Data use by Flemish school principals: impact of attitude,self-efficacy and external expectations

There is an increasing expectation that school principals use data to develop and justify school policy. There is also a strong belief among a wide variety of stakeholders that the quality of decisions within the school increases in proportion to the extent to which these decisions are based on good data. In most schools, however, it appears that data use is still quite limited. Research shows that the school principal plays a key role in data use in schools. In the present study, we examine the impact of external expectations, attitude and self-efficacy on the use of data by principals. The results of a survey among 451 school principals in Flanders show that affective aspects of attitude exhibit the strongest correlation with data use by principals. The impact of cognitive attitude and self-efficacy is statistically significant, but quite limited. The same applies to the perception of external school development-orientated and accountability-orientated expectations to use data.     

Watching MOOCs together: investigating co-located MOOC study groups

Research suggests that massive open online course (MOOC) students prefer to study in groups, and that social facilitation within the study groups may render the learning of difficult concepts a pleasing experience. We report on a longitudinal study that investigates how co-located study groups watch and study MOOC videos together. The study was conducted with on-campus flipped classroom students. Our subjects reported an overall high satisfaction with the study group style. The research reveals that students like to stay synchronized in the group while watching MOOC videos. However, they have to find a balance between synchronization, video interaction, and the amount of conversation. Watching MOOCs on a shared display addresses the need of synchronicity, and the distribution of control can increase the video interactivities.     

Developing and validating test items for first-year computer science courses

We report on the development, validation, and implementation of a collection of test items designed to detect misconceptions related to first-year computer science courses. To this end, we reworked the development scheme proposed by Almstrum et al. (SIGCSE Bulletin 38(4):132–145, 2006) to include students’ artifacts and to simultaneously incorporate think-aloud interviews and flash tests. We also investigated to what extent the practical efficiency of detecting certain misconceptions could be increased without significantly affecting the sensitivity of the instrument, and present positive and negative results regarding this goal. The results of a first transfer and implementation study suggest that it is indeed possible to use the test items in a large-scale practical setting – both as diagnostic instruments and as interventions.     

The Virtual Library: Changing Roles and Ethical Challenges for Librarians

Since the 1930s, the Library Bill of Rights has acknowledged the ethical responsibility of librarians to provide access to information in all formats to all people. Librarians are charged with selecting, organizing, and instructing patrons on how to locate and use the resources, and preserving information regardless of format or technology. The information revolution and the pervasive thinking that everything is available on the Web have created new challenges to these traditional professional ethics. Acquiring and providing dependable access to electronic resources require librarians to learn and apply new skills such as negotiating license agreements and understanding evolving technologies. Print publications provide a degree of permanence, but e-information, if it is not properly managed, can be highly transient. Internet services provide large, uncontrolled, unregulated collection of resources. If the very nature of the Internet makes it nearly if not completely impossible to evaluate the content of web-sites, how does the librarian protect the integrity of the information the library provides? Along with traditional ethical conflicts, librarians in the virtual library are faced with new challenges to provide equitable access to usefully organized resources, to address petitions to deselect or filter, to negotiate less-restrictive licensing policies, and to maintain the anonymity of individual users within electronic transactions.     

Popular Culture (Frank Oglesbee)

Randall P. Harrison, The Cartoon: Communication to the Quick (Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications, SAGE ComnText series, 1982, 14.00 cloth, 6.95 pb)

John Caldwell Mug Shots (21 Central Ave., Albany, NY 12210: Fantaco enterprises, 1980, 2.95 pb, unpaginated),

Jan Harold Brunvand The Vanishing_Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (NY: W.W. Norton, 1981, 208 pp., 14.95 cloth)

Richard Lipsky How We Play the Game: Why Sports Dominate American Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981, 189 pp., 7.25, pb)

Alan Gowans Learning to See: Historical Perspectives on Modern Popular Commercial Arts (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981, 22.95 cloth, 13.95 pb, 514 pp.)     

Barriers to resource sharing among higher education libraries a report to the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP)

This paper describes the user-focused approach to information skills at MMU Library. It covers the following cycle: identifying training needs at three levels (organisation, group and individual); developing a training strategy and materials; marketing information skills within MMU. Specifically, it describes how we went about discovering what our users wanted, creating and delivering what they needed, and how we ‘sold’ it back to them.     

THE SALTIRE CENTRE

This paper describes the development of the Saltire Centre: an innovative learning and information centre at Glasgow Caledonian University.     

Collaborate to Innovate: Expanding Access to Faculty Patents through the Institutional Repository and the Library Catalog

This work explores the use of Clemson University's institutional repository and library catalog in promoting and providing access to the patents granted to its inventors. More specifically, the authors outline the project from generating metadata for patents and crosswalking it into a form that can be batch-uploaded to a bepress Digital Commons repository. They then explore the process of harvesting the records from the repository and using MarcEdit to crosswalk it into the library catalog. The process could easily be adapted to other nontraditional forms of scholarship.     

Library Anxiety and Emotion Perception Among the Undergraduate Social Sciences Students: A Relationship Study

ABSTRACT

Previous research has mostly focused on the demographic and academic correlates of library anxiety. This study focused on the “library anxiety” and “emotion perception” of students, with the objective of examining the relationship between these two concepts. In total, 279 self-reporting questionnaires were used for analysis. The results confirmed the existence of the phenomenon of library anxiety, with these students being more anxious regarding the “user education” and “user knowledge” factors. They showed greater skills of emotion perception. A negatively significant relationship appeared between library anxiety and emotion perception. The results suggest that user education and emotion perception training programs should be developed to overcome students' problems.     

SHORT REPORTS

This short report explores the quality of the care process for children with intellectual disabilities. A Delphi procedure was used to identify a set of indicators for the quality of the care process reflecting the perspectives of the care providers, the parents and the experts. The sample consisted of 59 individuals involved in different ways in the process of the caring for children with intellectual ­disabilities. The first round of the Delphi procedure resulted in 56 themes, distributed across four different phases of the care process. In the second round of the Delphi procedure, these themes were elaborated into 346 indicators that were, in turn, evaluated on their importance for the quality of the care process by the respondents. Finally, 328 indicators did meet the 85% criterion for consensus. Six themes proved to be relevant in all phases of care: transfer of information, report, consultation, attitude of care provider, respect and appointments. The operationalization of quality of care presented in this study points in the direction of actually measuring, monitoring and improving the quality of care for children with intellectual disabilities.