Development of the Student-Athlete Career Situation Inventory (SACSI)

Currently a sound and reliable measure of a student-athlete's career development does not exist. The purpose of this study was to develop a psychometrically sound instrument that measures the career situation of student-athletes. Participants for the study were 204 (138 male and 66 female) student-athletes from a large midwestern Division I university. A primary axis factor analysis using promax rotation revealed that five factors, named: Career Development Self-efficacy, Career versus Sport Identity, Locus of Control, Barriers to Career Development, and Sport to Work Relationship, accounted for 81.39% of the common variance in the data. The internal reliability of each factor of the Student-athlete Career Situation Inventory (SACSI) was established using Cronbach's alpha (.70 to .80). The criterion validity of the SACSI was investigated by regressing career experiences and gains on the five factors of the SACSI, resulting in significant squared multiple correlations (.17, .28).     

Sex differentials in faculty salaries

Affirmative action and other efforts to combat sex discrimination in higher education have focused on rank and salary differences within institutions. Academic women, however, tend to receive relatively low pay in part because they are concentrated in the lower-paying institutions. Since multivariate controls of factors such as institutional type, control, size, selectivity, and curricular emphases do not eliminate this negative relationship, the hypothesis of a direct link between institutional pay scales and faculty sex ratios is strengthened. These results suggest that eliminating sex bias in faculty pay within individual institutions will not achieve salary parity for academic women until higher-paying institutions recruit more women faculty, or until institutions with higher proportions of women faculty upgrade their pay scales.     

Reading teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature and English phonology

We investigated relationships among elementary teachers’ reading-related content knowledge (knowledge of literature and phonology), their philosophical orientation toward reading instruction, their classroom practice, and their students’ learning. Correlations showed little relationship between instructional philosophy and content knowledge, and little relationship between instructional philosophy and classroom practice. However, relationships emerged between content knowledge and instruction, and between kindergarten teachers’ phonological knowledge and their students’ reading achievement. We recommend that the recent focus on teacher’s disciplinary knowledge be broadened to include teachers of beginning reading and that teachers be afforded opportunities to develop the necessary knowledge base to teach reading effectively.     

iSchools and archival studies

Whispers and rumors about the iSchool movement lead some to fear that this represents yet another shift away from the valued traditions of library schools, threatening something far different than what library science pioneers ever envisioned. Predating the iSchool movement, however, were other programmatic shifts such as those that led to the formalization of graduate archival education. This essay argues that such evolution is essential to our future, as iSchools tackle the increasingly complex issues confronting a digital society. We consider the mission and history of iSchools and of archival studies, the basic elements and concepts of archival studies that are critical to iSchools, and the relationship between iSchools and the changing nature of personal and institutional archives.     

Alphabetic Phonics: An organization and expansion of orton-gillingham

Alphabetic Phonics is a sequential language curriculum designed to assure that all students can achieve literacy. This curriculum is a 1980’s organization and extension of the Orton-Gillingham-Childs multisensory teaching of the structure of English. Alphabetic Phonics allows 95 percent of the auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners in a regular classroom to master written English. The curriculum includes modern behavioral, psychological, and educational theories and practice. Developed initially as remediation for dyslexics, Alphabetic Phonics is succeeding both with small groups of severely blocked dyslexics and as prevention in regular classrooms in the primary grades. Administrators, classroom teachers, clinicians, remedial, and resource room specialists, as well as speech and language therapists representing small and large schools (public and private; remedial and accelerated) have traveled to Texas from forty states and six foreign countries during the past ten years to earn graduate credit in one or more of the four month-long Introductory Courses held each year. Teachers report that cultural minority students and those learning English as a second language benefit especially from reading instruction which emphasizes the foundations of English and time-on-task activities to effect mastery. Outreach programs and multimedia tools are being developed and implemented to broaden the programs availability to groups with varied needs.     

A Culture of Teaching: Policy, Perception, and Practice in Higher Education

In an effort to identify policies that foster an institutional “culture of teaching,” or encourage use of effective pedagogies, this study uses data from 5,612 faculty members at 45 institutions to examine connections between institutional policies and faculty members’ perceptions and practices related to teaching and learning. A series of multi-level models suggests that academic policy variables have small and generally insignificant relationships to such faculty perceptions or practices. Instead, conventional institutional characteristics, such as selectivity and Carnegie classification, appear to be more influential factors.     

Principles of Integrated Instruction for Engagement in Reading

Our purpose in this article is to propose a set of design principles to serve as a structural framework for enhancing engagement in reading. We provide a rationale for our emphasis on engagement, which we believe is an important aim of reading instruction. We discuss the sources of the proposed design principles. These design principles consist of a set of features of the classroom context including: conceptual themes, real-world interactions, self-direction, interesting texts, social collaboration, self-expression, cognitive strategy instruction, time for engaged reading, and coherence. We present empirical support from the educational psychology literature for each principle. For illustration, we provide a brief depiction of each principle functioning within a framework of Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). We emphasize that each principle is dependent on several others, and we describe how the functioning of each principle is contingent on the occurrence of several affiliated principles in the vignettes of CORI.