studies at Harvard University and at Hampshire College are summarized to indicate the failure of traditional house systems or residence hall programming to successfully bridge the gap between the academic and living subcultures. It is suggested that student personnel staff should focus on their unique contribution in higher education: the facilitation of students' personal development and interpersonal communication skills.