Social Media and Active Shooter Events: A School Crisis Communication Challenge

In recent years, the need to study the communication challenges schools face during crises has become essential. The current study included semi-structured interviews with 56 crisis team members from 21 P–12 districts. Participants identified the social media challenges and strategies districts employ during crisis events. Implications for scholars and P–12 administrators are discussed.     

Interdisciplinary Research: A Promising Approach to Investigate Elite Performance in Sports

While the call for interdisciplinary studies has been loud and clear over the last decade or so, the number of interdisciplinary publications in sport sciences is rather limited. One of the reasons for this scarcity is the complexity of the research process itself. Still, the combination and integration of information from different scientific disciplines seems to be important to better explain how elite performance comes about. In this article, we focus on this issue and discuss the advantages of interdisciplinary research for understanding how elite athletes are able to achieve such high-proficiency levels. The first section provides an overview of the studies that investigated elite performance in sports. In the second section, we focus on the issue of interdisciplinarity and illustrate how the ecological–dynamical approach and the concept of dimensional reduction can be used to explain how elite performers cope with the complex nature of sport skills. In the last section, we present a research outline and some practical considerations that can be helpful for researchers who aim to study sport skills from an interdisciplinary perspective.     

Preschoolers' Attributions of Mental States in Pretense

When young children appear to recognize that someone else is engaging in make-believe play, do they infer what the pretender is thinking? Are they aware that the pretender is thinking about a pretend scenario yet knows what the real situation is? Preschoolers ages 3–5 ( N = 45) viewed scenes from the Barney & Friends television series depicting either make-believe or realistic actions. Children were questioned concerning the presence of pretense and the thoughts and beliefs of the TV characters. The children where also presented with false belief and appearance/reality theory of mind tasks. Children who identified when TV characters were engaging in pretend play did not necessarily infer the pretenders thoughts and beliefs. Inferring pretenders' thoughts was related to performance on false belief and appearance/reality tasks, but simply recognizing pretense was not. These data support the view that children initially learn to recognize pretense from contextual cues and are able to infer pretenders' beliefs only with further development of metarepresentational ability.     

American education,meritocratic ideology,and the legitimation of inequality: the community college and the problem of American exceptionalism

This article examines American education in comparative perspective, suggesting that the distinctive structure of the school system is both an embodiment and a source of the felt fluidity of class boundaries in the United States. Several characteristic features of the American educational system are identified: the avoidance of early selection, the lack of sharp segmentation between different types of institutions, relative freedom of movement both among and within institutions, openness to new fields of study, high levels of enrollment, and the provision of opportunities for educational mobility well into adulthood. The two-year public community college, it argues, is an essential expression of these patterns which, through its very accessibility, reinforces the American ideology that it is never too late for individual talent to reveal itself - and to be rewarded. The article concludes with a discussion of the effects of the nation's distinctive school system on American culture and politics, suggesting that the perceived classlessness of American society may in part be a product of its seemingly open and democratic structure of education.The research reported here has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Education (NIE-O-77-0037), the National Science Foundation (SOC77-06658, SES-80-25542 and SES-83-19986) and the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley. This article is a fully collaborative effort by the two authors and is part of a larger study of American public two-year colleges, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900–1985, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.     

Ranking forestry journals using the h-index

An expert ranking of forestry journals was compared with Journal Impact Factors and h-indices computed from the ISI Web of Science and internet-based data. Citations reported by Google Scholar offer an efficient way to rank all journals objectively, in a manner consistent with other indicators. This h-index exhibited a high correlation with the Journal Impact Factor (r = 0.92), but is not confined to journals selected by any particular commercial provider. A ranking of 180 forestry journals is presented, on the basis of this index.     

The role of teachers in facilitating situational interest in an active-learning classroom

The study sought to explore whether interactional teacher characteristics such as social congruence, subject-matter expertise, and cognitive congruence increase situational interest in students. Correlational and path analyses were conducted on a sample of 498 polytechnic students to assess potential differences in situational interest based on these three teacher characteristics and how well these characteristics predicted situational interest. Results revealed that students supported by teachers who scored high on these characteristics reported significantly higher levels of situational interest. Cognitive congruence was the most significant predictor of situational interest. Overall, the findings suggest that teachers play an influential role in increasing students’ situational interest in the active-learning classroom.     

Examining the Sustained Effects of Reading Recovery

Though the immediate effect of Reading Recovery (RR) is both strong and well established, the longer term or sustained effect has been less studied and the evidence regarding it has been less conclusive. Michigan Reading Recovery students (n = 328) were compared to control students (n = 264) while in first (2009–2010), third (2011), and fourth grades (2012), using propensity score matching to generate 3 levels of eligibility. Although the immediate effect measured at mid-year of first grade on the Observation Survey was large (1.17), the effect by the end of first grade on the same measure was .51, and by third grade, the effect was .16 on the state reading test. The overall effect completely diminished by fourth grade, but it was significant (.35) for the most eligible students in reading, and for moderately eligible (.34) and most eligible students (.35) in writing. The sustained effect overall was present but diminished by third grade, and was sustained into fourth grade for those students at greater risk. The findings suggest that RR instruction should be better tailored to the initial literacy profiles of individual students to maximize the longevity of the effect for all participants.     

R&D strategy in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry

The adverse economic impacts of the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act have transformed the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. The key elements of this transformation include declining rates of innovation, huge increases in R&D costs and risks, lowered profitability, and an erosion of U.S. technological leadership. U.S. pharmaceutical firms must develop new, creative R&D strategies in order to cope with this complex and demanding environment. U.S. firms have responded to more stringent domestic regulation by sharply increasing both foreign R&D expenditures and initial clinical testing of new chemical entities at foreign locations.New patterns of project selection strategies have begun to emerge in the 1970s. As the total number of R&D projects has been cut back, pharmaceutical firms have focused resources on those disease areas with the highest epidemiological importance. To cope with the increasing riskiness of drug R&D firms have shifted dollars from research to development. Pharmaceutical firms are also likely to alter their strategies for discovering new drugs. As firms reduce explorative, basic research, more structured, engineering approaches will receive increased emphasis. Because individual drug companies are likely to have reduced capacity for originating drugs within their own laboratories, competition among firms for access to new compounds and research ideas is likely to in tensify.     

Project Coast: eugenics in apartheid South Africa

It is a decade since the exposure of Project Coast, apartheid South Africa's covert chemical and biological warfare program. In that time, attention has been focused on several aspects of the program, particularly the production of narcotics and poisons for use against anti-apartheid activists and the proliferation of both chemical and biological weapons. The eugenic dimension of Project Coast has, by contrast, received scant attention. It is time to revisit the testimony that brought the suggestion of eugenic motives to light, reflect on some of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's findings and search for lessons that can be taken from this troubled chapter in South Africa's history.