Changing conceptions and practices of management: Professional learning from an MBA experience by distance education

This ethnographic study of a management learning experience by distance education analyses participants' changing conceptions and practices of management using the notions of professional empowerment, integration, odysseys and personal transformation. The study reveals the nature, extent and processes of professional empowerment and personal transformation. It also attempts to illuminate the contribution that the MBA program by distance education and ongoing workplace experience made to the processes of empowerment and perspective transformation. MBA participants are seen to be negotiating different stages of the empowerment/ transformation process. Different stages are seen to demand different empowerment/ transformative strategies, and to contain different forms of barriers to professional empowerment. The sobering possibility of participants experiencing professional disempowerment is highlighted in the study.     

Students' Understandings of Human Organs and Organ Systems

How do people develop their understanding of what is inside them? This study looks at students' understandings of their internal structure. A cross-sectional approach was used involving a total of 158 students in England from six different age groups (ranging from four year old students to first year undergraduates). Students were given a blank piece of A4-sized paper and asked to draw what they thought was inside themselves. Repeated inspections of the completed drawings allowed us to construct a seven point scale of these representations. Our analysis shows the extent to which student understanding increases with age and the degree to which students know more about some organs and organ systems than others. While gender differences in the drawings were generally not large there were some intriguing differences in the ways males and females drew reproductive organs.

     

A Review and Analysis of Selected School Climate Measures

Although it is widely agreed that there is no universally accepted definition for school climate, most professionals ground it in shared beliefs, values, and attitudes reflecting the quality and character of life in schools. In this article, we review and analyze measures accessible to school personnel charged with documenting and monitoring school climate. We document core features of four scientifically sound and comprehensive measures of school climate. We believe our work serves as a selective consumer's guide for school personnel engaged in important levels of decision-making related to monitoring and improving the quality and character of interactions that represent academic and behavior standards in schools.     

Does the discussion help? The impact of a formally assessed online discussion on final student results

While there is agreement that participation in online asynchronous discussions can enhance student learning, it has also been identified that there is a need to investigate the impact of participation in online discussions on student course performance. This paper presents a case study based on an undergraduate engineering management unit employing a formally assessed online discussion area. It was observed that while many students read a significant number of discussion postings, generally, the posting of new and reply messages occurred at the minimum level required to qualify for the assignment marks. Based on correlation and multiple regression analysis, it was observed that two variables were significantly related to a student's final unit mark—prior academic ability and the number of new postings made to the online discussion. Each new posting contributed three times as much to the final unit mark as its nominal assessment value, suggesting that the work in preparing their new discussion postings assisted students in the completion of a range of assessable tasks for the unit. The number of postings read was not significantly correlated with the final unit mark, suggesting that passive lurking in this online discussion did not significantly contribute to student learning outcomes.     

Cost-performance analysis of TWX-mediated interlibrary loans in a medium-sized medical center library

The need for a cost-performance analysis of TWX-mediated versus mail-mediated ILL requests is presented. Three hypotheses are proposed: (1) Unit cost for TWX-mediated ILL requests is greater then for mail-mediated ILL requests; (2) Completion time is shorter for TWX-mediated ILL requests than for mail-mediated ILL requests; (3) An analytic model can be developed that can be used to generate administrative data concerning a TWX installation. The data presented support all three hypotheses. It is shown, also, that through the use of this model a library can arrive at a cost for service of TWX versus mail-mediated ILL.     

Democracy or Republic: Answering a Frequent Reference Question

This article frames the issues that the writers of the U.S. Constitution left as one of their writing legacies. The writers settled on the idea of founding a republic rather than a monarchy or democracy because they believed it the most stable form of government available to them. Their debate over “republic or democracy” found its way quickly into political discourse, with theoreticians like Will Butts and Eugene Volokh offering different views about which terms worked best to describe some of the political disagreements of modern times. This essay is best read in association with the short article on civic education by Reneé Critcher Lyons, which follows this article.     

The relationship between pupils' age and the content of conversations generated at three types of animal exhibits

This paper reports a study designed to reveal the contents of the conversations of two main age groups of primary children who visited three types of animal exhibits, at a museum: live animals at the zoo; and, animated dinosaurs and preserved animals. The data show that the age of the child within a group had little effect on the content of the conversations. This finding gives rise to some concem. Furthermore, the data suggest that teachers were not developing the observations made by the children in ways appropriate for their stage of development. Whilst the data showed that observations were made at the animal exhibits and that there were more comments about affective issues as children developed, the lack of an age specific different emphasis on particular aspects such as body parts, that are important as defining attributes, is of concern. Zoology is an observational science and, as children develop, the data would be expected to have shown a focus on relevant concepts and attributes of the animals if effective science teaching was occurring.