Hurricane Katrina and the chōric object of rhetorical studies

This essay reads former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s infamous radio interview given during the aftermath of Hurricane to rethink both the popular narrative about the federal response to Katrina and, more broadly, the displacement of rhetorical objects both popularly and within rhetorical scholarship. Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s early work, I advocate for a turn to a particular understanding of chōra, which positions critics in provisional relation objects of rhetorical study. Finally, I tender a reading of Nagin’s post-Katrina radio interview. The essay ultimately argues that: (1) the chōric function of Nagin’s interview simultaneously spurred political change and displaced the appearance of having done so; and (2) if rhetorical studies is to avoid remaining complicit with the politics of such displacement, scholars should attend carefully not only to what counts as rhetorical, but also to those objects that do not count but nevertheless function rhetorically. Reconsidering the object domain of rhetorical studies in this way not only opens up new objects for study but also accounts for how they might function outside of already established narratives.     

Economic evaluation research in the context of Child Welfare policy: a structured literature review and recommendations

Objectives

With over 1 million children served by the US Child Welfare system at a cost of $20 billion annually, this study examines the economic evaluation literature on interventions to improve outcomes for children at risk for and currently involved with the system, identifies areas where additional research is needed, and discusses the use of decision-analytic modeling to advance Child Welfare policy and practice.

Methods

The review included 19 repositories of peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed “gray” literatures, including items in English published before November, 2009. Original research articles were included if they evaluated interventions based on costs and outcomes. Review articles were included to assess the relevance of these techniques over time and to highlight the increasing discussion of methods needed to undertake such research. Items were categorized by their focus on: interventions for the US Child Welfare system; primary prevention of entry into the system; and use of models to make long-term projections of costs and outcomes.

Results

Searches identified 2,640 articles, with 49 ultimately included (19 reviews and 30 original research articles). Between 1988 and 2009, reviews consistently advocated economic evaluation and increasingly provided methodological guidance. 21 of the original research articles focused on Child Welfare, while 9 focused on child mental health. Of the 21 Child Welfare articles, 81% (17) focused on the US system. 47% (8/17) focused exclusively on primary prevention, though 83% of the US system, peer-reviewed articles focused exclusively on prevention (5/6). 9 of the 17 articles included empirical follow-up (mean sample size: 264 individuals; mean follow-up: 3.8 years). 10 of the 17 articles used modeling to project longer-term outcomes, but 80% of the articles using modeling were not peer-reviewed. Although 60% of modeling studies included interventions for children in the system, all peer-reviewed modeling articles focused on prevention.

Conclusions

Methodological guidance for economic evaluations in Child Welfare is increasingly available. Such analyses are feasible given the availability of nationally representative data on children involved with Child Welfare and evidence-based interventions.

Practice implications

Policy analyses considering the long-term costs and effects of interventions to improve Child Welfare outcomes are scarce, feasible, and urgently needed.     

On the Meanings of Self‐Regulation: Digital Humanities in Service of Conceptual Clarity

Self‐regulation is of interest both to psychologists and to teachers. But what the word means is unclear. To define it precisely, two studies examined the American Psychological Association's system of controlled vocabulary—specifically, the 447 associated terms it presents—and used techniques from the Digital Humanities to identify 88 closely related concepts and six broad conceptual clusters. The resulting analyses show how similar ideas are interrelated: self‐control, self‐management, self‐observation, learning, social behavior, and the personality constructs related to self‐monitoring. A full‐color network map locates these concepts and clusters relative to each other. It also highlights some of the interests of different audiences, which can be described heuristically using two axes that have been labeled abstract versus practical and self‐oriented versus other‐oriented.     

