Measuring Quality: A Comparison of U.S. News Rankings and NSSE Benchmarks

College rankings and guidebooks have become big business. The prominent role played by rankings and guidebooks is problematic because the criteria used to evaluate institutions have little to do with the quality of education students receive. Designed as an alternative to college rankings, NSSE assesses student engagement in activities that contribute to learning and success during college. This study compared the NSSE scores for 14 AAU public research universities with their rankings by U.S. News and World Report.     

The effects of physical structure and semantic organization on the recall of prose

The effects of a prose passage's physical structure and semantic organization upon free recall performance was investigated. Passages, describing characteristics of fictitious countries, contained either five or nine paragraphs on attributes of the countries. Results showed that Mandler's in J. L. Cowan (Ed.), Studies in thought and language. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970] organizational limits could apply to prose as well as word lists and could be used to explain previous discrepant results in semantic organization research. Results showed differences in the distribution of materials interacting with type of semantic organization to produce differences in recall. Different learning strategies imposed by the passage's semantic organization were also found.     

Anticipatory contrast as a measure of time horizons in the rat: Some methodological determinants

In three experiments, the time horizon over which the rat evaluates alternative feeding sources was investigated. The time horizon was measured by the suppression of intake of one incentive (a 0.15% saccharin solution) when a preferred alternative incentive (a 32% sucrose solution) was available but delayed. In Experiment 1, we found a direct function between the amount of saccharin intake and the delay time before access to 32% sucrose. Compared with intake for a saccharin-only control, saccharin intake was suppressed before 4-min and 16-min sucrose delays, but not before a 32-min delay. Because previous work (Flaherty & Checke, 1982) had reported suppression before a delay of nearly 32 min, in the subsequent experiments we examined factors that might account for this difference. In Experiment 2, we found that saccharin intake was suppressed before a 32-min delay interval when saccharin and sucrose solutions were presented in a bright-novel test environment but not when the same solutions were presented in the home cage. In Experiment 3, we found that the time between testing and subsequent postsession feeding could also affect the suppression of saccharin intake. Saccharin intake was suppressed when access to 32% sucrose was delayed by 32 min and the test situation was followed by immediate postsession feeding, but not when postsession feeding was delayed by 90 min. These results thus extend estimates of the rat’s time horizon to at least 32 min, but indicate that the effective time horizon can vary, depending on the test situation.     

Auditory perceptual processing in reading disabled children

One hundred and three children attending Learning Assistance Centres due to reading difficulties and one hundred and three matched, average readers were administered a battery of auditory perceptual processing tasks. The battery was composed of auditory analysis and synthesis, auditory sequential memory, auditory discrimination, and phonemic segmentation tasks. A principal components analysis yielded four factors. These were determined to be advanced phonological awareness, sequential memory, discrimination, and simple phonological awareness. Discriminant analyses, using the factor scores, indicated that three of the four factors were able to discriminate between the able and disabled readers. Most notable among these was advanced phonological awareness. Auditory discrimination could not discriminate between the groups. The results suggest that there may not be one underlying phonological ability implicated in successful reading acquisition. Furthermore, it is clear that two levels of phonological awareness exist and that screening and diagnostic instruments should address both in order to have predictive validity.     

Putting the “Is for” Back into the Study of Cognition and Behavior: Commentary on “Unifying Themes for Educational Psychology”

Understanding human behavior situated in a classroom context has traditionally been the domain of educational psychology. This rich tradition continues today, but in a fragmented manner. This fragmentation is undoubtedly the result of a number of factors, but two contributing factors that come readily to mind are (a) the demise of grand theories and (b) the increase in multidisciplinary research efforts. In some respects, the former may be a function of the latter. Regardless, multidisciplinary efforts will continue to increase simply due to the complexity of the problems we are addressing. However, the major significance of the Dempster and Corkill paper is the call for unifying themes couched within a biological system that focuses on personal knowledge construction through the process of learning. In many respects this is a clarion call for a reconsideration of the theoretical roots of functionalism from which educational psychology sprang.     

The course as token: A construction of/by networks

In actor-network theory (ANT) the movement from the instability of science-in-the-making to the relative stability of ready-made-science is followed by tracing the path of a token or focal actor (either human or non-human) as it both constructs a network and is simultaneously transformed by the developing network. Within science education, a new course can be seen to be a token. It undergoes various transformations as it simultaneously changes those who encounter it (teachers, students, and interested actors beyond the school) and is changed by those same actors. This paper describes the way a new applied physics course introduced in British Columbia as part of a program in applied academics can be seen to construct different networks in different contexts and, in the process, to take on significantly different characteristics. Data are collected from interviews and observations in two different settings characterized in part by differences in the types of partnerships developed with industry, labour, and post-secondary groups. The success of the applied physics course in challenging traditional forms of school physics is seen to rely on the size and strength of the network in which it is imbedded.