Specialization and Fragmentation Among Faculty as Endemic Features of Academic Life

Proposals promising integration have been offered as solutions to problems of faculty specialization and fragmentation. Despite their merits, these proposals may be premature or even misguided. A prior need is to analyze the roots and processes of specialization and fragmentation. One kind of analysis begins with the relationship among professionalization, problem setting, and paradigmatic communities. In addition to emphasizing the import of institutional and societal contexts, this analytical frame of reference calls attention to issues of power, authority, resources, and prestige in higher education. Specialization and fragmentation are endemic in higher education, and proposals aimed at integration must accommodate both.     

Toward a Socioecological Conception of Health

Several academic fields in colleges and universities have claimed jurisdiction over research and practice regarding human health or specialized facets of it. Occasionally cooperating, but more frequently competing among themselves, these fields have been driven by underlying assumptions about a free-market, economic approach to health delivery systems and a still-dominant idea that health is merely a personal quality or state of being. With societal interest in health at an unprecedented high level, it is appropriate to examine critically this dominant conception of health and the market-oriented, competitive relationship that exists among these academic fields. The ensuing analysis begins with such a critique and then presents an alternative conception of health. This socioecological conception retains an emphasis upon individuals but expands the definition of health to include societal and environmental phenomena. Such a broad conception of health appears timely, and some of its implications are identified to support this observation.     

Capacity-Related Innovations Resulting From the Implementation of a Community Collaboration Model for School Improvement

A new genus of district and school improvement models entails partnerships with other organizations and new working relationships with families, community leaders, and youths. The Ohio Community Collaboration Model for School Improvement (OCCMSI) is one such model. It enables partners to leverage family and community resources for learning, healthy development, and overall success in school. This study presents qualitative research findings about the key capacities developed by 6 schools and 6 districts piloting the OCCMSI. Process and product innovations, as well as facilitators and barriers, were tracked as these sites progressed with their implementation efforts. Implications are drawn in relation to how these new and expanded capacities might be prioritized by district and school leaders, consultants, and other professionals involved in partnership-centered models of school improvement.     

Rewarding academics: Experiences of the Tenure Track System in Pakistan

Pakistan introduced the Tenure Track System (TTS) as a new performance-based reform in public universities in 2005. The purpose of this study is to understand the experiences of higher education authorities, university leaders and tenure-track faculty about the implementation of this reform. This is a qualitative interpretive study and utilised a nested case study design, focusing on two cases—Science Faculty and Social Sciences and Humanities Faculty in a large provincial university. It utilises three perspectives taken from organisation theory—instrumental, cultural and myth perspectives. The main results show instrumental problems of hierarchical authority and horizontal coordination, lack of expertise to implement, cultural compatibility problems through active resistance from some groups and active use of symbols to modify the impression of a challenging reform implementations. Summing up, this is a Western-inspired reform that meet challenging conditions in Pakistan, making is rather less successful.     

Racial hierarchy and masculine space: Participatory in/equity in computational physics classrooms

ABSTRACT

Background and Context

Computing is being integrated into a range of STEM disciplines. Still, computing remains inaccessible to many minoritized groups, especially girls and certain people of color. In this mixed methods study, we investigated racial and gendered patterns of equity and inequity in high school physics classrooms incorporating computational modeling, with an emphasis on group work.     

Read Two Impress and the Neurological Impress Method: Effects on elementary students’ reading fluency,comprehension, and attitude

This seven-week study examined the effects of the Neurological Impress Method and Read Two Impress on reading comprehension, fluency, and students’ attitude toward reading. The 57 first-, second-, and third-grade students were randomly assigned to three conditions and were pre- and posttested on eight reading measures. Several 3 × 2 factorial analyses of variance revealed significant interaction effects on retell, comprehension questions, and the multidimensional fluency scale as well as time effects on words read correctly per minute and word recognition accuracy. Moreover, a comparison of mean difference effect sizes favored the treatment groups on all reading fluency and comprehension measures. The interventions, however, had little effect on students’ attitude toward reading. Practical implications and future research directions are also discussed.     

The role of theory in instructional design: Some views of an ID practitioner

This article describes how an experienced instructional designer thinks about and uses learning theories to inform instructional design decisions. It uses a vision metaphor to provide a simple heuristic framework for identifying the nature of instructional problems and relating different types of problems to useful theoretical perspectives, methods of instructional analysis, and assessment strategies. Finally, it provides a synopsis of major learning theory perspectives and situations that could be addressed by applying models and strategies representing the different theoretical perspectives.