Connecting a Museum with Its Community

Abstract The exhibition, Changing Places: From Black and White to Technicolor, at the Levine Museum of the New South, in Charlotte, North Carolina, is more than a story about a changing community—it’s a platform for an experience that engages its local audience.     

Promoting positive attitudes towards science and religion among sixth‐form pupils: dealing with scientism and creationism

A sample of 187 female students, attending a sixth‐form study day on religious studies, completed a questionnaire containing four scales concerned with assessing: attitude towards theistic religion, attitude towards science, scientism and creationism. The data demonstrated a negative correlation between attitude towards religion and attitude towards science. However, this negative correlation was transformed into a positive correlation after taking into account individual differences in the students’ views about scientism and creationism. The implications of this finding are discussed in the context of the increasing support within society for the teaching of alternatives to evolution within the science curriculum. The authors argue both that it is important to challenge scientism by developing a better understanding of the role and limits of scientific methods, and that religious belief about creation should be recognised as essentially a claim about the ontological dependence of nature rather than about the details of its origins and development.     

The relevance of “recent and relevant” experience

The importance of recent and relevant experience is being asserted for teacher educators though not others responsible for education policy and curriculum. The paper will review the “self evident” value of recent and relevant experience from the perspective of researcher/teacher educator returning to classroom teaching. The potential and implications for research on teaching and learning and the opportunities for more significant school experience in teacher education are outlined. Specializations: teacher education, science education, health education, curriculum evaluation and research.     

Undercounting File Downloads from Institutional Repositories

ABSTRACT

A primary impact metric for institutional repositories (IR) is the number of file downloads, which are commonly measured through third-party Web analytics software. Google Analytics, a free service used by most academic libraries, relies on HTML page tagging to log visitor activity on Google's servers. However, Web aggregators such as Google Scholar link directly to high value content (usually PDF files), bypassing the HTML page and failing to register these direct access events. This article presents evidence of a study of four institutions demonstrating that the majority of IR activity is not counted by page tagging Web analytics software, and proposes a practical solution for significantly improving the reporting relevancy and accuracy of IR performance metrics using Google Analytics.     

Teachers as researchers: The rationale; The reality

Conclusion Collaborative action research, a style of research which connotes involvement, commitment, and growth, has the potential to bring together process and outcome, teaching and research, reflection and action, theory and practice. It is an organising frame to foster productive blending of school knowledge and academic knowledge, through the participation of members of the secondary and tertiary sectors. It has the potential to enhance the professionalism and expertise of members of both sectors, in circumstances which facilitate personal development. It has the potential to enhance the relevance and applicability of educational research to the educational context and hence to generate real and permanent change in schools. We believe that this form of research has potential to be of value that extends beyond the direct participants and school settings in which it occurs. The problem is of translating this potential into practice. Neither the school nor the educational research sectors are geared for such long-term collaborative research. However, PEEL demonstrates that it can be done. Educational research can be made relevant and important to teachers. Through collaborative action research, teachers can participate in improving the quality of education in our schools.     

The Twin Cities biomedical consortium.

Twenty-eight health science libraries in the St. Paul-Minneapolis area formed the Twin Cities Biomedical Consortium with the intention of developing a strong network of biomedical libraries in the Twin Cities area. Toward this end, programs were designed to strengthen lines of communication and increase cooperation among local health science libraries; improve access to biomedical information at the local level; and enable the Consortium, as a group, to meet an increasing proportion of its members' needs for biomedical information. Presently, the TCBC comprises libraries in twenty-two hospitals, two county medical societies, one school of nursing, one junior college, and two private corporations.     

Assessment of model-based image-matching for future reconstruction of unhelmeted sport head impact kinematics

Player-to-player contact inherent in many unhelmeted sports means that head impacts are a frequent occurrence. Model-Based Image-Matching (MBIM) provides a technique for the assessment of three-dimensional linear and rotational motion patterns from multiple camera views of a head impact event, but the accuracy is unknown for this application. The goal of this study is to assess the accuracy of the MBIM method relative to reflective marker-based motion analysis data for estimating six degree of freedom head displacements and velocities in a staged pedestrian impact scenario at 40 km/h. Results showed RMS error was under 20 mm for all linear head displacements and 0.01–0.04 rad for head rotations. For velocities, the MBIM method yielded RMS errors between 0.42 and 1.29 m/s for head linear velocities and 3.53–5.38 rad/s for angular velocities. This method is thus beneficial as a tool to directly measure six degree of freedom head positional data from video of sporting head impacts, but velocity data is less reliable. MBIM data, combined in future with velocity/acceleration data from wearable sensors could be used to provide input conditions and evaluate the outputs of multibody and finite element head models for brain injury assessment of sporting head impacts.     

Recovery Responses to Maximal Exercise in Healthy-Weight Children and Children With Obesity

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine differences in heart rate recovery (HRRec) and oxygen consumption recovery (VO₂ recovery) between young healthy-weight children and children with obesity following a maximal volitional graded exercise test (GXTmax). Method: Twenty healthy-weight children and 13 children with obesity completed body composition testing and performed a GXTmax. Immediately after the GXTmax, HRRec and VO₂ recovery were measured each minute for 5 consecutive minutes. Results: There were no statistically significant group differences in HRRec for the 5 min following maximal exercise, Wilks’s Lambda = .885, F(4, 28) = 0.911, p = .471, between the healthy-weight children and children with obesity despite statistically significant differences in body fat percentage (BF%; healthy-weight children, 18.5 ± 6.1%; children with obesity, 41.1 ± 6.9%, p < .001) and aerobic capacity relative to body mass (VO₂ peak; healthy-weight children, 46.8 ± 8.2 mL/kg/min; children with obesity, 31.9 ± 4.7 mL/kg/min, p < .001). There were statistically significant differences in VO₂ recovery for the 5 min following exercise, Wilks’s Lambda = .676, F(4, 26) = 3.117, p = .032. There were no statistically significant correlations between HRRec and body mass index (BMI), BF%, VO₂peak, or physical activity. Conclusions: In a healthy pediatric population, obesity alone does not seem to significantly impact HRRec, and because HRRec was not related to obesity status, BMI, or BF%, it should not be used as the sole indicator of aerobic capacity or health status in children. Using more than one recovery variable (i.e., HRRec and VO₂ recovery) may provide greater insight into cardiorespiratory fitness in this population.     

Of Mice and Manga: Comics and Graphic Novels in Art Education

A justification for the inclusion of graphic comic art in post-14 art education following the development of graphic novels in Europe, Japan and the USA. in recent years. The case is based on the visual dynamics of the medium and the potential for a critical realism which can be exploited in students’ studio practice and research. Particular attention is given to the Holocaust novel Maus and selected Japanese ‘Manga’ comics which have made an impact in the west, such as Barefoot Gen and Adolf. The article analyses the various innovative visual forms that these graphic novels utilise and considers their effectiveness as a vehicle for practice and research in the institutional art curriculum.