A Bibliography of Littleton’s Tenures as an Archetype for the Study of Early English Legal Printing

For hundreds of years, bibliographies have been invaluable tools for researchers, collectors, and institutions, to provide contextual understanding as well as adding depth to collections. In this piece, the author uses his updated bibliography of the first 200 years of Littleton's Tenures to examine many aspects of early English legal printing. These include the development and evolution of the content of early legal materials, as well economic and other factors driving the market for printed law books. Preceding the bibliography is a list of fundamental bibliographic terms concerning early printing, contextually applied to Littleton's Tenures.     

Financial Resources, Parent Psychological Functioning, Parent Co-Caregiving, and Early Adolescent Competence in Rural Two-Parent African-American Families

We proposed a family process model that links family financial resources to academic competence and socioemotional adjustment during early adolescence. The sample included 90 9–12-year-old African-American youths and their married parents who lived in the rural South. The theoretical constructs in the model were measured via a multimethod, multi-informant design. Rural African-American community members participated in the development of the self-report instruments and observational research methods. The results largely supported the hypotheses. Lack of family financial resources led to greater depression and less optimism in mothers and fathers, which in turn were linked with co-care giving support and conflict. The associations among the co-caregiving processes and youth academic and socioemotional competence were mediated by the development of youth self-regulation. Disruptions in parental co-caregiving interfered with the development of self-regulation. This interference negatively influenced youths' academic competence and socioemotional adjustment.     

A Longitudinal Hierarchical Linear Model for Estimating School Effects and Their Stability

This paper presents a general longitudinal model for estimating school effects and their stability. Previous research on the stability of school performance over successive years has produced inconsistent findings. We argue that the findings have been inconsistent for at least two reasons: researchers have estimated different types of school effects, and they have not distinguished between instability due to true changes in school performance and instability due to measurement and sampling error. We describe two different types of school effects, each relevant to a different policy audience, and we present a longitudinal model that is capable of separating true changes in school effects from sampling and measurement error. The model also provides a means for estimating the effects of school policies and practices while controlling statistically for the effects of factors exogenous to the schooling system. This paper provides an example of the approach based on data describing two cohorts of students from one Education Authority in Scotland. It concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the model and implications for those collecting indicators of school performance for planning and evaluation purposes.     

Assessing dialogic argumentation in online environments to relate structure,grounds, and conceptual quality

The national science standards, along with prominent researchers, call for increased focus on scientific argumentation in the classroom. Over the past decade, researchers have developed sophisticated online science learning environments to support these opportunities for scientific argumentation. Assessing the quality of dialogic argumentation, however, has proven challenging. Existing analytic frameworks assess dialogic argumentation in terms of the nature of students' discourse, formal argumentation structure, interactions, and epistemic forms of reasoning. Few frameworks, however, connect these assessments to conceptual quality. We present an analytic framework for assessing argumentation in online science learning environments that relates levels of opposition with discourse moves, use of grounds, and conceptual quality. We then apply the proposed framework to students' dialogic argumentation within a representative online science learning environment to investigate the framework's potential affordances as well as to assess issues of reliability and appropriateness. The results suggest that the framework offers significant affordances and that it also offers high interrater reliability for trained coders. The applicability of the framework for offline contexts and future extensions of the framework are discussed in light of these results. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 293–321, 2008     

Does ratemyprofessor.com really rate my professor?

This article explores the usefulness and validity of self‐selected online student ratings of faculty. These ratings appear to be increasing in importance, particularly as students utilize them as guides in their choice of instructors. Validity is investigated by analyzing the pattern of relationships of online ratings for 399 randomly selected faculty. Analysis suggests that online ratings in their current form may be useful, even though possible abuses could limit validity in specific instances.     

Virtual(ly) Athletes: Where eSports Fit Within the Definition of “Sport”

Electronic sports, cybersports, gaming, competitive computer gaming, and virtual sports are all synonyms for the term eSports. Regardless of the term used, eSports is now becoming more accepted as a sport and gamers are being identified as athletes within society today. eSports has even infiltrated higher education in the form of an intercollegiate athletic sport, as two university athletic departments have made eSports an official varsity sport where scholarships are provided to collegiate eSports athletes. Thus, the intertwining of eSports and university athletics brings into question whether eSports should be considered sport by broader society. This article provides a brief history of eSports, a further developed definition of eSports, and a comparison of eSports to traditional philosophical and sociological definitions of sport. The purpose of this article is to provoke thought on the academically accepted definitions of sport and debate whether eSports should be considered a sport. Attention will be given to the following components of sport: play, organization, competition, skill, physicality, broad following, and institutionalization.     

现代教育技术在数学教学中应用的思考

现代教育技术广泛的应用于数学教学中已经成为新世纪数学教育的标志之一。本文中我们将探究一些对把现代教育技术引入课程一些较重要的设想和反思,比如怎样将“高科技”转化为“高质量的教学,”如何实施高期望值的教学以取得良好的成绩等,并对如何将现代教育技术恰当地引入数学课程提出一些可行的建议。     

Individual Differences in Thinking: cognitive and neurophysiological perspectives

This paper explores the neglected area of categories of individual difference in human cerebral function. During thinking and decision making, it is hypothesised that different people process the same information in different ways, using different areas of the brain. Recent work suggests that individuals can be categorised into a small number of consistent groups of thinking, or cognitive, style. The different ways of processing reflect two basic dimensions of cognitive style. A simple computer‐presented method of determining cognitive style has been developed.

It is probable that these styles have an underlying cerebral basis. The styles are likely to be related to cerebral orientation. The specialisation of one cerebral hemisphere for verbal function and the other for visuo‐spatial has been long established. Hemispheric specialisation has been associated with the right hemisphere being the location of the visuo‐spatial and the left the verbal function, although evidence for this has been sometimes conflicting. This is not surprising when attention has not been paid to individual differences in cognitive style, as subjects of different styles will use different processes when doing the same cognitive task. Individual differences in orientation have not been clearly linked to differences in cognitive style.

It is proposed that studies could usefully explore the cerebral basis of individual differences in cognitive style, by measuring EEG asymmetries of individuals of specific cognitive styles, during the performance of a range of cognitive tasks. It is proposed that this would identify the location of certain brain functions associated with the different processing underlying the styles. A subsidiary intention is to assess the effectiveness of digital EEG monitoring as a research tool in this context.