“Epistemology Not Ideology OR Why We Need New Germans”

This article argues for a shift away from ideology critique as the primary focus of critical communication and media studies. Instead, the author suggests enlisting the work of German Media theorist Friedrich Kittler's Foucault-inspired approach to the epistemological dimensions of media. This focus is relevant to digital media in terms of the selection, storage, and processing of data that are the fundamental concerns of Kittler's media studies. Advertising and drone warfare are used as examples of how this approach differs from ideological critique.     

Democracy exported,history expunged: John Dewey’s trip to Turkey and the challenge of building ‘civilised’ nations for democratic life

In 1924, John Dewey travelled to Turkey to make recommendations on the Turkish educational system. According to many existing accounts, Dewey brought a sorely needed progressive educational perspective to a nation emerging from centuries of despair. On the whole, these accounts dismiss the Ottoman legacy and overlook how Dewey’s historical thinking coloured his view of Turkish democracy. This article draws on these considerations to offer a critical re-reading of Dewey’s trip, arguing that the visit, rather than supporting the expansion of a bottom-up democratic perspective in the Turkish educational system, actually helped advance top-down Turkish nation-building. In so doing, it explores the connections between history and democracy in Dewey’s thinking, reclaims the significance of the Ottoman legacy, examines the role of education in radically remaking the Turkish public, and points to the need for studying places and times where schooling is used to expunge history in the name of exporting democracy.     

The Environmental Action and Philosophy Matrix: An Exploratory Study of the Environmental Attitudes of Recreation Management and Environmental Studies Students

This study is a comparative analysis of the environmental philosophies of college undergraduates enrolled in a Midwestern university. Two courses were used for the research, one from a recreation management curriculum and the other from environmental studies. The study utilized a survey instrument called the Environmental Action and Philosophy Matrix to determine the extent to which students’ environmental attitudes are based on scientific or religious rationale, as well as anthropocentric or biocentric perspectives. Findings show students to possess scientific underpinnings for their viewpoints, regardless of anthropocentric or biocentric tendencies. In addition, the environmental studies students displayed more biocentric attitudes than the recreation management students.     

Scaling Up Innovative Technology-Based Mathematics

We report on the initial attempts at evaluating at scale a particular technological/curricular innovation that enables more students to develop deeper knowledge. The methods, issues, and findings of the current pilot experiment speak not only to the success of SimCalc MathWorlds, the focus of our research program, but also to the evaluation at scale of a broad class of representationally innovative technologies and to the merit of long-term investment in design-based research. In particular, we present conditions and findings from a completed pilot experiment involving 21 seventh-grade mathematics teachers from Texas. Pilot outcomes suggest that (a) innovative representational technologies can have an important impact on student learning, (b) considerable impact can be found across a wide range of teachers and conditions, and (c) these gains can be detected even in the absence of other desirable conditions. In particular, detection of student gains does not, in our case, depend on having a long-term context of learning, long-term teacher professional development, or a shift to learner-centered constructivist pedagogy. The full experiment will replicate and extend our experimental design with a wider range of teachers and schools, model the factors that contribute to classroom success with such technology, and explore what happens as research support fades away.     

Inference and Interval Estimation Methods for Indirect Effects With Latent Variable Models

Although much is known about the performance of recent methods for inference and interval estimation for indirect or mediated effects with observed variables, little is known about their performance in latent variable models. This article presents an extensive Monte Carlo study of 11 different leading or popular methods adapted to structural equation models with latent variables. Manipulated variables included sample size, number of indicators per latent variable, internal consistency per set of indicators, and 16 different path combinations between latent variables. Results indicate that some popular or previously recommended methods, such as the bias-corrected bootstrap and asymptotic standard errors had poorly calibrated Type I error and coverage rates in some conditions. Likelihood-based confidence intervals, the distribution of the product method, and the percentile bootstrap emerged as leading methods for both interval estimation and inference, whereas joint significance tests and the partial posterior method performed well for inference.     

The roles of epistemology and ideology in teachers’ pedagogy with historical ‘media’

Within the field of social studies education, disciplinary models of teaching, such as approximating a historian in asking students to ‘think historically,’ have been the emphasis of countless professional development and teacher education programs. This movement, however, has focused largely on the use of traditional primary documents and generally does not include training for teachers or students on how other forms of media construct history. This collective case study examines how two US history teachers’ epistemological beliefs about historical media and ideology and overall goals for students as citizens impacts their pedagogy with different historical media, particularly film. Data were collected on a daily basis over the course of six months, and included observations, teacher interviews, and the media used as historical sources. Findings show that teachers’ beliefs about how sources represent history affect their pedagogy with the particular media, and that epistemic development and current notions of historical thinking may be limited when it comes to media that commonly serve as historical sources for the public at large (e.g., film, television, WWW, videogames). This limitation is caused in large part by the teachers’ larger goals for students that are informed by their ideology, and difficulty in identifying bias in media that aligned with their own beliefs. Therefore, a shift in teachers’ epistemic beliefs about how different forms of media serve as sources of history, essentially a form of critical media literacy, and coinciding recognition of ideological goals needs to occur in order to better instill students with skills in historical and media literacy for the twenty‐first century.     

Exploring the Hardwired for News Hypothesis: How Threat Proximity Affects the Cognitive and Emotional Processing of Health-Related Print News

This study explored how the proximity of threatening health news affects cognition and emotion through a 2 (Proximity: High/Low) × 4 (Topic) fractional experiment. Fifty-one participants read four news stories about either local or distant health threats, with their heart rate, skin conductance, and corrugator electromyography recorded. Results showed that high-proximity health threats elicited greater heart rate deceleration than did low-proximity health threats, indicating greater allocation of automatic resources to encoding high-proximity threats. Recognition data demonstrated that details from high-proximity health threats were recognized more accurately than details from low-proximity health threats. There were no significant effects of proximity on either skin conductance levels or corrugator activation. These results are discussed in terms of Shoemaker's (1996 Shoemaker , P. J. ( 1996 ). Hardwired for news: Using biological and cultural evolution to explain the surveillance function . Journal of Communication , 46 ( 3 ), 32 – 47 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) hardwired for news hypothesis and A. Lang's (2000 Lang , A. ( 2000 ). The limited capacity model of mediated message processing . Journal of Communication , 50 , 46 – 70 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2006 Lang , A. ( 2006 ). Using the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing to design effective cancer communication messages . Journal of Communication , 56 , S57 – S80 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) limited capacity model.     

High School Success: A Learning Strategies Intervention to Reduce Drop-Out Rates

The Urban Review - The transition into high school is a critical time to act for students with a history of academic difficulty. In this study, researchers examined the impact of a learning...     

Toward a Transdisciplinary Internet Research

Given the expanse of the Internet as a topic for research, the need for transdisciplinary research becomes evident. This paper introduces and expands on the problems of Internet research and how some of those can be resolved by pursuing transdisciplinary research. Issues introduced are the fragmentation of understanding, the disunity of research, and the public reception of that research.