A look at superheroes: Some issues and guidelines

Most early childhood teachers are not alarmists about children and television. TV is a fact of life for American children and simply another aspect that teachers must deal with in the classroom.     

Child Care Selection Under Welfare Reform: How Mothers Balance Work Requirements and Parenting

This paper examines the reasoning and experiences of mothers in selecting child care while trying to meet welfare-to-work requirements. Three theoretical positions that have been used to look at child care selection -rational choice, structuralist, and cultural - are examined and critiqued in light of a structural developmental psychology perspective. The paper then reports on semi-structured, open-ended interviews with seven mothers from three different ethnic groups—African- American, Anglo, and Latina—who range in age from 21 to 42. Interviews covered a 15-month period of time following the mothers' enrollment in a welfare- to-work program. The major finding is that mothers have hierarchically ordered criteria for evaluating child care possibilities, and the preeminent criteria is that they trust the child care provider to keep their children safe and well cared for. Structural constraints on the mothers choices are also analyzed. The findings in this article suggest that policy makers should focus on issues of trust and legitimacy of child care providers, as well as on more traditional concerns of supply and educational quality.     

Getting to Evo-Devo: Concepts and Challenges for Students Learning Evolutionary Developmental Biology

To examine how well biology majors have achieved the necessary foundation in evolution, numerous studies have examined how students learn natural selection. However, no studies to date have examined how students learn developmental aspects of evolution (evo-devo). Although evo-devo plays an increasing role in undergraduate biology curricula, we find that instruction often addresses development cursorily, with most of the treatment embedded within instruction on evolution. Based on results of surveys and interviews with students, we suggest that teaching core concepts (CCs) within a framework that integrates supporting concepts (SCs) from both evolutionary and developmental biology can improve evo-devo instruction. We articulate CCs, SCs, and foundational concepts (FCs) that provide an integrative framework to help students master evo-devo concepts and to help educators address specific conceptual difficulties their students have with evo-devo. We then identify the difficulties that undergraduates have with these concepts. Most of these difficulties are of two types: those that are ubiquitous among students in all areas of biology and those that stem from an inadequate understanding of FCs from developmental, cell, and molecular biology.     

From mountaintop to corporate ladder – what new professionals really really want in a capstone experience!

Capstone subjects are increasingly used in Universities worldwide to complete the undergraduate program experience and to transition graduates into the workplace. As such, capstones fulfil a large role consolidating one experience and traversing the gap to another. Yet, little is known or understood about their design, their implementation or evaluation. In this study we investigate the final-year experience from the student's perspective. We surveyed graduates from five Business Schools in Australia to identify perceptions of their final-year experience. Findings indicate that the transition experience of the student to professional is unique. In their liminal or intermediate state between student and professional they recognise the value of process skills, in particular the development of generic business skills related to application and the importance of opportunities for experiencing the application of theory in practice. The findings add a new understanding to the current literature which has not previously acknowledged the insight of the transitioning professional.     

Modeling of Nonrecursive Structural Equation Models With Categorical Indicators

Nonrecursive structural equation models generally take the form of feedback loops, involving 2 latent variables that are connected by 2 unidirectional paths, 1 starting with each variable and terminating in the other variable. Nonrecursive models belong to a larger class of path models that require the use of instrumental variables (IVs) to achieve model identification. Prior research has focused on SEM parameter estimation with IVs when indicators were continuous and normally distributed. Much less is known about how estimators function in the presence of categorical indicators, which are commonly used in the social sciences, such as with cognitive and affective instruments. In this study, there was specific interest in comparing the 2-stage least squares (2SLS) estimator and its categorical variant to other recommended estimators. This study compares the performance of several estimation approaches for fitting structural equation models with categorical indicator variables when IVs are necessary to obtain proper model estimates. Across conditions, 1 extension of the nonlinear 2SLS (N2SLS) approach, the nonlinear 3-stage least squares (N3SLS), which accounts for correlated errors among regressors within each model (as does the N2SLS), as well as correlations of errors across models, which N2SLS does not, appears to work the best among methods compared.     

The Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale: Confirming the factor structure with beginning pre-service teachers

This study examined the factor structure of the Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001) using the scores of pre-service teachers at the beginning stage of teacher development to gather internal structure score validity evidence. Two plausible rival models derived from prior research were tested using CFA. Results showed good fit for both models; however, high inter-factor correlations indicate strong support for the unidimensional model. Findings suggest that pre-service teachers who lack pedagogical knowledge and teaching experience do not differentiate between the different aspects of teaching measured by the TSES. Questions for future research are raised.     

Diversity Education at a Predominately White Catholic College

This article discussed the successes that have occurred in a graduate and an undergraduate course in diversity education and English language acquisition at a small, predominantly white college. The activities and assignments that are discussed in this article have been refined by the four professors who teach the courses to enable candidates to examine their own biases and the power they have as teachers in a classroom. In addition, the assignments and activities educate and begin to provide candidates with the tools to address cultural capital and how to work with families and students who have different beliefs than themselves.     

Exploiting Manual Indexing to Improve Collection Selection and Retrieval Effectiveness

Vocabulary incompatibilities arise when the terms used to index a document collection are largely unknown, or at least not well-known to the users who eventually search the collection. No matter how comprehensive or well-structured the indexing vocabulary, it is of little use if it is not used effectively in query formulation. This paper demonstrates that techniques for mapping user queries into the controlled indexing vocabulary have the potential to radically improve document retrieval performance. We also show how the use of controlled indexing vocabulary can be employed to achieve performance gains for collection selection. Finally, we demonstrate the potential benefit of combining these two techniques in an interactive retrieval environment. Given a user query, our evaluation approach simulates the human user's choice of terms for query augmentation given a list of controlled vocabulary terms suggested by a system. This strategy lets us evaluate interactive strategies without the need for human subjects.