Drawing in Perspective: Scottish Art and Design Teachers Discuss Drawing

What are the main purposes of drawing in the secondary art and design curriculum? What are Scottish art teachers' views on the role and function of drawing? How is drawing taught in Scottish schools? These three broad questions formed the basis of the research reported in this article. The small‐scale study, carried out between June 2002 and June 2004 will, the authors hope, be of interest to art educators seeking to explore the teaching of drawing as a key component of art and design education. In this article, we report on the background to the study, the place of drawing in Scottish art education, the methodology used, discuss some of the respondents' comments and conclude with some reflections and thoughts for future study.     

An analysis of four ways of assessing student beliefs about sts topics

The study investigated the degree of ambiguity harbored by four different response modes used to monitor student beliefs about science-technology-society topics: Likert-type, written paragraph, semistrue tured interview, and empirically developed multiple choice. The study also explored the sources of those beliefs. Grade-12 students in a Canadian urban setting responded, in each of the four modes, to statements from Views on Science-Technology-Society. It was discovered that TV had far more influence on what students believed about science and its social, technological context than did numerous science courses. The challenge to science educators is to use the media effectively in combating naive views about science. Regarding ambiguity in student assessment, the Likert-type responses were the most inaccurate, offering only a guess at student beliefs. Such guesswork calls into question the use of Likert-type standardized tests that claim to assess student views about science. Student paragraph responses contained significant ambiguities in about 50% of the cases. The empirically developed multiple choices, however, reduced the ambiguity to the 20% level. Predictably, the semistructured interview was the least ambiguous of all four response modes, but it required the most time to administer. These findings encourage researchers to develop instruments grounded in the empirical data of student viewpoints, rather than relying solely on instruments structured by the philosophical stances of science educators.     

Decision-making theories as tools for interpreting student behavior during a scientific inquiry simulation

The study investigated the predictive ability of two sociological theories of group decision making, the social decision scheme (SDS) and the valence distribution (DV) model. The theories were applied to a normal classroom setting of grade-9 and -10 students (N = 159) involved in a scientific inquiry—a simulation of scientific decision making. In their attempt to resolve conceptual conflicts concerning a pendulum's period, the students worked towards a consensus. It was discovered that student beliefs at the end of the simulation deviated from this group consensus. Neither the SDS or the DV theories could account for this result, except in one extreme case. The psychological state of the decision makers (vigilant, hypervigilant, etc.) was mildly associated with this deviation. The predictive function of the SDS and DV models was apparently severely hampered by the natural complexities common to classroom interactions. However, the study did illuminate factors that likely affect conceptual change in the context of classroom group decision making; and the study discovered strategies which students invented in order to maintain their alternative conceptions of motion related to the pendulum, in the face of conflicting evidence. These results are discussed in terms of the students' participation in the scientific inquiry.     

Democracy or Republic: Answering a Frequent Reference Question

This article frames the issues that the writers of the U.S. Constitution left as one of their writing legacies. The writers settled on the idea of founding a republic rather than a monarchy or democracy because they believed it the most stable form of government available to them. Their debate over “republic or democracy” found its way quickly into political discourse, with theoreticians like Will Butts and Eugene Volokh offering different views about which terms worked best to describe some of the political disagreements of modern times. This essay is best read in association with the short article on civic education by Reneé Critcher Lyons, which follows this article.     

High intensity and reduced volume training attenuates stress and recovery levels in elite swimmers

This study investigated the effect of increased high-intensity interval training (HIT) at the expense of total training volume on the stress and recovery levels of elite swimmers. Forty-one elite swimmers participated in the study and were randomly assigned to either a HIT or a control group (CON). Eleven swimmers did not complete the questionnaires. For 12 weeks both groups trained ~12 h per week. The amount of HIT was ~5 h vs. 1 h, and total distance was ~17 km vs. ~35 km per week for HIT and CON, respectively. HIT was performed as 6–10 × 10–30 s maximal effort interspersed by 2–4 min of rest. The Recovery Stress Questionnaire – Sport was used to measure the swimmers’ stress and recovery levels. After the 12 week intervention, the general stress level was 16.6% (2.6–30.7%; mean and 95% CI) lower and the general recovery level was 6.5% (0.7–12.4%) higher in HIT compared to the CON, after adjusting for baseline values. No significant effects could be observed in sports-specific stress or sports-specific recovery. The results indicate that increasing training intensity and reducing training volume for 12 weeks can reduce general stress and increase general recovery levels in competitive swimmers.     

Race in biology and anthropology: A study of college texts and professors

Information about social issues is underemphasized in college science education. This article takes the race concept as an example of this neglect. We review the history of the race concept and report the current status of the concept in textbooks and among professors. Responses to surveys of faculty at Ph.D.-granting departments indicate that 67% of biologists accept the concept of biological races in the species Homo sapiens, while only 50% of physical anthropologists do so. Content analysis of college textbooks indicates a significant degree of change over time (1936–1984) in physical anthropology but a lesser degree in biology. We suggest several reasons for the dissimilarity in the two disciplines. We propose continued use of the concept for some infrahuman species, while abandoning its application to Homo sapiens. For those biologists and anthropologists who continue to use the concept, scientific accuracy can be achieved by the presentation in lecture and text of the following ideas: first, consensus among scientists on the race concept's utility and accuracy does not exist; second, there is more variation within than between so-called races; third, discordant gradations due to natural selection, drift, and interbreeding make consistent racial boundary lines impossible to identify; fourth, past use of the race concept has had harmful consequences; fifth, the most precise study of human hereditary variation maps one trait at a time; and sixth, racial labels are misleading, especially as most populations have a cultural designation.     

Traditional Governance Structures – Current Policy Pressures: The Academic Senate and Canadian Universities

The objective of this paper isto identify current policy pressures inCanadian higher education and explore theirimplications for academic decision-makingbodies based on data we obtained in ournational study on university senates. Wedescribe two inter-related sets of publicpolicy pressures that have emerged in recentyears in Canada including on-going financialrestraint and a renewed interest in universityresearch. We conclude by reviewing a number ofimportant implications for Canadian universitygovernance in the context of contemporarypolicy pressures.