Agile Project Management in Libraries: Creating Collaborative,Resilient, Responsive Organizations

Libraries must continually adapt to meet the ever-changing needs of users. Doing so requires the ability to be flexible and respond quickly. This is a case study of how The George Washington University Libraries rethought its approach to collection development using a cross-functional, team-based strategy that leveraged the benefits of Agile project management. Adopting an Agile approach to collection development maximized the impact of the library’s financial resources and enabled staff to develop new skills. This project underscores the value of collaboration, agility, and experimentation in libraries.     

The unacknowledged value of female academic labour power for male research careers

Academic work in Sweden's higher education system is changing character. Distinctly different career pathways are emerging, as facilities for developing research careers and capital have become both more restricted and more dependent on external funding. These developments are in focus in the present article. Based on ethnographic research and a series of semi-structured interviews with new academics and senior academic mentors in education faculties, the research suggests that several factors intercede in how careers are developed and experienced. The unacknowledged exploitation of female academic labour is perhaps amongst the more significant of these.     

Endorsing achievement goals exacerbates the big-fish-little-pond effect on academic self-concept

The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) model predicts students’ academic self-concept to be negatively predicted by the achievement level of their reference group, controlling for individual achievement. Despite an abundance of empirical evidence supporting the BFLPE, there have been relatively few studies searching for possible moderators. Integrating the BFLPE model with Achievement Goal Theory, the present study aims to determine whether the negative effect of class-average achievement on academic self-concept is moderated by individual and class-average achievement goals. Our sample comprised of 2987 students (50% boys) from Grade 6 in 112 elementary schools in the Flemish region of Belgium (174 classes). Applying multilevel modelling, we found a stronger BFLPE when students’ individual achievement goals were higher, regardless of the specific nature of these goals. The BFLPE was not moderated by class-average levels of achievement goals. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the BFLPE is moderated by individual goal-related factors.     

Understanding heterogeneity in pathways between interparental conflict and children's involvement: The moderating role of affect-biased attention

The study examined the moderating role of children's affect-biased attention to angry, fearful, and sad adult faces in the link between interparental conflict and children's distinct forms of involvement. Participants included 243 preschool children (M_age = 4.60 years, 56% female) and their parents from racially (48% African American, 43% White) and socioeconomically (median annual household income = $36,000) diverse backgrounds. Data collection took place in the Northeastern United States (2010–2014). Utilizing a multi-method, multi-informant, longitudinal design, attention away from anger selectively amplified the link between interparental conflict and children's subsequent coercive involvement (β = −.15). Greater attention to fear potentiated the pathway between interparental conflict and children's later cautious (β = .14) and caregiving involvement (β = .15). Findings are interpreted in the context of environmental sensitivity models.     

Preschoolers rely on rich speech representations to process variable speech

To learn language, children must map variable input to categories such as phones and words. How do children process variation and distinguish between variable pronunciations (“shoup” for soup) versus new words? The unique sensory experience of children with cochlear implants, who learn speech through their device's degraded signal, lends new insight into this question. In a mispronunciation sensitivity eyetracking task, children with implants (N = 33), and typical hearing (N = 24; 36–66 months; 36F, 19M; all non-Hispanic white), with larger vocabularies processed known words faster. But children with implants were less sensitive to mispronunciations than typical hearing controls. Thus, children of all hearing experiences use lexical knowledge to process familiar words but require detailed speech representations to process variable speech in real time.