Determining the conceptions of teaching science held by experienced high school science teachers

The article describes the process of analysis for determining a teacher's conception of teaching science using an available interview task. The analytical process provides a transparent link between teachers' spoken words and the different representations of their conceptions of teaching science. Representations of a teacher's conception of teaching science include a grid for analyzing different themes in a teacher's conception, a brief summary of the themes, and a longer written interpretive summary. Because these representations are based on the fundamental components of teaching science, they allow the uniqueness of both specific and structural aspects of teachers' views to emerge, and they facilitate comparisons between teachers. The analysis and its outcomes are exemplified using interviews with several experienced high school science teachers.     

The ABCs of private equity and venture capital data and information

ABSTRACT

In June 2017, the Business Reference & Services Section of the Reference & User Services Association organized and hosted an event known as the Publishers' Forum during the annual American Library Association Conference in Chicago, Illinois. The Publishers' Forum is a professional development event that brings together business librarians and publishers of business information to engage in a discussion about business information products. The theme of the 2017 Publishers' Forum was private equity and venture capital data and information, and three different publishers were invited to speak and showcase their information products. This article will provide an overview of the Publishers' Forum, discuss the selection of private equity and venture capital as the theme, and highlight the importance of private equity and venture capital to business librarianship. Finally, this article will include a discussion of each of the publishers who presented at the Publishers' Forum and the information products they showcased.     

Influences on intercultural relations: Counseling implications for American adolescents in Germany

A comparison of the relative importance of variables shown to influence the outcome of interracial contact was made in an intercultural contact situation. Implications of the findings for counseling applications were discussed. The variables studied were: amount of contact, length of time living in the country, norms, personal association, initial attitudes toward the country (expectations and first impressions), and attitudes toward people in general. The subjects were 199 American adolescents living in Germany and enrolled in on-base American schools for military dependents. The data were collected by questionnaires administered by faculty members at the schools during regular class time. Attitudes toward Germans, attitudes toward Germany and social distance toward German adolescents were utilized as the dependant variables. The analyses controlled for past intercultural experience and the age, sex, and ethnic group of the subjects. Three variables affected subjects' attitudes toward Germany: norms, first impressions, and sex of subject. The same three variables plus attitudes toward people affected attitudes toward Germans. Three different variables affected the social distance scale: age, sex, and expectations. Age and sex were control variables and appear to be artifacts of the particular social climate of the situation under study. Thus, norms, first impressions, expectations, and attitudes toward people appear to be the major influences on attitudes toward members of another culture. Amount of contact, length of time living in the country and personal association do not appear to be important in intercultural interaction. Suggestions were made for the preparation of educational programs and for family, group and individual counseling for families with adolescents who are transferred to new cultural environments.     

Study techniques differentially influence the delayed judgment-of-learning accuracy of adolescent children and college-aged adults

The ways in which adult learners study information influences their judgment-of-learning (JOL) accuracy (e.g., Koriat et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131(2), 147-162, 2002). The present study extends this investigation to adolescent children to determine whether developing learners’ metacognitive monitoring is similarly influenced by different study techniques. In two experiments, we examined JOL accuracy in adolescent children (ages 11 to 12) and college-aged adults. Across both experiments, we employed a standard delayed-JOL paradigm in which three groups of participants, differing in type of study technique, encoded weakly-related word pairs. One group studied the word pairs twice (study practice). A second group studied with the instruction to generate a word that linked the two members of the word pair together (elaborative encoding). The final group studied word pairs and then took an immediate cued-recall test with feedback (retrieval practice). In children and adults, retrieval practice led to better JOL accuracy as compared to study practice. Children differed from adults in how elaborative encoding influenced JOL accuracy. For adults, elaborative encoding resulted in better JOL accuracy than study practice; however, for children, JOL accuracy did not differ between the two groups. Our results suggest that encoding processes influence delayed-JOL accuracy in both age-groups.     

Supporting school teachers’ rapid engagement with online education

Educational technology research and development - In response to Philipsen et al.'s (Educ Technol Res Dev 67:1145–1174, 2019) article titled “Improving teacher professional...     

Teaching and learning birth: "help all to know"

This guest editorial explores the idea that our worldview, regardless of education, influences our childbirth practices, sometimes interfering with achieving the goals of our discipline. Over time, we have lost our ability to support women through the process of childbirth so that they emerge as strong, healthy women. The high road ahead is to teach everyone, including ourselves, that we need to provide optimal, evidence-based care. Pursuing this path will take courage and commitment.     

Comparison of two article-level,field-independent citation metrics: Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)

We reproduce the article-level, field-independent citation metric Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) using the Scopus database, and extend it beyond the biomedical field to all subject areas. We compare the RCR to the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), also an article-level, field-normalised metric, and present the first results of correlations, distributions and application to research university benchmarking for both metrics. Our analyses demonstrate that FWCI and RCR of articles correlate with varying strengths across different areas of research. Additionally, we observe that both metrics are comparably stable across different subject areas of research. Moreover, at the level of universities, both metrics correlate strongly.     

The Neighbourhood House: site of struggle,site of learning

Adult education research has tended to concentrate on the pragmatics of facilitating learning and developing educational programmes in institutionalised settings. Critical, contextual analysis of adult learning, and studies of informal learning, are both relatively neglected in the adult education literature. Applying concepts drawn from contestation theory to data from two Australian women's learning centres, this paper suggests that, while women gain considerable knowledge from adult education courses conducted in community centres, the informal, incidental or embedded learning that takes place as women participate in these centres is also very significant. This experiential learning enables women to make sense of and act on their environment, and to come to understand themselves as knowledge‐creating, acting being. It appears that much of this informal learning is generated by conflict between people within the centres.