Innovation in postgraduate teaching: mixed methods to enhance learning and learning about learning

Growing pressure to restructure and reform tertiary education is encouraging university academics to use innovative practices that assist students to develop ‘employable’ skills. The hybrid approach described in this paper stimulated students to be self‐directed adult learners who maximized their learning of content and skills by means of problem‐based learning and action research strategies. The lecturer also operated as a reflective practitioner and role model by using an action research approach. This paper demonstrates the value of student empowerment, communication and leadership in autonomous learning groups. It outlines methods by which academic teaching staff can build continuous improvement into a university unit’s curriculum design and processes. These can be powerful additions to lecturers’ teaching strategies and to students’ learning experiences.     

Multi-postpath-based lookahead multiconstraint QoS routing

Multiconstraint QoS (quality of service) routing is an essential mechanism for QoS-guaranteed services. Unfortunately, the multiconstraint QoS routing problem is NP-complete. In this paper, we propose a heuristic multiconstraint QoS routing scheme, MPLMR (multi-postpath-based lookahead multiconstraint routing). MPLMR is a routing scheme using an extended shortest-path algorithm. As in previous schemes such as TAMCRA and H_MCOP, MPLMR stores a limited number of subpaths between the source node and each intermediate node, and extends these subpaths toward the destination node. However, MPLMR uses an improved “lookahead” method to estimate the path length of the full path to which each subpath is extended. MPLMR then selects and stores the subpaths that have higher likelihood than other subpaths to be extended to feasible paths. We show via simulation that MPLMR has a smaller probability of missing a feasible path than competing schemes in the literature.     

Early Family and Child-Care Antecedents of Awakening Cortisol Levels in Adolescence

This study examined early observed parenting and child-care experiences in relation to functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis over the long term. Consistent with the attenuation hypothesis, individuals ( n  =   863) who experienced: (a) higher levels of maternal insensitivity and (b) more time in child-care centers in the first 3 years of life had lower awakening cortisol levels at age 15. Associations were small in magnitude. Nonetheless, results were (a) additive in that both higher levels of maternal insensitivity and more experience with center-based care uniquely (but not interactively) predicted lower awakening cortisol, (b) not accounted for by later caregiving experiences measured concurrently with awakening cortisol at age 15 or by early demographic variables, and (c) not moderated by sex or by difficult temperament.     

Response,Demand, and Control: Evaluating a Three-Factor Model and Measure of Teachers’ Interactional Styles

Abstract

Theory and research in teachers’ interactional styles and authoritative teaching typically posit two factors, including response and a second factor featuring some combination of demand and control. Two survey-research projects examined how teachers construe interactional styles, with results suggesting three discrete factors: response, demand, and control. The optimal interactional style is more complex than the formula of high response and high demand/control emphasized in literature in this area.     

Structure, features, and faculty content in ARL member repositories

Questions about the optimal way to present repository content to authors, submitters, and end-users, prompted this study. The authors examined, through an observation and a survey, the institutional repositories of peer institutions in the ARL for good practices related to the presentation and organization of faculty-authored institutional repository content.     

Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

Given the force of colonial violence and the politics of erasure, I argue it is imperative to deeply address what Rhetorical Studies has inherited from academic predecessors and to uncover colonialism's enduring impacts on our field. I contend that much of Rhetorical Studies upholds a system of knowledge that overwhelmingly perpetuates erasure and effacement of Indigenous work and thus the political stakes of complicity in Indigenous erasure and anti-Blackness must be addressed. This account of Rhetorical Studies' dominant and embedded histories, narratives, and authors reveals how the discipline is still missing an intellectual genealogy that orients rhetorical scholarship toward indigeneity, which provides possibilities to challenge erasure. Even as settler colonialism receives more attention in Rhetoric, I suggest the necessity of a coarticulated frame that navigates Rhetorical Studies alongside direct intellectual engagement with Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) to build simultaneous attention to indigeneity and settler colonialism. This frame explains racialization and colonization must be addressed together while centering a focus on indigeneity as analytic. Launching this intellectual genealogy reveals contradictions, limitations, and complexities to hold Rhetorical Studies – to hold all of us – accountable for nurturing and building a world beyond colonialism in QJS and in our field.     

Those Hands

When examined cross-culturally, the formal incorporation of sport by American colleges and universities is rather unique. Although higher education in the United States is largely the result of European influences, only in America has sport become an official responsibility of the educational organization. The openness of the “charter” of higher education was the primary factor in the formal incorporation of sport responsibilities within American institutions. Without an agreed upon understanding of the role of American higher education, the business-minded leadership of its colleges and universities was allowed to use sport as a survival mechanism in response to financial and enrollment exigencies.     

The interaction of assessment format and examinees' perceptions of control

Performance assessments have been touted for their multidimensional and ‘realworld’, or authentic, appearance, yet this complexity is at the heart of the most serious problems in the use of performance assessments. If performance assessments are more multidimensional and situational, then perhaps performance assessment scores represent other things besides the construct of interest. This study empirically explored that possibility, namely that scores on a performance assessment reflect a motivational variable (perception of control), in addition to the construct intended, while an objective test does not. Data from high school Spanish students who took an objective test, a performance assessment and a measure of perceptions of control suggest that perceptions of control indeed predict performance assessment scores but not objective test scores.     

Do Time in Child Care and Peer Group Exposure Predict Poor Socioemotional Adjustment in Norway?

Extensive exposure to nonparental child care during the first 4.5 years of life has been demonstrated in some American studies to negatively affect children's socioemotional functioning. Data from 935 preschool children who averaged 54.9 (SD = 3.0) months of age, from Trondheim, Norway were used to examine whether such negative effects, would emerge in Norway, a country with a different child‐care system. The children's externalizing problems and social competence were unrelated to their child‐care experience. More time spent in child care during the first 4.5 years of life and experiencing peer groups of < 16 or > 18 children predicted greater caregiver–child conflict. The effect sizes were small. The results are discussed in terms of cross‐national child‐care differences.