Perceptions of Business Students' Feature Requirements in Educational Web Sites

There is paucity of original research that explains phenomena related to content organization and site design of educational Web sites. Educational Web sites are often used to provide Web‐based instruction, which itself is a relatively recent phenomenon for business schools, and additional research is needed in this area. Educational Web sites are designed with a different set of criteria as compared with other sites, such as those having an e‐commerce or marketing focus. More research is needed to build a theoretical foundation for feature requirements in educational Web sites. As in any new approach to teaching and learning, critical issues need to be examined before Web‐based instruction is fully integrated into teaching processes. When developing educational Web sites, features that support pedagogy should be given primary consideration. It is therefore important to identify key elements that will have maximum impact on learning. Using Q‐sort analysis (a type of Factor Analysis), this study investigated feature requirements of educational Web sites as perceived by business students. Based on the analysis of user requirements in relation to several variables that were identified from a review of literature, group characteristics emerged from students' responses. Similarities and differences between groups were investigated, and implications of these results for development of educational Web sites are presented in this study.     

Choices with clients with profound hearing impairments

Kurt L. Johnson, Ph.D., and E. Jane Burkhead, Ph.D., are Assistant Professors with the Program in Counseling Psychology and Human Systems, Department of Human Services and Studies, at the Florida State University. D. Anthony Clark, M.S. is a Doctoral Candidate at the Florida State University.     

Impact of Inservice Education in Elementary Science: Participants Revisited a Year Later

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Faculty perceptions of job rewards and instructional development activities

The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of faculty at a large urban university concerning: (a) personal and college rewards for various areas of job responsibilities, and (b) which programs and incentives to enhance teaching effectiveness would be most attractive to them. Faculty generally reported both teaching and scholarly activity to be personally rewarding, but perceived discrepancies between personal and college rewards for teaching, and between college rewards for teaching and scholarly activity. Although a wide range of instructional development programs and incentives was endorsed, the top rated options referred to institutional recognition of teaching excellence.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following persons with this project: Nellie Bess, Gilbert Braun, Donald Brewer, Eileen Duffy-Blair, Gary Duncan, Daniel Funk, James West, Cheryl White.     

Does Special Educator Effectiveness Vary Depending on the Observation Instrument Used?

In this study, we compared the results of 27 special education teachers’ evaluations using two different observation instruments, the Framework for Teaching (FFT), and the Explicit Instruction observation protocol of the Recognizing Effective Special Education Teachers (RESET) observation system. Results indicate differences in the rank‐ordering of teachers depending on which instrument was used. Overall scores on RESET were higher on average than those on FFT. Item‐level analyses showed that across 125 correlations, 73 were significant, low‐moderate, and 52 were nonsignificant. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Availability of pre-admission information to prospective graduate students in speech-language pathology

An extensive Internet search was conducted to obtain pre-admission information and acceptance statistics from 260 graduate programmes in speech-language pathology accredited by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in the United States. ASHA is the national professional, scientific and credentialing association for members and affiliates who are audiologists; speech-language pathologists; speech, language and hearing scientists; audiology and speech-language pathology support personnel and students. Data were collected for analysis from Internet websites of individual academic programmes and ASHA’s EdFind, an online directory for undergraduate and graduate programmes in communication sciences and disorders in the United States. Frequency counts were used to analyse the data. Since graduate programmes are not required by ASHA to report or publish entrance requirements, the information included on the individual websites and ASHA’s EdFind varies widely among the programmes with some information incomplete or not reported at all.