Crime,Camping, and Fear: Developing High Impact Practices in Criminal Justice

High Impact Practices (HIPs) have been shown to increase critical thinking skills, student engagement, persistence, and GPA. Examples of HIPs include research experiences, collaborative projects, study abroad, and internships. One of the main characteristics of a HIP is the effort they require. This effort not only applies to the experience, but the development of the experience itself. In the fall of 2014, a HIP was utilized to provide criminal justice students an opportunity to engage in research and data collection. This paper will explore the logistics, best practices, benefits, and pitfalls of developing a high impact practice.     

Writing your first successful grant application to conduct communication research

Advice is offered to help scholars write successful communication grant applications, including practical issues such as learning about opportunities, finding the time to write, planning personnel, budgeting, negotiating internal resources, institutional review boards, and deliverables. Additional tips are offered on theoretically rich research with socially meaningful applied outcomes, counterintuitive mechanisms and outcomes, simplicity, detail orientation, demonstrating expertise in the content area, and demonstrating expertise with the population under investigation. Finally, we mention some important traits for getting through the review process-persistence and low ego-involvement.     

Many Languages,Many Workflows: Mapping and Analyzing Technical Services Processes for East Asian and International Studies Materials

This case study addresses a workflow analysis project undertaken in the International Studies and Asia Library technical services areas of the University of Michigan Library. The analysis was an opportunity to document existing technical services practices in three primary workflow areas: acquisitions/receiving, cataloging, and cataloging maintenance. International Studies began the project independently, and subsequently consultants were hired to work with both International Studies and Asia Library to find efficiencies and barriers, identify solutions, and propose future changes in non-Roman-language cataloging workflows. This article provides an account outlining the project background, implementation, outcomes, challenges, and lessons learned.     

The Network University? Technology,Culture and Organisational Complexity in Contemporary Higher Education

This paper discusses the concept of the network organisation in relation to the technologised university. Drawing upon the early findings of a study that examines the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on both organisational and teaching and learning issues in five Australian universities, the authors discuss the way in which discourses of network technology have become articulated to a range of at times paradoxical agendas within higher education. The introduction of new technologies into organisations tends to be portrayed in either transformative or oppressive terms. The complexity of the university experience foregrounds the important role played by pre‐existing organisational practices and narratives in determining the uses and meanings of ICTs in the organisational setting. These observations place into question the notion that the network organisation is a single coherent entity driven by a particular technological logic. Instead, it suggests that network technologies are socially embedded and therefore highly variable in their expression.     

Preliminary evidence for color stimuli discrimination in the Asian small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea)

Color discrimination ability can be determined through anatomy or perceptual ability. In this study we tested perceptual ability. Three Asian small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinerea), one male and two females, were trained via operant conditioning to discriminate stimuli within a training task. If they passed criteria for this task, they were tested on as many as six delayed matching-to-sample experimental tasks. These experimental tasks involved comparing varying saturations of the colors blue, green, and red against varying shades of gray, as well as against each other. The male reached criterion on five of the experimental tasks, indicating an ability to discriminate the stimuli. One female participated in only two tasks and did not achieve the criteria as set. The second female did not pass the training task, and thus was not experimentally tested. This study overall showed some early evidence that Asian small-clawed otters may have the ability to learn to discriminate different stimuli on the basis of color cues. Sensory studies conducted on two other otter species and the results of this study indicate that color vision may be a common trait across Lutrinae species.     

Performance of good and poor readers at two grade levels on an Auditory Cognitive Style Task

Sixty-four good and poor readers at first and third grades were administered a task measuring cognitive style in the auditory modality. They were also administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) to obtain a measure of IQ. Poor readers committed significantly more errors and exhibited shorter response latencies on the Auditory Cognitive Style Task than did good readers. More importantly, poor readers demonstrated inefficient strategies for successful performance. It was suggested that good reading skills, as well as successful performance on the auditory task, require a certain degree of planfulness and self-monitoring activity on the part of the child which was apparently absent in the poor reader. Furthermore, it was proposed that the cognitive style variable, conceptual tempo, may be better viewed within the framework of the concept of metacognition.