Student Research Projects and the Institutional Review Board

Graduate social work students often are required to complete an evaluation or research project. Research instructors work with their students to assure that these projects are rigorous as well as ethical. This study focuses upon the relationship of student projects and the Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB aims to strengthen research ethics and to assure that study participants are not exploited. Sixteen MSW research instructors' shared their experiences guiding students through the IRB. Study participants identified benefits and challenges of having students experience the IRB, as well as recommendations on how to facilitate the review process. Additionally participants reflected upon how they determine IRB review requirements.     

Combining Best-Practice and Experimental Approaches: Redundancy,Images, and Misperceptions in Multimedia Learning

This experiment combined controlled experimental design with a best-practice approach (i.e., real course content, subjective evaluations) to clarify the role of verbal redundancy, confirm the multimodal impact of images and narration, and highlight discrepancies between actual and perceived understanding. The authors presented 1 of 3 computer-based lecture conditions: audio, redundant (audio with redundant text), or complementary (audio with nonredundant text and images). Audio and redundant conditions produced similar actual understanding, whereas the complementary condition produced greatest actual understanding. Redundant condition learners perceived their understanding as greater than their actual understanding. Findings encourage multimedia research to balance controlled experiments with a best-practice approach to better understand effective multimedia design.     

Lesbians Play Football Too: widening the gender debate

The gender debate works with an analysis based on stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. These stereotypical gender roles are enforced by labelling those who step outside of them as having a non‐conventional sexuality. Thus, the cultural perception of lesbians and gay men as ‘bad’ is pivotal in the enforcing of gender roles. So, until heterosexism is dismantled sexism cannot effectively be countered. Much work to tackle gender inequalities actually reinforces heterosexism and thus sexism. The equal opportunities agenda must include acknowledgement and exploration of the interrelationship between sexuality and gender, in order to be effective.     

Sex and gender in transition in US schools: ways forward

Abstract

This paper examines the current state of law and policy in relation to US transgender youth and their lived experiences. We approach this from different disciplinary backgrounds, identities, and ways of writing terms related to gender identity. We begin with an examination of the current legal climate in the USA and explore how students have pushed back against gender and sexuality norms even in a restrictive climate. Some transformations are already happening in public schools and some backlash, too, is being felt. Laws and policies in some locations are encouraging students, teachers, school leaders and community members to collaborate in making schools more educationally concerned about trans student success and teaching the school community about gender diversity. In shifting among scales and experiences of youth thinking and working on gender, we aim to emphasise youth agency and outline young people’s frustrations at the obstacles related to trans, gender dissidence and sexuality. In conclusion, we point to changes that can be made in schools to help professionals understand how policy and curricular innovation can bolster the openings that trans, gender creative and gender non-binary youth are already creating, whether or not those opportunities are officially recognised.