What can academic development learn from the health humanities?

The health humanities is a movement seeking to promote engagement with arts and humanities disciplines as a way of helping professionals, patients, informal carers, and members of the public to understand healthcare. Here, I draw parallels between health and learning and suggest a similar approach for academic developers. I indicate the potential scope for the learning arts and humanities, providing examples of existing practice in which the methods and sensibilities of literary studies are shedding light on learning and teaching in higher education.     

Cross-Modal Transfer of Shape is Difficult to Demonstrate in One-Month-Olds

We tested 1-month-olds for cross-modal transfer of shape between touch and vision using a procedure described by Meltzoff and Borton, but including controls for side bias and stimulus preference. In Experiment 1 (N = 48), infants' looking times to smooth and nubby visual stimuli were not influenced by previous oral exposure to one of the shapes during the preceding 90 s, except for an effect on the first test trial in one group; this effect could have been due to limited cross-modal transfer, to Type 1 error, or to side bias, possibly interacting with a small stimulus preference. The failure of that effect to replicate in a group (N = 16) with less side bias (Experiment 2) suggests that it was not due to cross-modal transfer. Experiment 3 (N = 32), an exact replication of Meltzoff and Borton's experiment, also failed to yield evidence of cross-modal transfer. Overall, there is not good evidence that 1-month-olds can transfer information about these shapes from touch to vision. Future studies exploring the ability to transfer information about other shapes will be easier to interpret if they include controls for side bias and stimulus preference.     

Learning to rank for<Emphasis Type="Italic"> why</Emphasis>-question answering

In this paper, we evaluate a number of machine learning techniques for the task of ranking answers to why-questions. We use TF-IDF together with a set of 36 linguistically motivated features that characterize questions and answers. We experiment with a number of machine learning techniques (among which several classifiers and regression techniques, Ranking SVM and SVM ^map ) in various settings. The purpose of the experiments is to assess how the different machine learning approaches can cope with our highly imbalanced binary relevance data, with and without hyperparameter tuning. We find that with all machine learning techniques, we can obtain an MRR score that is significantly above the TF-IDF baseline of 0.25 and not significantly lower than the best score of 0.35. We provide an in-depth analysis of the effect of data imbalance and hyperparameter tuning, and we relate our findings to previous research on learning to rank for Information Retrieval.     

‘I'm a dancer’ and ‘I've got a saucepan stuck on my head’: metaphor in helping lecturers to develop being-for-uncertainty

University lecturers need to help their students to develop ways of being that will allow them to flourish amidst uncertainty. Professional development workshops involving artwork and reflection provide a space where lecturers themselves can hold, examine and develop tolerance for uncertainty. Artwork and exploration of metaphors enable them to reflect on who they are as teachers, and what teaching means to them; two enquiries that are likely to involve some encounters with uncertainty. Two series of art workshops were offered to 11 nurse educators over two periods of three months. The workshops were characterised by exploration of metaphors, which allowed participants to draw on and move beyond naïve inquiry. Photographs of their artwork are presented, which demonstrate that participants were enabled to make a restorative space in their workplace, stay with ambiguity and re-embody their thinking.     

Predictors of mothers' use of spanking with their infants

OBJECTIVES: This study describes mothers who report spanking their infants in the first 13 months of life. METHODS: Two hundred forty-six (246) mothers were interviewed in the Mother-Baby Unit of a large university-affiliated hospital in a large southeastern city of the United States. Ninety-three percent (93%) of those mothers were reinterviewed in their homes when infants were 6-13 months of age. RESULTS: Younger mothers, those who endorsed fewer alternatives to corporal punishment, and those who experienced their infants as "difficult" were significantly more likely to spank their infants. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest the importance of more anticipatory guidance from physicians, nurses, social workers, and other professionals about discipline in the first few months of life, particularly given the risks associated with spanking infants and popular support for corporal punishment.     

Mentors’ personal growth and development in a college access mentorship program

As the prevalence of mentoring programs in higher education institutions continues to grow, there remains little research on the growth and development that comes from serving as a mentor. In this phenomenological study, the researchers examined college students’ personal and educational gains through serving as mentors to high school students in a work-study mentoring program for increasing college access. Drawing on interviews with 14 mentors and other program staff, the researchers examined the following research question: In what ways did student mentors in the G-Force Mentoring Program grow and develop as a result of their mentor experience? Findings included mentor growth in three key categories: (a) self-development and awareness, (b) skill development, and (c) career development. Implications for practice and future research are offered.     

Priming of Perceived Control in Young Children as a Buffer against Fear-Inducing Events

Young children (aged 5 and 6) watched videotaped fairy tales that acted to prime child control versus adult control over frightening events. Subsequently, they watched an ambiguous videotape of a child having a medical exam; tapes were varied for presence or absence of fear cues (facial expressions shown by actors). We predicted that children primed for child control versus adult control would show information-processing error patterns that paralleled those previously found for children who were dispositionally high or low in perceived control. As expected, children primed for child control showed processing enhancement whereas those primed for adult control showed processing deficits after witnessing fear cues. Attentional disengagement was found to mediate processing errors. Perceived control—dispositional or temporary—was interpreted as an important organizer of attention to and processing of potentially threatening events.     

Emancipatory or instrumental? Students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the implementation of the EcoSchool program

Abstract

We present findings of a mixed method evaluation study of the EcoSchool program in the Czech Republic. The innovativeness of this study is its specific focus on implementation strategies rather than learning outcomes. Using data from 148 students and 65 teachers from 54 different schools involved in the program, we investigated perceptions about the nature of the implementation and the impact of the approach on students’ and teachers’ feelings of ownership of success, loss of meaning of the program, or satisfaction with their participation in the EcoSchool program. The findings support the relevance of the emancipatory approach: students’ perceived participation predicts both their satisfaction with the program and perceived ownership of the success of their EcoTeams. Unexpectedly, the study also found that another factor predicting the program’s effectiveness is the level of students’ control over nonparticipating students.     

The Boundlessness of Performativity in Elite Australian Schools

This paper examines how prominent private schools in Australia are performing in a market context according to the tenets of performativity. From a discourse analysis of promotional materials that include prospectuses, advertisements, and school publications, it considers the “value‐addedness” that these schools purport to offer. In this regard, ideas such as building self‐esteem and emotional intelligence are not only being used for market advantage but are also being nicely conflated with religious principles to produce the “whole” child with market edge. This paper draws on a recent research study of 30 elite Australian schools. As new practices of identity formation and self‐presentation are investigated, questions are raised about issues of fabrication in performativity‐inspired practices of marketisation.