Bridging Courses in Chemistry and Physics for Engineering Students

Throughout the 1980s there has been a remarkable rise in the retention rate of Australian students in secondary education. Although the absolute numbers of students undertaking the traditional upper secondary school preparatory subjects for Engineering courses has been increasing, their proportion as a percentage of the whole Year 12 group has simultaneously been decreasing.

In the face of this situation, the Faculty of Engineering at Monash decided in 1989 to ask the Faculty of Education to offer special bridging courses in chemistry and physics to students who had the appropriate high entry scores, but who had not studied either one or the other of these subjects during their Year 12 program.

After an initial period of data collection involving researching the chemistry and physics courses, two intensive special bridging courses to be taken over one semester were designed to meet the needs of these students. The first four years of the program have produced very encouraging results. The paper describes the rationale behind the design of these courses and the range of teaching and learning strategies that have been employed. It includes a discussion of some of the conditions that are believed to be necessary to ensure the success of such a bold educational experiment.     

Novice and experienced instructional software developers: effects on materials created with instructional software templates

The development of instructional software is a complex process, posing high demands to the technical and didactical expertise of developers. Domain specialists rather than professional developers are often responsible for it, but authoring tools with pre-structured templates claim to compensate for this limited experience. This study compares instructional software products made by developers with low production experience (n = 6) and high production experience (n = 8), working with a template-based authoring tool. It is hypothesized that those with high production experience will be more productive and create software with a higher didactical quality than those with low production experience, whereas no differences with regard to technical and authoring quality are expected. The results show that the didactical quality was unsatisfactory and did not differ between groups. Nevertheless the templates compensated for differences in experience because the technical and authoring quality was equal for both groups, indicating that templates enable domain specialists to participate successfully in the production process.     

Gender Gaps in Achievement and Participation in Multiple Introductory Biology Classrooms

Although gender gaps have been a major concern in male-dominated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines such as physics and engineering, the numerical dominance of female students in biology has supported the assumption that gender disparities do not exist at the undergraduate level in life sciences. Using data from 23 large introductory biology classes for majors, we examine two measures of gender disparity in biology: academic achievement and participation in whole-class discussions. We found that females consistently underperform on exams compared with males with similar overall college grade point averages. In addition, although females on average represent 60% of the students in these courses, their voices make up less than 40% of those heard responding to instructor-posed questions to the class, one of the most common ways of engaging students in large lectures. Based on these data, we propose that, despite numerical dominance of females, gender disparities remain an issue in introductory biology classrooms. For student retention and achievement in biology to be truly merit based, we need to develop strategies to equalize the opportunities for students of different genders to practice the skills they need to excel.     

Celebrating the Past,Creating the Future: 50 Years of Community College Research

The Council for the Study of Community Colleges (CSCC) celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008. This article summarizes the establishment of the Council and sets it in the context of the development of the community college movement. Highlights of research conducted by CSCC members to address contemporary issues facing community colleges are described. A summary of insights offered by members during a 2008 plenary session, research presented at the 50th annual conference, and key community college leaders are described in the context of the historical evolution of community college research and future directions.     

Mentoring as a learning tool: enhancing the effectiveness of an undergraduate business mentoring program

Mentoring can be used as a pedagogical alternative both to extend and augment the educational experience of business students. This article addresses a gap in the literature regarding the use and effectiveness of mentoring in undergraduate business education by examining improvements to an existing mentoring program. After reviewing the mentoring literature and identifying four critical elements for program success (matching, preparation, interaction and outcome assessment), the researchers used a cohort design and developed a survey to assess baseline participant satisfaction with these elements. Interventions were developed to enhance the mentoring program, and a second cohort allowed the authors to assess the benefits of these interventions. With statistically significant improvements in two out of four program elements (and a third showing marginally significant differences), the results demonstrate that the authors’ approach to evaluating and enhancing mentoring program effectiveness is useful in business education.     

Unravelling Data Journalism

The centrality of data in modern society has prompted a need to examine the increasingly powerful role of data brokers and their efforts to quantify the world. Practices and methods such as surveillance, biometrics, automation, data creeping, or profiling consumer behaviour, all offer opportunities and challenges to news reporting. Nonetheless, as most professional journalists display a degree of hesitancy towards numbers and computational literacy, there are only limited means to investigate the power dynamics underpinning data. This article discusses the extent to which current data journalism practices in the United Kingdom employ databases and algorithms as a means of holding data organisations accountable. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with data journalists, data editors, and news managers working for British mainstream media, the study looks at how data journalism operates within the news cycle of professional newsrooms in the United Kingdom. Additionally, it examines the innovations data journalism brings to storytelling, newsgathering, and the dissemination of news.     

Pre-Hispanic Music Survivals from the Canary Islands

This article discusses the evidence, mainly ethno-historical, for music and dance in the Canary Islands prior to the incorporation of the archipelago in the Crown of Castile during the fifteenth century. The survival of essential elements of pre-Hispanic music and dance is noted in some present-day dance forms, as are related customs in some of the islands’ main festivals. The relationship between pre-Hispanic dance and the Renaissance and early modern European dance, in the Canaries, is described and identified as an area for future research.