Lassoing the Licensing Beast: How Electronic Resources Librarians Can Build Competency and Advocate for Wrangling Electronic Content Licensing

The role electronic resources librarians (ERLs) have in licensing electronic content is the most relevant in the breadth of an ERLs core responsibilities. While ERLs are rarely lawyers in addition to being librarians, the role they play in educating stakeholders, negotiating with publishers and vendors, and crafting understanding of licensing terms is integral for the success of a rapidly growing and changing electronic collections environment. Often, new ERLs have to learn these skills on the job. Discussed are tools and resources for new ERLs to build their electronic content licensing competency and insight on how to educate to advocate for the ERLs role in licensing.     

Eligibility and classification decisions in educational settings: Issuing “Passports” in a state of confusion

Eligibility and classification decisions have become an integral part of the American educational system, but the process of making these decisions remains poorly understood. Subjects for this investigation of this decision-making process were 223 educational professionals. Each was given referral and assessment information reflecting average performance for a hypothetical student and asked to make decisions about that student. In their decisions, 51% declared the student eligible for special services; 61% indicated the presence of mental retardation, learning disabilities, and/or emotional disturbance. Several subjects indicated eligibility for services, but did not classify, or indicated ineligibility for services, but classified the student. Learning disabilities was the most popular classification. Student characteristics and the subjects' professional roles and knowledge of assessment/ measurement principles affected decisions made; however, greater training and knowledge did not lead to significantly better decisions. It is apparent that more care must be taken by decision makers in the use and interpretation of assessment information.     

Learning to Collaborate: General and Special Educators in Teacher Education

One of the foremost challenges for K–12 teachers is to provide relevant learning experiences in an environment of increasing accountability and student diversity. This balance is particularly consequential for students with disabilities who rely on special and general education teachers to ensure access to and success within the general curriculum. Teacher collaboration has been viewed as a critical part of the equation to help meet the needs of those learners. In this article, we present a case study from a course codeveloped and cotaught by secondary and special education faculty working in a teacher preparation program. Findings indicate that the teacher candidates with whom we worked showed a more complex sense of collaboration and recognition of critical elements of successful collaborative partnerships at the conclusion of the course.     

pth Moment exponential stability of impulsive stochastic functional differential equations and application to control problems of NNs

This paper investigates the pth moment exponential stability of impulsive stochastic functional differential equations. Some sufficient conditions are obtained to ensure the pth moment exponential stability of the equilibrium solution by the Razumikhin method and Lyapunov functions. Based on these results, we further discuss the pth moment exponential stability of generalized impulsive delay stochastic differential equations and stochastic Hopfield neural networks with multiple time-varying delays from the impulsive control point of view. The results derived in this paper improve and generalize some recent works reported in the literature. Moreover, we see that impulses do contribute to the stability of stochastic functional differential equations. Finally, two numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the results obtained.     

“Having it All” at Sleep's Expense: The Forced Choice of Participants in Advanced Placement Courses and International Baccalaureate Programs

The gifted can suffer from too many demands on their time and attention. This qualitative study tested the theory that advanced placement (AP) and international baccalaureate (IB) participants may feel forced to choose between academic success and social acceptance. The results, however, did not support the theory. Not only did gifted students not consider the necessity of choice between academic success and productive navigation in the social environment, they believed that they could, and should, maintain both high levels of academic success and healthy social lives. They reported that they could only have it all, both social and academic success, at the expense of sleep.     

Stringtern: springboarding or stringing along young interns’ careers?

Young people are repeatedly promised that internships will pave the way to the career of their dreams by providing the ‘hands-on experience’ necessary to differentiate themselves in a fierce job market. However, in many industries, internships – and increasingly unpaid internships – have become the obligatory norm. Young people quickly learn that the internship is not an opportunity, but rather a ‘necessary evil’ that, for many, strings them along in the hope that it may lead to a less precarious paid opportunity. In this article, our findings are based on 12 in-depth interviews with young female interns in the creative industries based in Toronto and New York City. Our participants recognise that in the current economic climate, they need to ‘pay their dues’; however, they often enter into a system of sequential – or string – internships, and become, what we label, a stringtern. In an evolving internship market in North America, we develop a typology of internships including (1) paid/underpaid/unpaid, (2) academic credit/not-for-credit, (3) for-profit/non-profit, (4) full-time/part-time and (5) on-site/off-site to develop a common language to critically analyse the culture of internships. By valuing young people’s perspectives as gleaned from our interviews, the typology aims to provide a more nuanced way to approach the complexity of unpaid internships and the transition from education to the workforce. Furthermore, three interrelated implications of the culture of internships are identified: internship as a free trial, internship as conveyor-belt labour and internship as displacing paid employment.     

Crafting the message: Controlling content on agency Web sites

While much research has focused on the new opportunities that government Web sites offer for greater citizen involvement and improved agency efficiency, less attention has been given to agency decisions about what to post on these Web sites. Here we use interviews with content managers in seven federal agencies to investigate the political and institutional influences behind decisions about Web content. We analyze the approval processes for new content and the emerging governance structures for evidence of greater centralization and political control or greater decentralization and autonomy for Web posters. In the end, it appears that institutional factors persist to influence content governance.     

A Gendered Perspective on Access to the Information Infrastructure

This article provides a gendered perspective on access to the emerging information infrastructure. It examines access issues as they affect women; discusses public policy work on gender equity to national information infrastructure initiatives; and provides recommended reforms towards increasing gender equity to the information infrastructure.     

Technical adequacy of tests used by professionals in simulated decision making

A critical issue in current assessment efforts is the widespread use of technically inadequate tests. This study looked at the technical adequacy of tests chosen by 159 school professionals during a computer simulation of placement decision making. An analysis of the results suggested that initially school personnel tended to select devices with technically adequate reliability and validity as often as they selected devices with inadequate reliability and validity; however, as decision making continued, technically inadequate devices were selected more often. More emphasis on the importance of technically adequate assessment devices is needed in training school professionals.     

The Social Cognition of Gifted Adolescents

This paper reviews major research findings on social cognition in gifted adolescents. We discuss interpersonal and intrapersonal perceptions of giftedness (i.e., how gifted students view themselves, and how they perceive others’ views of them), the social coping strategies of this population (e.g., denying and hiding one's giftedness, conforming to mask giftedness, and helping others), and the gender, age, and self-concept differences shown in strategy choice when interacting with others. Results suggest that both American and Chinese gifted students employ social coping strategies to manage the visibility of their abilities in social situations, and there is a consistent link between coping strategy and self-concepts; but the findings with regard to social cognitive strategies, themselves, are conflicting. Implications of these findings and recommendations are presented.