Strategies and effectiveness of teaching universal design in a cross-faculty setting

Universal design of built environments is an area of professional interest for both architects and occupational therapists, yet is not always specifically included in undergraduate curricula. This paper reports on the student experience of introducing universal design education into architecture and occupational therapy curricula. Online and face-to-face teaching methods were employed, including virtual and real-life simulation activities designed to provide students with a personal experience of impairment. Virtual simulation activities used the medium of Second Life?. Results showed improvement in self-reported learning outcomes related to universal design and, overall, students found the learning activities and resources useful. Real-life simulations were reported to be more useful than virtual simulations. Project outcomes support the introduction of universal design education into architecture and occupational therapy curricula, and offer insight into student perceptions and future directions for related teaching and learning resources.     

Creating high challenge/high support academic environments through constructive alignment: student outcomes

Higher education needs to provide challenging yet supportive learning environments catering for students with diverse academic needs. There is also an emphasis on using student-driven outcome measures to determine teaching effectiveness. How can these measures be used to reflect upon and evaluate teaching initiatives? Using an undergraduate occupational therapy programme as the site for exploration, this article reports on an application of constructive alignment principles and describes how available empirical data were used to explore student outcomes. A comparison was made between student evaluations and academic grades prior to, and after the implementation of the initiative. Results provide evidence of improvement in student satisfaction and academic grades as a result of implementing constructive alignment. Whilst it is acknowledged that changes in academic grades and student evaluations can be attributed to a number of factors, findings of this study support a view that constructive alignment facilitates students' learning and experiences.     

The expression of emotion in response to bullying

Abstract

Recent literature on bullying suggests that victims of KEYW ORDS bullying are likely to have certain emotional reactions that contribute anti-bullying to the problem. This is not to say that victims in any way deserve the intervention; treatment that they get from more aggressive peers, but rather to bullying; propose that they themselves can be empowered to change the situ-bystanders; ation. The purpose of the present review is to examine the proposal emotional that the ways in which victims express their emotions during a bullying expression episode can play a crucial role in the responses of peers. There are implications for both researchers and practitioners to develop new insights that may help vulnerable children and adolescents.     

Evaluation of a randomized intervention to delay sexual initiation among fifth-graders followed through the sixth grade

US adolescents initiate sex at increasingly younger ages, yet few pregnancy prevention interventions for children as young as 10–12 years old have been evaluated. Sixteen Washington, DC schools were randomly assigned to intervention versus control conditions. Beginning in 2001/02 with fifth-grade students and continuing during the sixth grade, students completed pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys each school year. Each year, the intervention included 10–13 classroom sessions related to delaying sexual initiation. Linear hierarchical models compared outcome changes between intervention and control groups by gender over time. Results show the intervention significantly decreased a rise over time in the anticipation of having sex in the next 12 months among intervention boys versus control boys, but it had no other outcome effects. Among girls, the intervention had no significant outcome effects. One exception is that for both genders, compared with control students, intervention students increased their pubertal knowledge. In conclusion, a school-based curriculum to delay sexual involvement among fifth-grade and sixth-grade high-risk youths had limited impact. Additional research is necessary to outline effective interventions, and more intensive, comprehensive interventions may be required to counteract adverse circumstances in students' lives and pervasive influences toward early sex.

ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00341471     

Outcomes Assessment and Legal Research Pedagogy

This article explores application of a taxonomic approach in legal research pedagogy to outcomes assessment based on Prof. Paul Callister's adaptation of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives which integrates instructional design and learning activities compatible with formative assessment during the learning process and summative assessment at its conclusion. It reviews the development of outcomes assessment initiatives by legal educators and the development of outcomes assessment standards by the American Bar Association for the accreditation of law schools.     

Perspectives on Sentiment Analysis

One of the consequences of the widespread use of social media is the equally widespread availability of all sorts of once intimate and private stuff: textual, visual, and affective. From this, a new form of labor arises: the mining of social media data. One type of social media data mining is sentiment analysis, the application of a range of technologies to determine sentiments expressed within social media about particular topics. This article maps out a range of emerging perspectives on sentiment analysis and argues that these sometimes-competing views need to be brought together, so that analyses of new socio-technical phenomena like sentiment analysis can be rich and rounded.     

From talking to doing: Digital preservation at the British library

What are the core competencies that a national library needs to address the preservation of digital material? What skills are needed, by whom, when, to do what? Are the skills available externally, or is it better to develop people within the library? How are preservation philosophies and IT philosophies attuned? How is the preservation of digital material managed in a matrical and distributed way within a large organisation?     

Scaffolding cognitive and metacognitive strategy instruction in regular class lessons

The quality of teachers’ knowledge about how people learn influences students’ learning outcomes. Similarly, the quality of students’ knowledge about how they learn influences their engagement in self-regulated learning and consequently, their learning achievement. There is a gap between research findings that support these two premises and teaching–learning practices in classrooms. In this paper we describe attempts to reduce this gap. In Study 1 we surveyed early adolescent students’ cognitive and metacognitive strategy use and demonstrated that students’ cognitive and metacognitive strategy knowledge has substantial room for improvement. In Studies 2 and 3 we collaborated with teachers to embed explicit cognitive and metacognitive strategy instruction, using learning protocols, into regular class lessons. Studies 2 and 3 showed that the learning protocols slipped readily into teachers’ typical lesson designs, scaffolded teachers’ delivery of strategy instruction, and scaffolded some students’ acquisition of strategy knowledge, although progress was sometimes slow. Recommendations are presented for supporting teachers and students to engage with cognitive and metacognitive strategy instruction.     

Regional Queensland parents’ views of science education: some unexpected perceptions

Low post-compulsory science enrolments for secondary students have been a growing concern across the Western world. Research has examined factors relating to science curricula and students’ attitudes about science, but parental views of science education remain largely unexplored in Australia. Because parents have a strong role in shaping their children’s subject selection and career choices, in this pilot study we sought to explore parental attitudes about science education. Results from focus interviews and a survey of 132 Indigenous and non-Indigenous parents demonstrated, for the first time, that regional parents believe the study of society and the environment (SOSE) is a better preparation than science for their children’s understanding of socio-scientific issues. Most parents were unclear as to the nature of scientific literacy, believing science as it is currently taught in primary schools, not to be relevant to their children’s needs. Structural equation modelling using the survey data confirmed prior researchers’ claims and extended ideas about the likely interplay of parental attitudes and beliefs influencing their support of science study for their children. The results highlight an urgent need to explore such parental views across Australia.