A Critical Examination of the Assessment Analysis Capabilities of OCLC ACAS

Over 500 libraries have employed OCLC's iCAS and its successor Automated Collection Assessment and Analysis Services (ACAS) as bibliometric tools to evaluate monograph collections. This examination of ACAS reveals both its methodological limitations and its feasibility as an indicator of collecting patterns. The results can be used to maximize the assessment capabilities of ACAS.     

Examining Spontaneous Perspective Taking and Fluid Self-to-Data Relationships in Informal Open-Ended Data Exploration

Engaging learners with complex unfamiliar datasets is a known challenge in Data Science education. One promising phenomenon investigated in related work is perspective-taking. A first-person “actor” perspective can help facilitate group and individual sensemaking by mediating observations and actions taken by learners. Here we investigate how museum visitors made use of an actor perspective when exploring an open-ended, interactive data map museum exhibit. We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative empirical methods to explore how actor perspective-taking (APT) may mediate joint sensemaking around data visualizations. By applying interpretive coding to 54 conversations wherein APT naturalistically emerged, we identify 3 distinct self-to-data relationships constructed via APT: role-play, projection, and orientation. A further analysis explores how APT was embedded in joint sensemaking of the visualized data. Twelve APT-mediated sensemaking processes are identified; two (extrapolating and noticing absence) were used in conjunction with multiple APT self-to-data relationships, while the remaining ten (e.g., enacting, spatially characterizing, generalizing) were exclusively used with specific self-to-data APT relationships. We use these empirical findings to generate hypotheses about how APT and associated sensemaking processes may support Data Science learning goals.     

Quetelet and Parachuting Cats: Data Lessons for Libraries

As champions of information literacy, libraries and information professionals encourage users to assess the accuracy, trustworthiness, and relevance of information. The rationale behind current efforts to demonstrate library value based on empirical evidence is consistent with this professional stance. Yet, national library advocacy and research efforts routinely promote inaccurate, insubstantial, or irrelevant data to support claims made on behalf of libraries. This practice works at cross-purposes with the aim of making as strong a case about library effectiveness as possible. When we ignore the basic requirements for gathering sound evidence, the quality of our advocacy arguments suffer. This article analyzes two advocacy efforts that have been undermined by inattention to the rules of empirical evidence.     

A Rationale for Public Library Civics Instruction

Statistics bear out the dire need for civic education and engagement within our nation’s libraries, those free and “equalizing” institutions that traditionally afforded opportunities assisting in the development of civically astute individuals. Per our founding principles, libraries and librarians remain responsible for instituting programming that assists in the development of capable citizens who actively participate in political life, hence ensuring the perpetuation and positive evolvement of our governmental system and its resulting law. Public and school libraries must return to a targeted emphasis on the provision of services that develop critical thinking opportunities steeped in civic intent and purpose. Examples include civic-oriented instruction, debate, communication, service and public policy facilitation, and forum building.     

Improving assessment tasks through addressing our unconscious limits to change

Despite widespread recognition of the need to improve assessment in higher education, assessment tasks in individual courses are too often dominated by conventional methods. While changing assessment depends on many factors, improvements to assessment ultimately depend on the decisions and actions of individual educators. This paper considers research within the ‘heuristics and biases’ tradition in the field of decision-making and judgement which has identified unconscious factors with the potential to limit capacity for such change. The paper focuses on issues that may compromise the process of improving assessment by supporting a reluctance to change existing tasks, by limiting the time allocated to develop alternative assessment tasks, by underestimating the degree of change needed or by an unwarranted overconfidence in assessment design decisions. The paper proposes countering these unconscious limitations to change by requiring justification for changing, or not changing, assessment tasks, and by informal and formal peer review of assessment task design. Finally, an agenda for research on heuristics and biases in assessment design is suggested in order to establish their presence and help counter their influence.     

The Keys to STEM: Australian Year 7 Students’ Attitudes and Intentions Towards Science,Mathematics and Technology Courses

Research in Science Education - Educational researchers have long noted the apparent link between positive student attitudes and a student’s desire to continue their study of particular...     

Social reinstatement and open-field testing in chickens

Based on a model which holds that open-field behavior represents a combination of predator evasion tactics and attempts to reinstate contact with conspecifics, five experiments were conducted with chickens to assess the effects on them of social separation in response to being placed in a novel enclosure. As a means of independently demonstrating reinstatement tendencies, it was shown that birds would run faster down a straight alley if the goalbox contained one or more conspecifics than if it was empty or contained a guinea pig. For birds tested in pairs, the effects were different, depending on whether they had been reared in pairs or in larger groups. On the other hand, although chicks froze and remained silent longer in pairs, they seemed to be relatively insensitive to whether the pair member was a cagemate or a stranger. Finally, as predicted, reinstatement tendencies diminished and predator evasion tactics predominated with increasing age.