HLM Behind the Curtain: Unveiling Decisions Behind the Use and Interpretation of HLM in Higher Education Research

Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) has become increasingly popular in the higher education literature, but there is significant variability in the current approaches to the conducting and reporting of HLM. The field currently lacks a general consensus around important issues such as the number of levels of analysis that are important to include and how much variance should be accounted for at each level in order for the HLM analysis to have practical significance (Dedrick et al., Rev Educ Res 79:69–102, 2009). The purpose of this research is to explore the use of a 3-level HLM model, appropriate contextualizing of results of HLM, and the interpretation of HLM results that resonates with practice. We used an example of a 3-level model from the National Study of Living Learning Programs to highlight the practical issues that arise in the interpretation of HLM within a higher education context.     

Supporting Australian Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal nursing students using mentoring circles: an action research study

Attempts to recruit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students into nursing degrees have made minimal impact on the number of registered nurses working in Australia's healthcare sector. Yet increasing the number of Indigenous nurses remains one of the most important objectives in strategies to close the health gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Poor retention of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in a Bachelor of Nursing Science degree offered in far north Queensland, Australia, indicates the need for a different approach to support and retain Indigenous students. This action research study used a decolonizing methodology and was conducted at a satellite university campus in a remote Torres Strait Island community. Researchers trialled the use of a mentoring circle to support and retain nursing students and interviewed mentors and mentees about their experiences. Grounded theory methods were used to analyse the data. Findings indicated a growth in participant students’ emotional intelligence as a result of participating in a mentoring circle. Students developed confidence, formed a group identity, better-negotiated the university environment, became more effective communicators and supported one another through difficulties. The mentoring circle model improved students' university experience and its use should be considered by tertiary educators working with Indigenous students.     

Emotional Climate and Behavioral Management during Sleep Time in Early Childhood Education Settings

The majority of children cease napping between 3 and 5 years of age yet, internationally, the allocation of a sleep time during the day for children of this age remains a practice in many early childhood education (ECE) settings. These dual circumstances present a disjuncture between children's sleep needs and center practices, that may cause conflict for staff, increase stress for children and escalate negative emotional climate in the room. Testing this hypothesis requires observation of both the emotional climate and behavioral management used in ECE rooms that extends into the sleep time. This study was the first to apply the Classroom Assessment and Scoring System (CLASS) Pre-K (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008) to observe the emotional climate and behavioral management during sleep time. Pilot results indicated that the CLASS Pre-K functioned reliably to measure emotional climate and behavioral management in sleep time. However, new sleep-specific examples of the dimensions used were developed, to help orient fieldworkers to the CLASS Pre-K rating system in the sleep time context. The CLASS was then used to assess emotional climate and behavior management between the non-sleep and sleep time sessions, in 113 ECE rooms in Queensland, Australia. In these rooms 2.114 children were observed. Of these children, 71% did not sleep at any point during the allotted sleep times. There was a significant drop in emotional climate and behavioral management between the non-sleep and sleep-time sessions. Furthermore, the duration of mandated sleep time (a period of time where no activities are provided to non-sleeping children) accounted for significant independent variance in the observed emotional climate during sleep-time. The CLASS Pre-K presents a valuable tool to assess the emotional climate and behavior management during sleep-time and draws attention to the need for further studies of sleep time in ECE settings.     

Journalism

Howard Simons and Joseph A. Califano, Jr. (eds.) The Media and the Law (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1976---$4.95, paper with hardbound edition available)

Oscar H. Gandy, et al. Media and Government: An Annotated Bibliography (Institute for Communisation Research, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305--- apparently free on request, paper)

George S. Rage, et al. New Strategies for Public Affairs Reporting: Investigation, Interpretation, and Research (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976---price not given)

William A. Lucas and Karen B. Possner's Television News and Local Awareness: A Retrospective Look (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corp. R-1858-MF, 1975---$5.00, paper)

Judith S. Gelfman's Women in Television News (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976---$7.95)     

General Media

David Manning White, ed. The Great Contemporary Issues: Popular Culture (New York: Arno Press, 1975—$35.00)

Stan Lee's Son of Origins of Marvel Comics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975—$10.95/6.95)

Les Daniels' Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (New York: Scribners', 1975—$12.95)     

Two Losses in the American Slavic Book World,Irena Szwede and Charles Gribble

ABSTRACT

The piece is a brief obituary for two American Slavic book people, Irena Szwede and Charles Gribble. Irena Szwede co-founded and managed Szwede Slavic Books, a bookstore that was also a library vendor. Charles Gribble founded and directed Slavica Publishers, a major publisher of scholarly monographs and journals in Slavic studies.     

Report on Travel to Former Yugoslavia,April 17–May 7, 2008

The author traveled primarily to Sarajevo, Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Skopje, Macedonia. She attended the 4th International Convention of Slavicist Librarians in Sarajevo and visited the Sarajevo Book Fair. In both capitals she met with book vendors and visited bookstores and libraries. She also learned that travel between the successor states is more complicated now than before the breakup of close Yugoslavia.     

The Staging of Agency in Girls Gone Wild

This paper addresses the ambivalence produced by Girls Gone Wild (GGW) as both text and social practice by interrogating the ways in which it functions hegemonically by staging an effect of agency. I draw on Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque as a means to examine how contradictory spatio-temporal contexts of GGW function as spaces that offer the opportunity to momentarily transgress—yet simultaneously reify—white, bourgeois norms of femininity. The videos reinforce a neoliberalist mentality of personal responsibility through the inclusion of the consent—and dissent—processes on camera. After analyzing how postfeminist discourses emphasizing “individual choice” justify GGW as a mode of female empowerment, I turn to a complementary textual analysis of GGW's role-reversal counterpart, Guys Gone Wild (2004), in an effort to show the ways in which this “mirror image” text ultimately reinforces the structure of exploitation in the original.