WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM PROGRAMS IN NEW JERSEY'S PUBLIC COLLEGES

Since 1976 in response to growing concern about college students’ writing abilities, faculty development programs on writing across the curriculum have arisen in a number of two‐ and four‐year colleges throughout the United States. This movement, for it seems to be one, has its roots in a similar movement that began more than 15 years ago in British secondary schools. This paper first reviews briefly the early history of the movement in England and compares the movement there to the one now under way in U.S. higher education. It then presents the results of a questionnaire survey of New Jersey's public two‐ and four‐year colleges undertaken in the spring of 1979. The purpose of the survey was to determine whether and to what extent New Jersey's public colleges had started or were planning to start development programs designed to bring groups of faculty together, across disciplines, to discuss problems relating to student writing performance and to develop specific interdisciplinary plans for solving these problems. In addition, information is presented about the nature of the steps taken in those institutions that reported having initiated such programs and about the efforts to evaluate the impact of these programs. Finally, conclusions are drawn about the state of writing across the curriculum programs in New Jersey public higher education and recommendations are made for further action in this direction.     

Explaining Method Effects Associated With Negatively Worded Items in Trait and State Global and Domain-Specific Self-Esteem Scales

Several investigators have interpreted method effects associated with negatively worded items in a substantive way. This research extends those studies in different ways: (a) it establishes the presence of methods effects in further populations and particular scales, and (b) it examines the possible relations between a method factor associated with negatively worded items and several covariates. Two samples were assessed: 592 high school students from Valencia (Spain), and 285 batterers from the same city. The self-esteem scales used were Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale, the State Self-Esteem Scale, and Self-Esteem 17. Anxiety was also assessed with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and gender and educational level were taken into account. The models were conducted using a multiple indicators and multiple causes (MIMIC) model framework. The evidence in this research pointed out that method effects were present across the different measures of self-esteem. Moreover, a significant and negative effect of anxiety on method effects was present across scales and samples, whereas no effects of age or educational level where found.     

Early Childhood Teachers Reconstruct Beliefs and Practices Through Reflexive Action

Professional development, which results in sustained transformative change, requires that teachers engage in critical reflection regarding teaching practices. In this study, a group of five bilingual and generalist early childhood teachers engaged in a journey in which they elected to try to reconstruct their beliefs and practices about teaching and learning. In response to a school district's needs, these teachers were enrolled as a cohort in an early childhood graduate program that served as part of their professional development endeavor. The teachers used reflection and ongoing dialogue that bridged theory and practice as they raised questions about their daily practices in relation to theoretical perspectives. We provide a glimpse of these teachers' ongoing transformative journeys and provide suggestions for early childhood teachers to engage in sustained professional development.     

Discursive strategies and learning of the school language: an ethnographic study in a classroom with high ethnic and linguistic diversity / Estrategias discursivas y aprendizaje de la lengua escolar: un estudio etnográfico en un aula de alta diversidad étnica y lingüística

Abstract

Research on the dialogic and intersubjective nature of children’s learning has emphasised the study of educational discourse and the semiotic mechanisms involved in understanding the students’ constructive activity. These studies have been carried out in classrooms where there was continuity between the language of instruction and the students’ first language. However, the number of classrooms in which students have an initial language which is not the language of instruction is increasing. This article analyses the educational discourse in a multilingual classroom when the teacher interacts with seven students in a teaching unit about language. The study uses interactional ethnography. The results show the use of teacher inquiry into the students’ beliefs about the task and the semiotic procedures used to construct a shared intersubjective framework. The discussion emphasises the similarity of some of these procedures with those used in the family in the initial stages of language acquisition, as well as the variations which the teacher uses of the social and specific framework of reference.     