ESCOT: Coordinating the Influence of R&D and Classroom Practice to Produce Educational Software From Reusable Components

In a 3-year project, a consortium of university, nonprofit and commercial educational software developers formed a testbed for the rapid assembly of educational software from reusable component tools. This testbed incorporated interactive learning tools from a variety of university, nonprofit, and commercial developers, and hosted decentralized authoring teams consisting of teachers, developers and educational technologists. Within its testbed, the Educational Software Components of Tomorrow (ESCOT) project achieved notable success in (a) producing a large collection of technology-rich learning activities with reuse rates estimated at 90% and (b) scaffolding authoring teams in successful and rewarding collaborative development experiences. Fortunately, since ESCOT was funded as a National Science Foundation research project, we have had time to reflect on the conditions that led to our achievements. In this article, we reflect on the three activities of the project that we believe were most responsible for its success: (1) the selection of a unit of software production (2) the development of a strategy to allow reuse of interoperable software components and (3) the structuring of a distributed, team-based authoring process. We observe that a common characteristic across these activities was reciprocal influence from both the fields of research-based software development and teaching practice.     

The Construction of Knowledge in Classroom Talk

Social interaction is important for the development of knowledge (M. Chapman, 1991 Chapman, M. 1991. “The epistemic triangle: Operative and communicative components of cognitive competence.”. In Criteria for competence: Controversies in the conceptualization and assessment of children's abilities Edited by: Chandler, M. and Chapman, M. 209–228. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.  [Google Scholar]). Social interaction, however, takes many forms, and J. Piaget (1977/1995) proposed that the construction of knowledge is facilitated in cooperative as opposed to constraining relationships. These views of knowledge development were drawn on in a study of classroom talk in higher education, namely in 2 first- and 2 fourth-year college and university psychology classes. Classroom talk was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed following conversation analytic (H. Sacks, 1992 Sacks, H. 1992. Lectures on conversation Vol. 1–2, Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.  [Google Scholar]) and social pragmatic (W. Turnbull, 2003 Turnbull, W. 2003. Language in action: Psychological models of conversation. New York, NY: Psychology Press..  [Google Scholar]) approaches. Examination of how cooperation and constraint were constituted in the corpus was based on N. Mercer's (1995, 2000) categorization of different ways of making reasoning manifest, namely exploratory talk, or the joint negotiation of ideas; disputational talk, or the competitive negotiation of knowledge claims; and cumulative talk, or the uncritical addition of knowledge claims. Analysis focused on the sequential structures of classroom talk in and through which reasoning is achieved. Analysis revealed that most fourth-year talk was exploratory, whereas most first-year talk was disputational or cumulative.     

Techniques for Improving Online Community College Completion Rates: Narrow the Path?

This paper provides a brief overview of the status of retention and completion efforts among community colleges in the United States. This article identifies a number of successful strategies utilized in on-ground institutions that may translate well to online programs. In light of these successes, the article questions whether the costly current approaches by administrators of online institutions are not overlooking effective alternatives. The article also provides a number of questions for further discussion.     

Elsevier Compendex and Google Scholar: A Quantitative Comparison of Two Resources for Engineering Research and an Update to Prior Comparisons

Elsevier's Compendex product (and its ancestor, Engineering Index) has been a de rigeur indexing tool for searching the primary literature in engineering for many years. However, the price of Compendex continues to rise while at the same time, broader, lower-cost or even free alternatives to such expensive indexing tools have proliferated. This paper seeks to quantitatively and, to a lesser extent, qualitatively compare Compendex to Google Scholar.     

Assertive Discipline in a school for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties

The management of difficult and disruptive behaviour continues to be an issue in many classrooms. In this article, Jeremy Swinson, a senior educational psychologist and honorary lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, and Mike Cording, an education consultant working in Southport, consider the impact of in-service training on the use of Assertive Discipline in a school for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD). Swinson and Cording report improved rates of 'on-task' behaviour for pupils across the age range and reduction in numbers of disruptive incidents. These changes in pupil behaviour mirror an increase in teachers' use of positive feedback and praise. Swinson and Cording argue that these techniques are effective even for those pupils who are seen as being disaffected or very discouraged.