Consultative instructor supervision and evaluation

Organizations vary greatly in how they monitor training instructors. The methods used in monitoring vary greatly. This article presents a systematic process for improving instructor skills that result in better teaching and better learning, which results in better‐prepared employees for the workforce. The consultative supervision and evaluation model breaks monitoring into two distinct phases: supervision, for the purpose of improving instruction, and evaluation, for the purpose of rating instructors for promotion, retention, raises, and bonuses.     

REFUTATION TEXT IN SCIENCE EDUCATION: A REVIEW OF TWO DECADES OF RESEARCH

As people attempt to make sense of the world, they develop personal knowledge structures. These structures often contain misconceptions—inaccurate or incomplete information—that are highly resistant to change because existing knowledge networks must be restructured to accommodate counterintuitive information in a process known as conceptual change. Since textbooks are the dominant resource for science instruction in most classrooms, text-based methods of facilitating conceptual change need to be examined. Since the mid-1980 s, researchers have investigated the conceptual change potential of refutation text, a text structure that includes elements of argumentation and that has been described as one of the most effective text-based means for modifying readers’ misconceptions. In this paper, twenty years of refutation text research in science and reading education is reviewed and then a secondary analysis of those results is conducted to explore developmental aspects of the efficacy of refutation text. Although a developmental relationship was not revealed, two decades of research indicate that reading refutation text rather than traditional expository text is more likely to result in conceptual change.     

Musiknutzung durch Hochschulen

Dieser Beitrag gibt einen überblick über die rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen bei der Musiknutzung durch Hochschulen. Aus dem Urhebergesetz ergibt sich, dass eine Universit?t nicht Urheber im Rechtssinne sein kann. Sie ist weder Werksch?pfer noch ist das Urheberrecht als solches übertragbar. Bei der Nutzung von Musikstücken durch Hochschulen müssen somit insbesondere die Verwertungsrechte des Urhebers berücksichtigt werden, die seine materiellen Interessen schützen. Bei einer Nutzung von Musik über das Internet muss zwischen Streaming- und Download-Angeboten unterschieden werden. Hier kommt der Frage erhebliche Bedeutung zu, welche Rechte des Urhebers bei einer Nutzung dieser Angebote durch die Hochschule berührt werden und ob m?glicherweise gesetzliche Schrankenbestimmungen greifen. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist auch die Frage des Rechtsverh?ltnisses zur GEMA von besonderer Relevanz.     

Place-based education: a transformative activist stance

The ethnography presented by van Eijck and Roth focuses on the activities of people involved in a government funded internship program in conservation and restoration, which was offered by a ‘multidisciplinary research center’ through a local First Nation adult education center. The internship was designed, in partnership with a local non-profit conservation society (OceanHealth), to appeal to First Nation men and women considering career change, returning to school, or re-entering the work place. The primary aim of the internship was to ‘provide authentic science for diverse student populations (and their teachers), with particular attention to the needs of students from First Nations, to become scientifically literate to the extent that it prepares them for participating in public debates, community decision-making, and personal living consistent with long-term environmentally sustainable forms of life’. The authors report that at least one of the two interns was not interested in science and a WSáNEC elder expressed dissatisfaction with the efforts to establish the nature park and its current approved uses. Van Eijck and Roth argue that the divergence between the project aims and the goals of the participants are a result of how ‘place’ is viewed in place-based education and that disagreements like these can be resolved if place is theorized as chronotope. There are many interesting ideas raised and directions taken in the article by van Eijck and Roth. After several discussions during the review process, we decided to focus our forum response on the meaning of ‘place’ in place-based education, the utility of theorizing place as a chronotope, the implications for teaching–learning (‘education’), and musings on what remains unclear.     

A model for using a concept inventory as a tool for students' assessment and faculty professional development

This essay describes how the use of a concept inventory has enhanced professional development and curriculum reform efforts of a faculty teaching community. The Host Pathogen Interactions (HPI) teaching team is composed of research and teaching faculty with expertise in HPI who share the goal of improving the learning experience of students in nine linked undergraduate microbiology courses. To support evidence-based curriculum reform, we administered our HPI Concept Inventory as a pre- and postsurvey to approximately 400 students each year since 2006. The resulting data include student scores as well as their open-ended explanations for distractor choices. The data have enabled us to address curriculum reform goals of 1) reconciling student learning with our expectations, 2) correlating student learning with background variables, 3) understanding student learning across institutions, 4) measuring the effect of teaching techniques on student learning, and 5) demonstrating how our courses collectively form a learning progression. The analysis of the concept inventory data has anchored and deepened the team's discussions of student learning. Reading and discussing students' responses revealed the gap between our understanding and the students' understanding. We provide evidence to support the concept inventory as a tool for assessing student understanding of HPI concepts and faculty development.     

