Culture,Creativity, and Research

This article charts the increasing importance of the creative industries to the UK economy and to ways of meeting the information needs of those industries. The role of libraries is examined, particularly that of the British Library and its support services for business and enterprise. Related issues are discussed, such as those relating to the measurement of the value of services like the British Library, the preservation of digital documentation, and heritage and intellectual property rights.     

Effective Online Instructional and Assessment Strategies

The purpose of this study was to better understand the instructional and assessment strategies that are most effective in the online learning environment. Faculty and students identified several strategies for maintaining instructional quality in the online environment, including the importance of using a variety of instructional methods to appeal to various learning styles and building an interactive and cohesive learning environment that includes group work. Online assessment strategies include having a wide variety of clearly explained assignments on a regular basis and providing meaningful and timely feedback to students regarding the quality of their work. Effective assessment techniques include projects, portfolios, self-assessments, peer evaluations, and weekly assignments with immediate feedback. The role of meaningful feedback cannot be overemphasized.     

The Spatial Coding Strategies of One-Year-Old Infants in a Locomotor Search Task

The ability of 1-year-old infants to remember the location of a nonvisible target was investigated in 3 experiments. Infants searched for a toy hidden in one of many possible locations within a circular bounded space. The presence, number, and spatial arrangement of local cues or "landmarks" within this space were varied. The results of Experiment 1 showed that search performance was highly successful when a landmark was coincident with the location of the toy ("direct"), but less successful when a landmark was adjacent to the target location ("indirect"). The results of Experiment 2 suggested that search with an indirect landmark may be more fragile than search with no landmarks at all. In Experiments 3a and 3b, 2 different configurations of indirect landmarks were employed; search performance was equally poor with both of these and was inferior to search with no landmarks. It is concluded that infants of this age are able to associate a nonvisible target with a direct landmark and are able to code the distance and direction of a target with respect to themselves or with respect to the larger framework. However, there was no evidence that they can code the distance and direction of a target relative to another object. The difficulty of coding with indirect landmarks is interpreted in terms of cognitive complexity and conflict between spatial strategies.     

Pathways to resilience: how drawings reveal pre-service teachers’ core narratives underpinning their future teacher-selves

For this study of teacher-identity, which is part of a larger research project on teacher resilience, preservice teachers were invited to draw “the kind of teacher you hope to become”. In this, our study recognises drawing as a semiotic system of meaning-making and communication. The drawings were examined in terms of the “stories” they told. Using an emergent design approach to the data, drawings were synthesised into categories that were distilled into theme clusters. A hermeneutic reading revealed the core identity narrative underpinning each teacher-identity story. This story was told in sociocultural terms, or constructed around functioning at work or couched in terms of personal validation and achievement. These core identity narratives signal what “matters” to preservice teachers’ sense of their teacher-selves. Since there is an observed correlation between teacher-identity and resilience, knowing what matters is a helpful basis for building resilience.     

Using Proactivity,Time Discounting,and the Theory of Planned Behavior to Identify Predictors of Retirement Planning

This study developed and tested a model to identify the predictors of retirement planning based on an extension of the theory of planned behavior ([TPB], Ajzen, 1991 Ajzen , I. ( 1991 ). The theory of planned behavior . Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , 50 ( 2 ), 179 – 211 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) that included individual differences in proactivity and time discounting. The results showed that personal attitudes, sense of control, social influence, and stable traits have a significant influence on the extent to which late-career workers are engaged in retirement planning over and above the effect of demographic variables. However, some gender differences in the prediction of retirement planning were identified that have important implications for the design of programs and interventions to encourage planning.