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.     

Gendered positionality among Irish male primary teachers: the staff room as a site of performative masculinity

The concept of masculinities has traditionally been defined in terms of crises associated with boys’ underachievement, the violence of homophobia, the under-representation of males in caring occupations, the rituals and discourses of laddism, and perceptions of disaffected and unrealised talent. Whereas the topic of masculinities has long been associated with warrants for distinctive and diverse male identities, it has a comparatively more recent history in the research on male Irish primary teachers as a particular social category. Two key findings are discussed in relation to performative masculinities – a form of strategic manoeuvring designed to exploit gender discourses, practices for control, power and privilege. First, the findings show the staffroom as a bellwether or highly developed locus for teacher socialisation through gendered discourses, events and actions. Second, the findings show nonsynchronous performative masculinities not only between male and female teachers but also with male colleagues. Therefore, it is argued that this frequently forgotten and neglected seam in the grand narrative of schools and schooling in Ireland needs to be more fully understood as a variable of quality, social justice and democratic practices across the full scope and sequence of the teacher continuum and as a prerequisite component in all teacher leadership programmes.     

Technology column: public libraries as civic technology hubs

Civic technology is used to improve how citizens, businesses, and other groups engage and conduct business with governments. Libraries across the United States are uniquely positioned to be key players in the civic technology movement. Libraries offer community spaces where everyone is welcome and where people can come together, learn about new technologies, access information, and solve shared problems. By bringing our unique attributes and resources to bear, libraries can play a part in developing applications and services that power our communities.     

Congruence between mother and handicapped child's view of the child's sense of adjustment

The responses of 22 physically handicapped children to selected items of the Piers‐Harris Self Concept Scale for Children were compared with their mothers’ responses to equivalent items of the Personality Inventory for Children. The direction of the responses, whether children were more or less positive in self‐evaluation than mothers perceived them to. be, was analyzed with respect to sex of child, type of school attended, and diagnosis of handicap (cerebral palsy or spina bifida). Only diagnosis of handicap was significantly related to the tendency for children to be either less or more positive in response to the items than their mothers, with cerebral palsy children more positive and spina bifida children consistently less positive in direction. Possible explanations are considered, with particular reference to the children's views regarding peer relationships.     

Effects of Calculator Use on Scores on a Test of Mathematical Reasoning

A sample of college-bound juniors from 275 high schools took a test consisting of 70 math questions from the SAT. A random half of the sample was allowed to use calculators on the test. Both genders and three ethnic groups (White, African American, and Asian American) benefitted about equally from being allowed to use calculators; Latinos benefitted slightly more than the other groups. Students who routinely used calculators on classroom mathematics tests were relatively advantaged on the calculator test. Test speededness was about the same whether or not students used calculators. Calculator effects on individual items ranged from positive through neutral to negative and could either increase or decrease the validity of an item as a measure of mathematical reasoning skills. Calculator effects could be either present or absent in both difficult and easy items     

Archetypal narratives in career counselling: a chaos theory application

This paper seeks to extend previous work on narrative career counselling by considering the role of plot within clients’ narratives. Seven archetypal narratives derived from the work of Booker (2004) are introduced that represent systems of meaning to provide insight into how individuals interpret their experience. These plots can be understood within the Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC) in terms of the attractors contained within the client narratives. Identifying the plots provides new insights into the nature of career development difficulties and how client stories may be reformulated.