Along the Write Lines: a case study exploring activities to enable creative writing in a secondary English classroom.

This article arises from a four week study of a class of 14‐15 year old students. The study explored students’ perception of themselves as writers and the effects of a variety of teaching and learning strategies on their creative writing responses. The aim of the project was to enhance the students’ creative writing, whilst ascertaining whether there were particular activities or types of writing that would lead to students perceiving more satisfactory outcomes in their writing. It answers the research question: What do I observe, and what do my students say, about the experience of different classroom based creative writing tasks?     

ACADEMIC SELF‐EFFICACY AMONG JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN GHANA: EVALUATING FACTOR STRUCTURE AND MEASUREMENT INVARIANCE ACROSS GENDER

Self‐efficacy is a universal construct, but few validated measures exist for researchers in developing countries to use in assessing youths’ perceptions of their ability to achieve academic success. This study examined the cross‐cultural suitability and psychometric properties of an academic self‐efficacy scale (ASES) adapted for the Ghanaian context. ASES construct validity was assessed with a sample of 4,289 Ghanaian junior high‐school students and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Invariance testing assessed the scale's measurement equivalence by gender and temporal stability of gender equivalence. The ASES is a valid, reliable one‐dimensional scale for assessing young Ghanaians’ perceptions of their academic capabilities, and it works equally well across genders. As adapted, ASES is a valid scale with utility for researchers examining predictors and effects of academic self‐efficacy. The ASES has important implications for decisions regarding investment in programs aimed at improving academic self‐efficacy of youth, both in sub‐Saharan Africa and the increasingly diverse American public schools.     

Rapid mask prototyping for microfluidics

With the rise of microfluidics for the past decade, there has come an ever more pressing need for a low-cost and rapid prototyping technology, especially for research and education purposes. In this article, we report a rapid prototyping process of chromed masks for various microfluidic applications. The process takes place out of a clean room, uses a commercially available video-projector, and can be completed in less than half an hour. We quantify the ranges of fields of view and of resolutions accessible through this video-projection system and report the fabrication of critical microfluidic components (junctions, straight channels, and curved channels). To exemplify the process, three common devices are produced using this method: a droplet generation device, a gradient generation device, and a neuro-engineering oriented device. The neuro-engineering oriented device is a compartmentalized microfluidic chip, and therefore, required the production and the precise alignment of two different masks.