“I Just Want to Be Myself”: Adolescents With Disabilities Who Identify as a Sexual or Gender Minority

Abstract

Adolescents with disabilities who identify as a sexual or gender minority are at high risk for negative school experiences and poor outcomes, including peer rejection, bullying, and dropping out. Using an intersectionality framework, this study examined how multiple marginalized identities influence sense of self and school experience for this population. Findings reveal a complex picture of lived experiences and support the need for important changes in school practices.     

‘You're not able to breathe’: conceptualizing the intersectionality of early career,gender and crisis

Drawing on data from nine focus groups in four countries, I argue for the need to develop a research agenda around the intersectionality of early career, gender and crisis. I first give a brief explanation of the background, methodology and limitations of the study. Second, I lay out some key conceptualizations and their own limitations and then trace some important theoretical intersections that will frame the discussion. Third, to bring this intersectionality to life, I employ participant examples from the focus groups. In the first section of the analysis of the participant responses, I examine how crisis affects the identities of early-career academics. In the second section of the analysis, I connect these questions of identities with early-career academics' relationship with higher education (HE) pedagogies, most likely well known by the reader as a marginalized aspect of academics' work in HE institutions. Finally, I conclude with some responses to these dilemmas.     

The Library: Big Data’s Boomtown

Since 2012, nearly every sector has developed a fascination with the seemingly new discovery of Big Data and its unprecedented capabilities to fuel analytic breakthroughs. It is clear that the use of Big Data as an information resource will continue to become more prevalent as it is employed in academic research and data-driven decision making, and even emerges as a vehicle for government transparency. This article reviews the emergence and potentials of Big Data, describes the policies fueling the current data surge, and discusses the impact on libraries. As libraries evolve to provide more data services, there is an opportunity for librarians to become experts and authorities in the data age.     

Building a Virtual Reference Shelf

While many libraries have access to an extensive amount of quality virtual reference titles through platforms such as Gale Virtual Reference, individual titles are often invisible to users. At the University of Montevallo, building a Virtual Reference Shelf (VRS) allowed us to make e-reference titles more accessible for patrons. We constructed our VRS using LibGuides and our existing collections of virtual reference books. This article will discuss various aspects of creating and using the VRS, including designing, marketing, information literacy instruction, assessment, and future directions. The information is based on a presentation at the Mississippi State University eResources & Emerging Technologies Summit on August 2, 2013.     

Learning about Politics From The Daily Show: The Role of Viewer Orientation and Processing Motivations

Although late-night comedy and satirical news programs like The Daily Show have been recognized as important sources of political information, prior research suggests that viewers gain only a limited amount of political knowledge from watching these programs. Drawing from uses and gratification theory and extant research on political information processing, this study examines whether learning from The Daily Show depends on whether viewers orient to the message as news or as entertainment. Results from an online experiment suggest that viewers who orient to a segment from The Daily Show as news or as a mix of news and entertainment invest more mental effort and subsequently learn more than viewers who have a purely entertainment orientation. Further, among viewers with a purely entertainment orientation, providing them with an explicit informational-processing goal increases the amount of mental effort and learning relative to viewers who are given no explicit viewing objective.     

Graphic symbols as "the mind on paper": links between children's interpretive theory of mind and symbol understanding

Children gradually develop interpretive theory of mind (iToM)—the understanding that different people may interpret identical events or stimuli differently. The present study tested whether more advanced iToM underlies children’s recognition that map symbols’ meanings must be communicated to others when symbols are iconic (resemble their referents). Children (6–9 years; N = 80) made maps using either iconic or abstract symbols. After accounting for age, intelligence, vocabulary, and memory, iToM predicted children’s success in communicating symbols’ meaning to a naïve map‐user when mapping tasks involved iconic (but not abstract) symbols. Findings suggest children’s growing appreciation of alternative representations and of the intentional assignment of meaning, and support the contention that ToM progresses beyond mastery of false belief.     

Supplementing literacy instruction with a media-rich intervention: Results of a randomized controlled trial

This study investigates whether a curriculum supplement organized as a sequence of teacher-led literacy activities using digital content from public educational television programs can improve early literacy outcomes of low-income preschoolers. The study sample was 436 children in 80 preschool classrooms in California and New York. Preschool teachers were randomly assigned to implement either a 10-week media-rich early literacy intervention that employed clips from Sesame Street, Between the Lions, and SuperWhy! or to a comparison condition. The media-rich literacy supplement had positive impacts (+0.20 ≤ d ≤ +0.55) on children's ability to recognize letters, sounds of letters and initial sounds of words, and children's concepts of story and print. The study findings show the potential for incorporating literacy content from public media programming into curriculum supplements supported by professional development to impact early literacy outcomes of low-income children.     

The Underlying Factors of Word Reading Rate

The discovery of the acceleration phenomenon and the contribution of reading rate as an independent variable to the quality of the reading process brought about a systematic research project that examined the underlying factors of word reading rate. Word reading requires processing information in the visual and auditory modalities and relies on word recognition skills such as phonological and orthographic decoding. Therefore, it is believed that speed of processing of some subset of the above sub-processes affects word-reading rate. By using experimental manipulations relying on both electrophysiological (ERPs) and behavioral measures, the sub-processes that are activated in word reading can be distinguished and shown to differentiate between the early perceptual, the central cognitive, and the motoric stages of activation. Results indicate that word reading rate is related to basic speed of processing in the modalities activated during the reading process. However, the processing level within each modality that contributes to self-paced and fast word reading rate differs according to age and the efficiency of reading skills.     

Implementation of a Curriculum-Integrated Computer Game for Introducing Scientific Argumentation

Argumentation has been emphasized in recent US science education reform efforts (NGSS Lead States 2013; NRC 2012), and while existing studies have investigated approaches to introducing and supporting argumentation (e.g., McNeill and Krajcik in Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 45(1), 53–78, 2008; Kang et al. in Science Education, 98(4), 674–704, 2014), few studies have investigated how game-based approaches may be used to introduce argumentation to students. In this paper, we report findings from a design-based study of a teacher’s use of a computer game intended to introduce the claim, evidence, reasoning (CER) framework (McNeill and Krajcik 2012) for scientific argumentation. We studied the implementation of the game over two iterations of development in a high school biology teacher’s classes. The results of this study include aspects of enactment of the activities and student argument scores. We found the teacher used the game in aspects of explicit instruction of argumentation during both iterations, although the ways in which the game was used differed. Also, students’ scores in the second iteration were significantly higher than the first iteration. These findings support the notion that students can learn argumentation through a game, especially when used in conjunction with explicit instruction and support in student materials. These findings also highlight the importance of analyzing classroom implementation in studies of game-based learning.