Team Research at the Biology–Mathematics Interface: Project Management Perspectives

The success of interdisciplinary research teams depends largely upon skills related to team performance. We evaluated student and team performance for undergraduate biology and mathematics students who participated in summer research projects conducted in off-campus laboratories. The student teams were composed of a student with a mathematics background and an experimentally oriented biology student. The team mentors typically ranked the students'' performance very good to excellent over a range of attributes that included creativity and ability to conduct independent research. However, the research teams experienced problems meeting prespecified deadlines due to poor time and project management skills. Because time and project management skills can be readily taught and moreover typically reflect good research practices, simple modifications should be made to undergraduate curricula so that the promise of initiatives, such as MATH-BIO 2010, can be implemented.     

Do different components of working memory underlie different subgroups of reading disabilities?

The purpose of this study was to determine the components of working memory (WM) that underlie less skilled readers' comprehension and word recognition difficulties. Performance of 3 less skilled reading subgroups---children with reading disabilities (RD) in both word recognition and comprehension; children with comprehension deficits only; and children with low verbal IQ, word recognition, and comprehension (poor readers)--was compared to that of skilled readers on WM, short-term memory (STM), processing speed, executive, and phonological processing measures. Ability group comparisons showed that (a) skilled readers outperformed all less skilled readers on measures of WM, updating, and processing speed; (b) children with comprehension deficits only outperformed children with RD on measures of WM, STM, phonological processing, and processing speed; and (c) children with RD outperformed poor readers on WM and phonological processing measures. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that (a) subgroup differences on WM tasks among less skilled readers were moderated by a storage system not specific to phonological skills, and (b) STM and updating contributed significant variance to WM beyond what was contributed by reading group classification. The latter finding suggested that some differences in storage and executive processing emerged between skilled and less skilled readers that were not specific to reading.     

Foundations for self-awareness: An exploration through autism

Developmental psychopathology holds promise for elucidating the structure of self-awareness. Here we studied social emotions in matched groups of children and adolescents with and without autism. Our aims were to determine whether there are potentially dissociable aspects of self-awareness, and to reconsider how the qualities of young children's engagement with other persons influences the development of their sense of self. Parent interviews yielded evidence that children with autism are limited in social-relational and emotional domains of self-awareness; for example, few were reported to show guilt, embarrassment, or shame. Yet according to parent report, most were affected by the moods of others, showed some degree of pity and concern, and manifested jealousy. When presented with videotaped scenes, participants with autism were similar to those without autism in identifying pride, guilt, and shame, and they were able to describe their own experiences of pride and, more rarely, guilt. In situations designed to elicit emotions, participants with autism were rated as showing pride, but they manifested lesser degrees and atypical qualities of guilt and coyness. Relatively few showed personal forms of self-consciousness when asked to pose for a photograph. We argue that in order for children to achieve depth in self-awareness, and to relate to themselves as occupying a distinctive stance within a framework of mutual self-other relatedness, they need to identify with the attitudes of other people. We interpret the present studies in terms of dissociations among three forms of social emotion: "person-centered" qualities of relational self-awareness that require identification and are specifically limited among children with autism, more diffuse modes of relational self-consciousness, and a third group of social emotions, epitomized by jealousy, situated in a separate developmental line. We propose a rebalancing of emotion theory that gives greater prominence to children's developing forms of interpersonal and intra-psychic relatedness.     

Collection-based compound noun segmentation for Korean information retrieval

Compound noun segmentation is a key first step in language processing for Korean. Thus far, most approaches require some form of human supervision, such as pre-existing dictionaries, segmented compound nouns, or heuristic rules. As a result, they suffer from the unknown word problem, which can be overcome by unsupervised approaches. However, previous unsupervised methods normally do not consider all possible segmentation candidates, and/or rely on character-based segmentation clues such as bi-grams or all-length n-grams. So, they are prone to falling into a local solution. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes an unsupervised segmentation algorithm that searches the most likely segmentation result from all possible segmentation candidates using a word-based segmentation context. As word-based segmentation clues, a dictionary is automatically generated from a corpus. Experiments using three test collections show that our segmentation algorithm is successfully applied to Korean information retrieval, improving a dictionary-based longest-matching algorithm.