Professional development for iPad integration in general education: Staying ahead of the curve

This faculty development case study focuses on a team of 16 General Education faculty at an urban women’s college during the initial 6 months of the college’s comprehensive implementation of an iPad teaching and learning environment. This article traces the effectiveness of an iPad professional development program through analyses of critical feedback, and makes recommendations for learner-centered faculty development for iPads in Higher Education. We present our conceptual framework, guiding principles and iPad professional development program. The effects of the program were measured using thematic and content analysis of post-session interviews, participant observation, one-to-one interviews and an online discussion forum. The predominant themes were anxiety, having individual needs considered, time considerations, and fundamental questions about expectations in the mobile learning environment. The key recommendation are to attend to collaborative planning, intervention, facilitating authentic professional learning communities and timing of faculty development that is intended to result in integration of new learning tools and environments.     

A Systems Approach to Understanding and Counseling College Student‐Athletes

Student‐athletes have unique challenges as they confront pressures to perform both athletically and academically. The authors present a systems approach that will enhance the conceptualization skills that counselors need to intervene more effectively with college student‐athletes as well as address counselors' own stereotypes and biases about student‐athletes.     

Effects of intensive reading intervention for eighth-grade students with persistently inadequate response to intervention

The authors report the effects of a yearlong, very small-group, intensive reading intervention for eighth-grade students with serious reading difficulties who had demonstrated low response to intervention (RTI) in both Grades 6 and 7. At the beginning of Grade 6, a cohort of students identified as having reading difficulties were randomized to treatment or comparison conditions. Treatment group students received researcher-provided reading intervention in Grade 6, which continued in Grade 7 for those with low response to intervention; comparison students received no researcher-provided intervention. Participants in the Grade 8 study were members of the original treatment (N = 28) and comparison (N = 13) conditions who had failed to pass a state-mandated reading comprehension test in both Grades 6 and 7. In Grade 8, treatment group students received a 50-minute, daily, individualized, intensive reading intervention in groups of two to four students per teacher. The results showed that students in the treatment condition demonstrated significantly higher scores than comparison students on standardized measures of comprehension (effect size = 1.20) and word identification (effect size = 0.49), although most continued to lack grade-level proficiency in reading despite 3 years of intervention. Findings from this study provide a rationale for intensive intervention for middle school students with severe reading difficulties.     

Language, cognitive flexibility, and explicit false belief understanding: longitudinal analysis in typical development and specific language impairment

The hypothesis that language plays a role in theory-of-mind (ToM) development is supported by a number of lines of evidence (e.g., H. Lohmann & M. Tomasello, 2003). The current study sought to further investigate the relations between maternal language input, memory for false sentential complements, cognitive flexibility, and the development of explicit false belief understanding in 91 English-speaking typically developing children (M age = 61.3 months) and 30 children with specific language impairment (M age = 63.0 months). Concurrent and longitudinal findings converge in supporting a model in which maternal language input predicts the child's memory for false complements, which predicts cognitive flexibility, which in turn predicts explicit false belief understanding.     

Motivating and improving attitudes to reading in the final years of primary schooling in five New Zealand schools

Teachers are influential in motivating and improving attitudes towards reading. This article reports on an investigation of eight teachers of 10‐ to 12‐year‐old students from five New Zealand schools and the strategies they used to improve attitudes to reading. Each school had been identified as implementing effective reading programmes by a panel of literacy experts and supported by standardised tests demonstrating overall improvements in reading achievement. A reading culture developed by using sophisticated picture books and novels for discussion and debate along with ready access to age‐related, high‐interest appropriate books in the classroom and school library. Teachers worked with children on a whole class, group and individually and demonstrated explicit teaching using texts that engage the reader. The research suggests that children need support by their teachers to negotiate them away from potential points of discouragement in learning to read. Also, teachers need to be aware that reading may not be considered ‘cool’ at this time of early adolescence and initiate strategies to make reading fun.     

The mass media of Latin America: Selected information sources

For the past three or jour years, the Department of Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky has been constructing an undergraduate curriculum unlike most others in the country. A key concept in that development has been a seemingly simple definition of terms—what it is the department should be concerned with—and from that, how best to approach the teaching function. That the starting point of defining terms is not so simple is shown here by Dr. James E. Fletcher, assistant professor of telecommunications at Kentucky. Fletcher earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah in 1910, taught there for a year, and then joined the faculty at Kentucky where he has since been active in the process he discusses.     

Self-efficacy as an evaluation measure for programs in support of online learning literacies for undergraduates

This study evaluated an intervention for building undergraduates' technological literacies for higher education in support of use of the learning management system and desktop applications. Self-efficacy scores between a control group and a treatment group were compared. Relationships between scores and demographic/experiential variables were also analyzed. The study failed to find (with limited strengths) significant differences between control and treatment. Differences between exempted and control students were found. Relationships between age, gender, and experience with online learning were rejected; however a relationship between experience with computers and scores was not rejected. For treatment learners, mastery experience and physical/emotional response to task performance were stronger self-efficacy sources than were verbal persuasion and vicarious experience. Results indicated that design might be improved by increasing sources of verbal persuasion and vicarious experience. The study also highlighted a need to monitor students' diverse backgrounds with technology.