Interpersonal attraction and religious identification: a comparative analysis of Muslims and Hindus in India

This study compared whether an individual is more likely to perceive interpersonal attraction toward a member of his/her own or a different religious group. Self-identified Hindus (N=526) and self-identified Muslims (N=301) in India participated in the study. Results indicate members of a religious group (Hindus and Muslims) are significantly more likely to perceive physical, social, and task attraction for members of their own religious group than for individuals from another religious group. These results support an ethnic group vitality and in-group/out-group dichotomy.     

Sustainable Procurement: Integrating Classroom Learning with University Sustainability Programs

Organizations are facing increased pressure from various stakeholders to address issues of sustainability, resulting in a growing demand for sustainability education and training. Procurement groups remain the key drivers of many sustainability‐related strategies, placing pressure on universities to integrate sustainability concepts into the business curriculum. This article describes a replicable educational model that allows students to learn about sustainable procurement while concurrently promoting sustainability within the university community.     

Exploring perceived support of postgraduate medical science research students

There is still much to learn about the support required by postgraduate research students, across academic disciplines, to facilitate successful completion of a research degree. The primary aim of this study was to explore postgraduate medical science research students’ perceptions of academic and mentoring support at different stages during their degree programme. A second aim was to explore the feasibility and acceptability of peer mentoring as a strategy to enhance student support in this population. A mixed method study design was used. Students first completed an online questionnaire, which was then supplemented with focus group discussion to explore emergent findings in greater depth. The main results indicated that the nature and quality of academic supervision support have a significant influence on research student training and development. ‘Functional’ and ‘relationship development’ concepts of supervisory styles were highlighted as important aspects to perceived support in this research population. The main facilitators to enhance academic support were effective communication, project planning and timely feedback. There was a high degree of acceptability for a peer mentoring programme as a complementary approach to enhance student support. Peer mentoring psychosocial functions such as friendship, counselling and career guidance were considered potentially beneficial to enhancing student support. Students also discussed peer coaching as central to their learning and research skill development. This work is a useful starting point to explore perceptions of research student support in the target population. Further work is required to develop strategies to enhance student support in academic practice.     

Governing knowledge in the scientific community: Exploring the role of retractions in biomedicine

Although the validity of knowledge is critical to scientific progress, substantial concerns exist regarding the governance of knowledge production. While research errors are as relevant to the knowledge economy as defects are to the manufacturing economy, mechanisms to identify and signal “defective” or false knowledge are poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate one such institution - the system of scientific retractions. We analyze the universe of peer-reviewed scientific articles retracted from the biomedical literature between 1972-2006 and comparing with a matched control sample in order to identify the correlates, timing, and causal impact of scientific retractions. This effort provides insight into the workings of a distributed, peer-based system for the governance of validity in scientific knowledge. Our findings suggest that attention is a key predictor of retraction - retracted articles arise most frequently among highly-cited articles. The retraction system is expeditious in uncovering knowledge that is ever determined to be false (the mean time to retraction is less than two years) and democratic (retraction is not systematically affected by author prominence). Lastly, retraction causes an immediate, severe, and long-lived decline in future citations. Conditional on the obvious limitation that we cannot measure the absolute amount of false science in circulation, these results support the view that distributed governance systems can be designed to uncover false knowledge relatively swiftly and to mitigate the costs that false knowledge for future generations of producers.     

Measuring ESL readers’ ability to apply reasoning in reading: a validity study of the TOEFL reading comprehension subtest

This paper reports the results of an attempt to measure English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ability to apply reasoning in reading. The elicitation instrument was an experimental test which was developed from a model of reading comprehension based upon cognitive activities which Piaget referred to as concrete operations. The experimental test delineated Piaget's concrete operations in prose text and set them against difficulty criteria. The experimental test which measured the ability to apply reasoning in reading and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) were administered to a pool of adult ESL subjects. The results indicated that the TOEFL reading comprehension subtest does not measure the ability to apply reasoning in reading; thus, its validity as a measure of reading is in doubt. Significant effects were also shown for the paragraph types and the item types in the experimental test. The items based on the classification paragraphs were significantly more difficult than the items based on the serial paragraphs. In like manner, the items based on the multiplication paragraphs were significantly more difficult than the items based on the addition paragraphs. And finally, the intension questions which concerned the properties of a class were significantly more difficult than the extension questions which dealt with the members of classes. The results of this study indicate a need for further, increased attention to the measurement of reading to solve problems in ESL reading assessment and to the effects of the different structural organizations of ideas (e.g., addition, classification, multiplication, and series) and the interrelations of ideas on the comprehension process. The motivation for this line of research derives from the pragmatic interest of those researchers concerned with the communicative aspects of a text and the manner in which authors organize their ideas. Current research is beginning to explain the complex interaction between text structure and the reader's processing of such structure which further explicates the comprehension process.     

Learning in and beyond school gardens with cyber-physical systems

This design-based research study considers the learner-generated design and refinement of a school garden. We report one enactment of the Connected Gardening project in order to illuminate and understand how a fourth-grade class organizes and refines its garden plot using observations of the physical environment and evaluations of data from a networked digital probe. By examining the ways individuals, materials, and activities influence, and are influenced by, one another, our qualitative analysis characterizes interplay among an ecosystem, a garden and graphical representations of environmental indicators in real time and over time. We consider the novel affordances of such a cyber-physical systems for supporting participatory culture within yet beyond school classrooms.