‘Tough love and tears’: learning doctoral writing in the sciences

Contemporary changes to the doctorate mean student researchers are likely to be expected to write differently, write more and more often, and yet, despite a growing interest in doctoral education, we still know relatively little about the teaching and learning practices of students and supervisors vis-a-vis doctoral writing. This paper draws from a research study into the writing experiences of higher degree students and their supervisors in one science, health and technology-based university Faculty. The study used surveys, interviews and focus groups to collect information from students and supervisors about their experiences of doctoral writing and their perceptions about its development. By attending to the writing-related pedagogical practices of supervisors, this article explores how doctoral writing can be the stage for the playing out of tensions over changing roles and identities aggravated by contemporary pressures on doctoral education.     

'Talking Stones': An Interview Technique for Disaffected Students

This paper describes and discusses the use of an interview technique derived from Personal Construct Theory, 'Talking Stones', that is designed to support self advocacy, particularly for groups of disaffected students whose views may be difficult to ascertain. This technique assumes that for the individual learner everything is perceived and mediated by what is socially and personally salient. The paper illustrates how this tool lends itself to practice in schools. It can help to lay bare problematic relationships, usually between teenagers and staff, and open up dialogue.     

Learning from James: Lessons about Policy and Practice for Schools' Special Provision in the Area of Literacy Difficulties

Janice Wearmouth is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at the Open University in the UK. She has many years' experience of teaching and research in mainstream secondary schools and of developing and leading postgraduate development courses for teachers in the area of special and inclusive education. In this article, she argues that successive Governments in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have adopted policies in relation to special educational provision that are essentially technicist in character. These policies proceed from assumptions that are made about the clear and unproblematic nature of the issues and the responses that need to be made. In this model, difficulties in learning can be 'fixed' by selecting the most appropriate 'tool' in the most efficient and cost-effective way. The current focus on competency-based teacher education can be seen as a corollary of this approach.
Drawing upon a personal account of the experience of having difficulties in literacy acquisition, this article presents a contrary view. Janice Wearmouth argues that the area of special educational needs in schools, including literacy difficulties, is fraught with uncertainty and conflicting viewpoints. Given this complex situation, the technicist responses of recent Governments in the UK seem inappropriate and inadequate, Janice Wearmouth suggests. She proposes that practice in relation to special educational needs in general, and literacy difficulties in particular, can be most effectively understood from the perspective of a reflective practitioner. Her article closes with a call for practitioner professional development to be reconceptualised in these terms.     

Challenges and Opportunities for State Systems of Community Colleges: A Document Analysis

From their very beginnings, the community colleges have demonstrated a commitment to their founding principles of access, affordability, and quality. However, following February 2009, when President Obama set forth the agenda for U.S. postsecondary education to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020, priority shifted to college completion. This national agenda has posed increased challenges and opportunities for community colleges, the states, and the nation. Through a document analysis we identify the most frequently cited challenges and opportunities of the 50 state systems of community colleges.     

Examining care navigation: librarian participation in a team-based approach?

Objective

This study investigated responsibilities, skill sets, degrees, and certifications required of health care navigators in order to identify areas of potential overlap with health sciences librarianship.

Method

The authors conducted a content analysis of health care navigator position announcements and developed and assigned forty-eight category terms to represent the sample''s responsibilities and skill sets.

Results

Coordination of patient care and a bachelor''s degree were the most common responsibility and degree requirements, respectively. Results also suggest that managing and providing health information resources is an area of overlap between health care navigators and health sciences librarians, and that librarians are well suited to serve on navigation teams.

Conclusion

Such overlap may provide an avenue for collaboration between navigators and health sciences librarians.     

Representations of proportional relationships: Are children part-part or part-whole reasoners?

This research describes an intensive study undertaken to determine children's representational strategies for relational numbers (e.g. proportions, ratios, fractions). Relational numbers have three quantities associated with them: a whole and two parts. Given these three quantities, children can form a representation based on a part-whole relationship or on a part-part relationship. Fifteen children (6th, 7th, and 8th graders) solved fifteen probability problems which varied information content and quantitative relationships between the quantities expressed in the problems. A quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed that children prefer a part-part representation to solve problems with relational quantities.     

Phonological and semantic priming in children with reading disability

Lexical priming was assessed in children with reading disability (RD) and in age-matched controls ( M = 11.5 years), in visual and auditory lexical decision tasks. In the visual task, children with RD were found to have deficits in semantic (SHIP–BOAT), phonological/graphemic (GOAT–BOAT), and combined (FLOAT–BOAT) priming. The same pattern of semantic priming deficits also occurred in auditory lexical decisions, suggesting that the semantic deficits are not confined to reading. Children with RD also showed less priming than reading-age matched controls, suggesting that their priming deficits are not simply due to lower reading level but are due to the reading disability in particular. These semantic deficits may contribute to both the word reading and the comprehension problems seen in children with RD.     

Will Web Search Engines Replace Bibliographic Databases in the Systematic Identification of Research?

The availability of web search engines offers opportunities in addition to those provided by bibliographic databases for identifying academic literature, but their usefulness for retrieving research is uncertain. A rigorous literature search was undertaken to investigate whether web search engines might replace bibliographic databases, using empirical research in health and social care as a case study. Eight databases and five web search engines were searched between 20 July and 6 August 2015. Sixteen unique studies which compared at least one database with at least one web search engine were examined, as well as drawing lessons from the authors’ own search process. Web search engines were limited in that the searcher cannot be certain that the principles of Boolean logic apply and they were more limited than bibliographic databases in their functions, such as exporting abstracts. Recommendations are made for improving the rigour and quality of reporting studies of academic literature searching.     

Undergraduate Student Participation in an Evaluation of a Police Program: A High-Impact Practice

High-impact educational practices are increasingly being recognized as powerful teaching strategies that can positively impact both student and faculty experiences in the classroom. Student persistence in college is correlated to campus integration, and one way this can be successfully facilitated is through student–faculty research partnerships. This paper documents the process of one faculty research team integrating four undergraduate students into an ongoing research project, for which students received course credit. There were many benefits of this collaboration to both student and faculty participants, but there were also many opportunities to better streamline the project and to potentially create an institutional template for replication of this process so that other faculty members can learn from this experience and more easily successfully integrate students into their own research.