The Dominance Concept Inventory: A Tool for Assessing Undergraduate Student Alternative Conceptions about Dominance in Mendelian and Population Genetics

Despite the impact of genetics on daily life, biology undergraduates understand some key genetics concepts poorly. One concept requiring attention is dominance, which many students understand as a fixed property of an allele or trait and regularly conflate with frequency in a population or selective advantage. We present the Dominance Concept Inventory (DCI), an instrument to gather data on selected alternative conceptions about dominance. During development of the 16-item test, we used expert surveys (n = 12), student interviews (n = 42), and field tests (n = 1763) from introductory and advanced biology undergraduates at public and private, majority- and minority-serving, 2- and 4-yr institutions in the United States. In the final field test across all subject populations (n = 709), item difficulty ranged from 0.08 to 0.84 (0.51 ± 0.049 SEM), while item discrimination ranged from 0.11 to 0.82 (0.50 ± 0.048 SEM). Internal reliability (Cronbach''s alpha) was 0.77, while test–retest reliability values were 0.74 (product moment correlation) and 0.77 (intraclass correlation). The prevalence of alternative conceptions in the field tests shows that introductory and advanced students retain confusion about dominance after instruction. All measures support the DCI as a useful instrument for measuring undergraduate biology student understanding and alternative conceptions about dominance.     

An Experimental Evaluation of Guided Reading and Explicit Interventions for Primary-Grade Students At-Risk for Reading Difficulties

Abstract

Considerable research evidence supports the provision of explicit instruction for students at risk for reading difficulties; however, one of the most widely implemented approaches to early reading instruction is Guided Reading (GR; Fountas & Pinnel, 1996), which deemphasizes explicit instruction and practice of reading skills in favor of extended time reading text. This study evaluated the two approaches in the context of supplemental intervention for at-risk readers at the end of Grade 1. Students (n = 218) were randomly assigned to receive GR intervention, explicit intervention (EX), or typical school instruction (TSI). Both intervention groups performed significantly better than TSI on untimed word identification. Significant effects favored EX over TSI on phonemic decoding and one measure of comprehension. Outcomes for the intervention groups did not differ significantly from each other; however, an analysis of the added value of providing each intervention relative to expected growth with typical instruction indicated that EX is more likely to substantially accelerate student progress in phonemic decoding, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension than GR. Implications for selection of Tier 2 interventions within a response-to-intervention format are discussed.     

Identifying Key Features of Effective Active Learning: The Effects of Writing and Peer Discussion

We investigated some of the key features of effective active learning by comparing the outcomes of three different methods of implementing active-learning exercises in a majors introductory biology course. Students completed activities in one of three treatments: discussion, writing, and discussion + writing. Treatments were rotated weekly between three sections taught by three different instructors in a full factorial design. The data set was analyzed by generalized linear mixed-effect models with three independent variables: student aptitude, treatment, and instructor, and three dependent (assessment) variables: change in score on pre- and postactivity clicker questions, and coding scores on in-class writing and exam essays. All independent variables had significant effects on student performance for at least one of the dependent variables. Students with higher aptitude scored higher on all assessments. Student scores were higher on exam essay questions when the activity was implemented with a writing component compared with peer discussion only. There was a significant effect of instructor, with instructors showing different degrees of effectiveness with active-learning techniques. We suggest that individual writing should be implemented as part of active learning whenever possible and that instructors may need training and practice to become effective with active learning.     

城市公共空间的功能意义研究——基于加拿大原住民人口城市迁移视角

在多种因素的作用下,加拿大原住民人口的城市迁移趋势越来越明显,不仅为原住民人口的城市迁移提出了新课题,也给城市原住民社区的服务及管理带来了挑战。在对现阶段加拿大原住民人口城市迁移主要原因的分析基础上,对作为公共空间的加拿大城市原住民中心的服务对象及其服务功能展开了研究,并对新形势下如何帮助城市原住民人口适应新环境并尽快融入到城市社区生活等一系列问题进行了重点探讨。最后指出加拿大城市原住民中心可为我国少数民族城市流动人口公共空间构建及其社会管理工作创新提供重要的经验借鉴作用。     

Journal author rights and self‐archiving: the case of Spanish journals

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The lack of clarity of publisher permissions for archiving in OA repositories affects the adoption of the green OA route. This paper explores editorial policies and self‐archiving conditions in 1,615 Spanish scholarly journals. 48% are published by university and research institutions, 25% by associations/societies, and 17% by commercial publishers; social sciences and humanities (SSH) accounted for 67% of the journals (44.5% and 22.5%, respectively) followed by health sciences (20%); 71% offered gratis access immediately after publication, and 11% after an embargo; 31% provided some mention of author rights. Self‐archiving was specifically allowed by 65% of the journals; 52% were classified as ROMEO‐blue, 12% as green and 15% as white, and 21% could not be classified; 21%, mostly in SSH, used some type of Creative Commons license.     

Academic social bookmarking: An empirical analysis of Connotea users

Three groups of social bookmarking users, namely experienced users, users with moderate level of experience, and novice users, were investigated, in terms of their reported tagging behaviors, perceived usefulness of social bookmarking in information discovery and management, and perceived usefulness of the bookmarking features provided. Based on the empirical analysis of the Connotea users, who are primarily in academia, the study shows that experienced academic users generally prefer to use social bookmarking while moderately experienced and novice users still prefer to use the traditional bookmarking methods, such as creating and using bookmarks on a dedicated computer. Experienced academic users were also found to create more tags per bookmark comparing to the other two groups. Most novice academic users, however, only created one tag per bookmark, which just met Connotea's minimum requirement. Surprisingly different from the collaborative design nature of the social bookmarking systems, the study finds that our participants, particularly experienced academic users, prefer to create and use their own bookmarks rather than sharing bookmarks created by others. In fact, experienced users have significantly higher frequency (once every two weeks) of creating bookmarks than the other two groups (once a month or less). In addition, website design features and functions, such as automatic collection of bibliographic information, are regarded by all participants as helpful for information discovery. The in-depth examination and discussion of the opinions of Connotea users may be useful for further improvement of the design features and usage applications, particularly for academic social bookmarking websites. The results may also have potential implications to the future development of social bookmarking services in general.     

Motivational and Cognitive Contributions to Students' Amount of Reading

The amount that students read for enjoyment and for school is a major contributor to students' reading achievement and knowledge of the world. Consequently, it is important to identify the factors that predict amount of reading. A literature review revealed that motivation, strategy-use, and past reading achievement all may be expected to predict reading amount. To examine these variables, a total of 251 students in Grades 3 and 5 was administered questionnaires of these constructs and a reading test. Results showed that amount of reading for enjoyment was predicted most highly by motivation, when all other variables were controlled statistically in multiple-regression analyses. In contrast, amount of reading for school was predicted most highly by strategy use, when all other variables were controlled. However, these predictions were different for students in Grades 3 and 5. Findings of the study indicate that amount of reading is multiply determined by cognitive and motivational constructs, which is consistent with an engagement perspective on reading development. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.     

Radiocarbon geophysics

Radiocarbon dating is, and remains, one of the most powerful methods of dating archaeological artefacts. Initially, it was assumed that the carbon-14 content of atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained constant, but latterly it has been shown that this assumption is not valid. It has now proved possible, mainly by correlation with tree-growth rings, to measure historic fluctuations in carbon-14 content and to make the necessary corrections—of up to one thousand years—to the conventionally calculated dates.