Influence of Process Parameters on Chlorinated Biocide Decontamination by li-CO2 on Artificially Contaminated Model Materials

ABSTRACT

Previously, heavy use of biocides for the treatment of objects made of organic materials in museum collections (e.g. ethnographic, historical collections) was very common. Now suitable decontamination methods/technologies are being sought. A decontamination treatment by li-CO₂ was optimized that considered the specific requirements of museum objects. The treatment was tested on model materials artificially contaminated with biocide solutions containing dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), pentachlorophenol (PCP), lindane, and permethrin or cypermethrin. High decontamination was achieved for DDT, lindane, PCP, and permethrin on artificially biocide loaded wool and wood model materials. Optimal process parameter settings for li-CO₂ decontamination include a single 30?min cycle for woolen materials and three sequential 30?min cycles each for wood. These methods allow a reduction of at least 90% of all biocides for wool and between 70% and 85% for wood. Decontamination of the latter was more effective for less polar biocides as DDT and permethrin. Despite a significant improvement in decontamination for wood using co-solvents such as acetone, ethanol, and methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE), their use is not recommended due to the increased risk of damage to the objects, in particular if a surface coating is present.     

Adaptation and evaluation of a learning analytics dashboard to improve academic support at three Latin American universities

Despite the success of academic advising dashboards in several higher educational institutions (HEI), these dashboards are still under-explored in Latin American HEI's. To close this gap, three different Latin American universities adapted an existing advising dashboard, originally deployed at the KU Leuven to their own context. In all three cases, the context was the main ruling factor to these adaptations. In this paper, we describe these adaptions using a framework that focuses on four different elements of the context: Objectives, Stakeholders, Key moment and Interactions. Evaluation of the adapted dashboards in the three different Latin American universities is conducted through pilots. This evaluation shows the value of the dashboard approach in different contexts in terms of satisfaction, usefulness and impact in academic decision-making and advising tasks. The main contribution of this paper is the systematic reporting of the adaptations to an academic advising dashboard and showing the value of an academic advising dashboard on academic decision-making and advising tasks.     

Twenty-four-hour movement behaviours and fundamental movement skills in preschool children: A compositional and isotemporal substitution analysis

ABSTRACT

Studies that have analysed the association between the different movement behaviours and fundamental movement skills (FMS) have considered it in an independent manner, disregarding the compositional nature of 24-h movement behaviours (24-h MB). The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the 24-h MB and FMS in preschoolers using a compositional data analysis . Two hundred and four preschoolers (4.5 ± 0.8 years old; 101 boys) provided objectively assessed physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour (SB) data (Actigraph wGT3X), and FMS (TGMD-2). Sleep duration (SD) was reported by parents. Association of daily composition of movement behaviours with FMS was explored using compositional analysis and isotemporal substitution (R Core Team, 3.6.1). When considered as a 24-h MB composition (PA, SB and SD), adjusted for age, BMI and sex, the composition predicted locomotor (r² = 0.31), object control (r² = 0.19), and total motor score (r² = 0.35), respectively (all P < 0.001). Reallocation of time from light to moderate-to-vigorous PA was associated with greatest positive changes in total motor score. Achieving adequate balance between movement behaviours over the 24-h period, and its relationship with locomotor and object control skills should be considered and further investigated in early childhood.     

A compressed self-index using a Ziv–Lempel dictionary

A compressed full-text self-index for a text T, of size u, is a data structure used to search for patterns P, of size m, in T, that requires reduced space, i.e. space that depends on the empirical entropy (H _k or H ₀) of T, and is, furthermore, able to reproduce any substring of T. In this paper we present a new compressed self-index able to locate the occurrences of P in O((m + occ)log u) time, where occ is the number of occurrences. The fundamental improvement over previous LZ78 based indexes is the reduction of the search time dependency on m from O(m ²) to O(m). To achieve this result we point out the main obstacle to linear time algorithms based on LZ78 data compression and expose and explore the nature of a recurrent structure in LZ-indexes, the suffix tree. We show that our method is very competitive in practice by comparing it against other state of the art compressed indexes.

Television fiction and online communities: an analysis of comments on social networks and forums made by female viewers

This article analyzes the feeling of communities of female social viewers who watch television fiction and participate in social networks and forums dedicated to the programs. The sample is made up of 7,849 comments from 157 platforms (49 Facebook pages, 71 Twitter accounts, and 37 forums). We describe the characteristics of these communities of fans, which differ significantly from cult fandoms and are based on ICT interweaving between reception and female viewers’ daily lives. The results reveal that these active online poster and lurker communities express themselves through their emotional ties with the television series, self-reflection, and the manifestation of intimacy. Identification with the group is based on the relationship of the storylines with their own lives, with no attempts at constructing a cultural or political identity.