Learning To Read Each Other: Black Female Graduate Students Share Their Experiences at a White Research I Institution

This paper uses Black Feminist Thought to explain the lived experiences of three Black female graduate students at a White Research I institution. Through mentoring from Black female professors, the students received instrumental and psychosocial support that helped them to navigate through their graduate level work. Common themes of identity, community service missions, and empowerment provides a thread that ties the student’s narratives together. We close by offering some suggestions for further research on the Black graduate experience and mentoring Black graduate students. Meca R. Williams, Denise N. Brewley, R. Judith Reed and Dorothy Y. White are affiliated with University of Georgia. Rachel T. Davis-Haley is affiliated with University of New Orleans.     

Prevalence of father-child rough-and-tumble play and physical aggression in preschool children

Three samples of francophone subjects from Quebec (Canada) are used to establish the prevalence of parent-child RTP according to different personal, social and family variables, and to verify if children who engage in more RTP with their father exhibit less physical aggression towards other children and are more competitive without resorting to aggression. Our results showed that 24 to 43% of fathers engaged in RTP with their children on a daily basis, and only 4 to 16% of fathers never do. Moreover, personal characteristics such as the age and sex of the participants seemed to have a greater influence on the frequency of parent-child RTP than variables related for example to work, socio-economic conditions, or the living environment. The hypothesis that children who engage in more RTP with their fathers display less physical aggression towards their peers is invalidated here. We have concluded that it is important that not only RTP frequency, but also and especially indicators of RTP quality be used. Future observational studies of father-child RTP are required in order to do so. Finally, certain preliminary results support the hypothesis that father-child RTP fosters the development of the competition skills in children without using aggression.     

Students' perceptions on the influence of institutional evaluation on universities

There are many studies about the experiences of higher education students, but few analyse their representations of the governance and the management of their institutions. Our study will describe, analyse and compare students' representations of institutional evaluation at three institutions in Portugal and Brazil. Our results, based on an open questionnaire which sought to collect students' views on institutional evaluation, show that students' views are neither homogeneous nor do they simply reproduce the dominant external perspectives on the subject. A significant amount of students thought that evaluation is a legitimate exercise, resulting from a political decision, which is useful to improve the quality of universities and the relationship between students and academic staff. Some students also recognize that evaluation will lead to institutional comparisons, functioning as a mechanism of control, regulation, monitoring, and possibly of standardization. It is also noted to be ‘an impossibility’, since it can never comprehend the existing diversity of institutional performance.     

Gardnerella vaginalis infection and sexual contact in female children

Gardnerella vaginalis (GV) infection has been reported as being acquired via sexual contact in adults and as an indicator of sexual contact in female children (DeJong, 1985). The purpose of this study was to determine if GV infection was more commonly found in 191 female children who gave a history of sexual contact and/or were infected with Neisseria gonorrhoeae (GC) or Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) (Group 1), compared with 144 female children evaluated for possible sexual abuse and found to have no such history or infection with GC or CT (Group 2), or 31 female children (friends of the authors) without such a history or GC or CT infection (Group 3). Vaginal GV was found in 5.3% of Group 1, 4.9% of Group 2 and 6.4% of Group 3 (p > .05). Also, vaginal GV infection was not related to the type of sexual contact or race, but did increase with age in white female children. Because vaginal GV infection is not more commonly found in children with a history of sexual contact than those without such a history, the finding of GV in a vaginal culture in an individual case would not be a reliable marker of sexual contact. Routine culturing for GV is not recommended as part of a sexual abuse workup.     

Assessing the unassessable: making learning visible in undergraduates’ experiences of scientific research

We suggest that academics involved in the provision of research experiences to undergraduate science students may benefit by reconceptualising these experiences as work-based learning. In particular, drawing on the widespread use of reflective practice in work-based learning allows for a more effective focus on process-related learning. We describe an empirical study involving the implementation of reflective blogs in which science students responded to prompt questions designed to focus their attention on how their project was progressing, the process of research and their own learning. The blogs reveal examples of students engaging in independent thinking, creative thinking and developing a sense of themselves as scientists, all qualities valued by supervisors. They also show how these combine as ‘wicked competences’ that allow students to address the complex problems and uncertainties of research. We identify characteristic patterns of reflection that indicate the exercise of such competences and suggest that these could be used as explicit evidence by academics making judgements for assessment purposes.