Systematic Marketing Facilitates Optimal Customer Service: The Marketing Audit of a Rural Public Library System

This article presents a case study of a marketing audit of the Lee County Library System, a rural public library system located in southwest Georgia. Marketing audits are an underutilized but needed tool for public libraries. In this audit, the library system’s mission, goals, environments, community and employee demographics, and a strengths/weakness/opportunities/threats (SWOT) analysis were evaluated, resulting in several recommendations. These recommendations include a new mission statement, regular SWOT analyses, and potential market segments for targeted library services. Through this case study, the complexities, challenges, and opportunities unique to rural public libraries can be understood.     

Building a Foundation for Collection Management Decisions

Salisbury University and the University of Maryland, College Park, both undertook projects to evaluate the effectiveness of EBSCO Information Service’s EBSCONET® Usage Consolidation product and the usefulness of the extracted data for collection development decisions. The goals of implementation were to centralize the collection and analysis of e-resource usage data and to allow collection management librarians easy access to usage and cost per use data to aid in their decision making. The presenters discussed how staff at each institution populated Usage Consolidation and presented usage reports to collection managers; how collection managers responded to the data; and how they used the data to inform collection management decisions.     

The role and functionality of emotions in feedback at university: a qualitative study

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the role and functionality of emotions in feedback. In-depth interview data from students and lecturers at an Australian university are analysed using cognitive appraisal and prototype theory. Results suggest that students experience a range of positive and negative emotions in feedback contexts which function to address both achievement and relational concerns. Practical implications are identified.     

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL CONFERENCE ISSUE

This paper explores the process through which a group of preservice early childhood/early childhood special education students examined their own beliefs about quality teaching and learning within the context of multiple practicum experiences in diverse settings. Students' reflections and actions are illuminated through a careful individual and cross-case analysis of field-based journals.

For these students, different instructional contexts provoked distinct questions. With increased experiences in early childhood settings, participants became more comfortable with the uncomfortable, considered that there are multiple ways to teach and learn, and realized that their own understandings of quality teaching must be informed by the children they teach. They also learned the process of using critical reflection to refine and adapt teaching practices to meet the needs of young learners continuously.

Findings from this study provide a window into the complex and individualized nature of new early childhood teachers' learning processes. By analyzing their journals, we were able to examine how these experiences move new teachers toward understanding concepts that are central to quality performance.     

Kindling fires: examining the potential for cumulative learning in a Journalism curriculum

This study investigated context-dependency of learning as an indicator for students' potential to continue learning after graduation. We used Maton's theoretical concepts of ‘cumulative’ and ‘segmented’ learning, and ‘semantic gravity’, to look for context-independent learning in students' assessments in a Journalism curriculum. We postulated whether the curriculum constrained or enabled cumulative learning. Students' responses to assessments were coded by their degree of context-dependency, or semantic gravity. We found that, firstly, students are overly successful in producing context-dependent answers but struggle to deliver context-independent responses. Secondly, students were not effective when they used higher level knowledge principles without the foundation of lower level ones. Lastly, the marking criteria were encouraging markers to reward context-dependent answers over context-independent ones. This study has implications for educators interested in curriculum design that enables cumulative learning in discipline specific contexts.     

More than a place to teach: exploring the perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of mentor teachers

The purpose of this study was to shed light on mentor teachers’ perceptions of their roles and responsibilities and to contrast their understandings with a normative view of mentoring (Goldsberry, 1998 Goldsberry, L.F. 1998. “Teacher involvement in supervision”. In Handbook of research on school supervision, Edited by: Firth, G.R. and Pajak, E.F. 428–462. New York: Macmillan.  [Google Scholar]; Hawkey, 1997 Hawkey, K. 1997. Roles, responsibilities, and relationships in mentoring: A literature review and agenda for research. Journal of Teacher Education, 48: 325–335. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We hypothesized that the mentor teachers’ perceptions would likely differ from established conceptions of this construct, a difference that has significant implications for mentor preparation and university collaboration. Participants, 264 teachers who were serving as mentors to pre‐service teachers, were asked open‐ended questions designed to allow the mentors to describe the ways in which they envisioned their role. Follow‐up telephone interviews were conducted with 34 randomly selected mentor teachers to further determine the relative value they placed on different aspects of mentoring. The results of this research confirm that mentoring is a complex construct and that the perceptions held by mentors may be influenced by the kinds and quality of mentoring experiences they have had. Implications for the appropriate selection, preparation, and support of mentor teachers are discussed.     

Reconceptualise a dynamic framework of the learning constructs in higher education

This paper reconceptualised the interrelated learning constructs in higher education based on the Dynamic Systems Theory (DST). The university students' learning experience before, during and post the Emergency Online Learning (EOL) was investigated to explore the dynamic changes among the learning constructs in higher education. A case study of a Chinese university was conducted, and one hundred and ninety-three university students participated in the questionnaire. The data collected from this empirical research identify different hierarchical constructs of the conceptualised learning environment and reconceptualise the period of system reformation influenced by the EOL. The key findings include the identifications of the attractors and repellors framed by the DST and the impact on the changes in the learning constructs. The results of this paper contribute to further understanding of the university constructs' changes to better plan and support students' active learning in higher education.     

Examining teachers’ perceptions of K‐11 students’ 21st century skills and student performance

This study examined the relationship of teachers’ ratings of students’ 21st century skills (i.e., persistence, curiosity, externalizing and internalizing affect, and cognition) via the Human Behavior Rating Scale: Brief (HBRS: Brief; Eaves & Woods‐Groves, 2011) with student performance. Midwestern K‐11 teachers (n = 96) rated students (n = 1,689) via the HBRS: Brief and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1997). Students’ academic (i.e., standardized tests) and behavioral (i.e., office discipline referrals [ODRs] and absences) performance was compared with HBRS: Brief ratings. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that teachers’ ratings of students’ 21st century skills were related to the following: (a) Persistence with SDQ conduct problems, academic performance, and absences; (b) curiosity with SDQ emotional symptoms; (c) externalizing affect with SDQ conduct problems, academic performance, and ODRs; (d) internalizing affect with SDQ emotional symptoms and academic performance, and (e) cognition with academics.     

Measuring social capital among youth: applications in environmental education

Although critiqued for circular reasoning and lack of definitional and analytic clarity, social capital has garnered widespread interest in two areas relevant to environmental education (EE): the impact of family and community-level social capital on positive youth development and of community-level social capital in fostering collective action to manage natural resources. Although EE is normally considered for its value relative to environmental outcomes or natural capital, intergenerational, community, and other approaches to EE may also foster social capital. Drawing on Putnam’s definition of social capital, which emphasizes civic engagement, we developed and tested for reliability a survey to measure cognitive and structural attributes of social capital among youth. We conclude that although several attributes of our instrument are useful for use with youth aged 10–18 years in EE contexts, much more work needs to be done on conceptualizing and developing measures of social capital that are relevant to EE. Further, we suggest that social capital presents a framework for how EE programs can bring youth and adults together to create the conditions that enable collective action, as a complement to ongoing work in EE focusing on individual behaviors.