Adopting an active learning approach to teaching in a research-intensive higher education context transformed staff teaching attitudes and behaviours

The conventional lecture has significant limitations in the higher education context, often leading to a passive learning experience for students. This paper reports a process of transforming teaching and learning with active learning strategies in a research-intensive educational context across a faculty of 45 academic staff and more than 1000 students. A phased approach was used, involving nine staff in a pilot phase during which a common vision and principles were developed. In short, our approach was to mandate a move away from didactic lectures to classes that involved students interacting with content, with each other and with instructors in order to attain domain-specific learning outcomes and generic skills. After refinement, an implementation phase commenced within all first-year subjects, involving 12 staff including three from the pilot group. The staff use of active learning methods in classes increased by sixfold and sevenfold in the pilot and implementation phases, respectively. An analysis of implementation phase exam questions indicated that staff increased their use of questions addressing higher order cognitive skills by 51%. Results of a staff survey indicated that this change in practice was caused by the involvement of staff in the active learning approach. Fifty-six percent of staff respondents indicated that they had maintained constructive alignment as they introduced active learning. After the pilot, only three out of nine staff agreed that they understood what makes for an effective active learning exercise. This rose to seven out of nine staff at the completion of the implementation phase. The development of a common approach with explicit vision and principles and the evaluation and refinement of active learning were effective elements of our transformational change management strategy. Future efforts will focus on ensuring that all staff have the time, skills and pedagogical understanding required to embed constructively aligned active learning within the approach.     

Book Review of Experiential Activities for Teaching Career Counseling Classes and for Facilitating Career Groups

Experiential Activities for Teaching Career Counseling Classes and for Facilitating Career Groups by Mark Pope & Carole W. Minor (Eds.).     

Identifying Best Practice Principles in Working with the Inupiat Eskimo: Building Trust and Beyond

The authors present an examination of established models on trust building issues in multicultural counseling and apply them with the Inupiat Eskimo population. Drawing on the cultural strengths of the Inupiat communities, counselors traverse challenging cultural barriers and develop positive working relationships with families and individual clients within the communities of Alaska. Cultural competence is discussed and guidelines for multicultural counseling are provided. The principles outlined in this paper, whilst developed in this instance in a particular location and cultural context, have relevance for other situations where counseling involving a minority is concerned. The overriding element is working at and maintaining trust, with this being the essential foundation upon which other counseling strategies are implemented.     

Writing4practice in engineering courses: Implementation and assessment approaches

In this article, we analyze a two‐semester effort to integrate writing instruction into a multi‐disciplinary sophomore engineering design course in Northern Arizona University's College of Engineering and Technology. Specifically, we describe the programmatic implementation and assessment approach to evaluate whether student writing improved over the course of the semester. After discussing the reasons for taking a writing‐intensive approach to engineering, we analyze the results of a pre‐and post‐test administered over the span of an academic semester. Although the outcome of our assessment did not show significant improvement, we argue that writing instruction is important for increasing students’ overall learning skills. We conclude by pointing out several benefits and disadvantages of trying to assess writing improvement over two one‐semester periods.     

Telecommunications and Cable

Ken Marsh's Independent Video (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1974—$7.95, paper)

Richard H. Davis and Allen E. Edwards' Television: A Therapeutic Tool for the Aged (Publication and Media Projects, Andrus Gerontology Center, University Park, Los Angeles, Calif. 90007—$2.25, paper)

Irving W. Larson (ed.) EIA Electronics Multimedia Handbook (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1975—price not known, paper)

Kendall Webster Sessions' 2nd Class FCC Encyclopedia (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB Books, 1975—$10.95/7.95)

Mary Louise Hollowell (ed.) Cable Handbook: 1975-1976—A Guide to Cable and New Communications Technologies (Communications Press, 1346 Connecticutt Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036—$7.35, including postage, paper)

Gilbert Gillespie's Public Access Cable Television in the United States and Canada (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1975—price not given, but likely around $12.00 or so)     

Tensions in Community Health Improvement Initiatives: Communication and Collaboration in a Managed Care Environment

Between the years 1993 and 2000, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation sponsored the Comprehensive Community Health Models (CCHMs) Initiative in three Michigan counties. CCHMs was comprised of three closely related community initiatives carried out in the midst of a failed national health care reform effort and the continued penetration of managed care arrangements into many health care systems. This experimental initiative set out to test the hypothesis that traditional healthcare system animosities and exclusionary practices could be overcome by stakeholder participation in an ongoing, structured, collaborative dialogue about improving access to health services. In the process of collecting data through surveys, interviews, content analysis, and observation, we were struck by the occurrence of several overarching tensions that we perceive to exist in our data. The present article elucidates five such tensions and suggests how third parties such as communication researchers, evaluators, and practitioners can facilitate community health improvement initiatives and better their own data interpretation by acknowledging and understanding these tensions.     

The meaning of “power”

This investigation attempted to (a) determine how individuals in positions of status and authority respond to the concept of power, and (b) develop an instrument that could be used to measure an individual's power orientation. The inquiry represented a preliminary step toward explorations of the theoretical proposition that there is a relationship between power orientation and overt communication behavior. The responses of over 500 individuals in supervisory positions in business, industry, government, and law enforcement to items reflecting thirty‐seven possible “meanings” of power were factor analyzed. The following six power orientations explain much of the variance in the way individuals are oriented toward the concept of powers (a) power as good; (b) power as resource dependency; (c) pofer as instinctive drive; (d) power as political; (e) power as charisma; and (f) power as control and autonomy. A forty‐item Power Orientation Scale was developed to measure these orientations.