Predicting international students’ academic success... may not always be enough: Assessing Turkey’s Foreign Study Scholarship Program

In 1993, Turkey’s Higher Education Council (YOK) launched a program to sponsor thousands of students for graduate study abroad, in the hopes of building up a base of highly qualified, foreign educated faculty for 24 newly established universities nationwide. With an incoming new YOK administration in 1995, dramatic changes were made in the program’s selection procedures. One of the key elements of these changes was the inclusion of a high foreign language proficiency requirement, which served both to meet certain ideological goals of the new administration as well as presuming to reduce the high degree of student failure abroad. In addition to assessing the overall success of the scholarship program in light of the changes made, this study provides another look at the connection between language proficiency and academic success, with both qualitative and quantitative data collected from 23 ‘YOK scholars’. Although finding a positive relation between language proficiency and academic success, the study suggests that rather than having solved the scholarship program’s problems by imposing high language proficiency requirements, the new YOK administration actually reduced even further the program’s ability to successfully supply faculty to the new universities. Recommendations are made for the Turkish and similar foreign study programs.     

Educating students with FASD: linking policy,research and practice

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD ) is a prevalent neurodevelopmental disability with significant implications for learning and behaviour. International research suggests that the prevalence of FASD in school‐aged children is 2.3–6.3%. In this paper, we address the questions: (1) what is FASD ; (2) what is the prevalence of FASD in schools; (3) what is the impact of FASD ; and (4) why develop special FASD education strategies and programmes? We summarise the 18‐year history of W innipeg S chool D ivision's development of its FASD P rogramme of services, describe the specialised FASD classrooms and then present the results from a consensus‐generating workshop comprised of 36 FASD education professionals, with over 209 years of collective FASD education programme experience, who were asked to identify and reach consensus on best strategies and lessons learned in FASD education programmes. We then suggest that effectively educating children with FASD is critical to get right if positive educational outcomes are to be realised.     

Holland environments as reinforcement systems

Holland's (1973, 1985) theory of vocational choice stipulates that model environments seek toreinforce the characteristic predispositions and attitudes of their corresponding personality types. The results of this longitudinal study of the self-perceptions of more than 2,000 graduates from eight types of colleges and universities (Carnegie Commission, 1971) generally support the validity of this premise. For example, graduates prepared in investigative environments have higher intellectual self-esteem scores and those prepared in artistic environments have higher artistic self-esteem scores, when pre- and postcollege measures are controlled. These general patterns are consistent for graduates from the eight institutional types. The implications of these findings are discussed for those who study the intra- and interinstitutional diversity of colleges and universities and their differential impact on student developmental patterns.     

Citing as a sourcing practice: students’ citing self-selected online sources in their essays (Las citas como práctica del uso de las fuentes: las citas de fuentes en línea seleccionados por los estudiantes en sus trabajos)

ABSTRACT

This study examined upper secondary school students’ citations of self-selected online sources in their essays. Students (n = 140) conducted online inquiry about either effects of social media on people’s quality of life (SM) or allowance of genetic manipulation of organisms (GMO). Students, working either individually or in pairs, explored online sources with the help of a graphic organizer, after which they composed their essays. To capture the quality of citations identified in the essays, they were evaluated in terms of accuracy and richness of source features. Further, regression analysis was used to examine the effect of topic, grade level and work mode on the number and quality of citations. Results showed that students seldom cited sources in their essays, and when they did, citations were mostly accurate but less often rich in source features. When writing about SM, students most frequently cited media sources, while sources with ideological, political or religious motives were frequently cited in GMO essays. Students’ grades and work modes predicted the number of citations and number of accurate citations.     

Directed forgetting effects in pigeons: Remember cues initiate rehearsal

Pigeons were trained in a two-choice delayed matching-to-sample task with red and green hues. A brief postsample cue (a vertical or horizontal line) signaled whether the comparison stimuli would be presented or omitted on each trial. Comparison stimuli were always presented following the remember-cue (R-cue) trial, but never following the forget-cue (F-cue) and no-cue trials. In Experiment 1, matching accuracy on F-cue and no-cue trials was equivalent and was considerably inferior to accuracy on R-cue trials. In Experiment 2, the placement of the postsample cue was manipulated. Matching accuracy decreased as the R cue was delayed in the retention interval, but performance in the F-cue condition was not affected. These data indicate that the no-cue condition can function as an implicit F cue and that the R cue can function to initiate and maintain rehearsal.     

Rubrics: Design and Use in Science Teacher Education

Journal of Science Teacher Education -