Can Middle School Students with Serious Reading Difficulties Help Each Other and Learn Anything?

This investigation was intended to examine the effects of teaching middle school students with learning disabilities and mild mental retardation to tutor one another in reading comprehension strategies. All students were reading significantly below grade level and many students exhibited behavior problems in addition to their primary disability area. Students were randomly assigned to a tutoring or traditional reading instruction condition. Within the tutoring condition, students were matched into tutoring dyads, trained in the tutoring procedures, and taught specific reading comprehension strategies. Reciprocal tutoring was employed, such that students assumed roles of both tutor and tutee during daily reading periods. Performance on reading comprehension tests following tutoring yielded significant performance advantages for students involved in tutoring. Observational, survey, and interview data revealed that students enjoyed tutoring more than their traditional instruction, appeared to see the value and benefits of the tutoring, and wanted to include tutoring as part of their other classes, such as science and social studies. Findings are discussed with respect to the strengths and challenges associated with the use of tutoring to provide strategic instruction to students with special learning needs.     

Finding the right balance: campus involvement in the collections allocation process

Many libraries have sought the best approach to allocating the collections budget. “History plus increment” is the standard for many libraries in the allocation of any new dollars to collections budgets. Other libraries have identified factors that help make the process of disbursing new money more objective including counts of faculty and students, literature size and costs, and program changes on campus.The Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is striving toward a more open and understandable allocation process that uses an allocation formula, professional judgment of its librarians, and input from campus faculty and administration. Through this process, we work to achieve balance between formula and professional judgment, between decisions made outside the Library and within the Library, between competing disciplines and old and emerging fields for budget dollars.     

Instructing College Students on the Ethics of Information Use at the Reference Desk: A Guide and Literature Review

As educators and members of the academic community, reference librarians should take a proactive stance toward instructing students about the ethics of information use. The authors summarize the best practices found in the existing library literature, consider the context of ethical information use from a global perspective, and make an argument for the role of librarians. Our goal is to provide a guide for librarians attempting to successfully integrate ethical issues, such as intellectual property and academic integrity, into their reference instruction.     

Coming out,rolling over,and playing model: possibilities beyond the trope of queer students “at-risk”

In this article, I explore one lesbian teacher’s ethical dilemmas and resulting disappointment related to the lack of participation by queer students in the Gay Straight Alliance she helped to create. Her dilemmas hinge on the paradoxical subject position of queer teacher in tension with the “coming out imperative” and intersecting with discursive articulations of teacher-as-role model and queer students as a population “at-risk.” Grounded in scholarship that describes the discursive production of queer teacher and queer students, I explore the ways in which one group of queer students resist notions of “at-riskness” and the resulting impact on their teacher.     

Assessment of Consultation and Intervention Implementation: A Review of Conjoint Behavioral Consultation Studies

Reviews of treatment outcome literature indicate treatment integrity is not regularly assessed. In consultation, two levels of treatment integrity (i.e., consultant procedural integrity [CPI] and intervention treatment integrity [ITI]) provide relevant implementation data. Specifically, assessment of CPI and ITI are necessary to conclude (a) consultation is functionally related to consultee implementation behavior and (b) intervention implementation is functionally related to student outcomes. In this article, study characteristics and the presence of treatment integrity at both levels are examined in 21 studies utilizing Conjoint Behavioral Consultation, a model of consultation that includes multiple consultees. Results indicate that in approximately half of studies, CPI, ITI, or both are assessed and, when reported, treatment integrity is moderately high across both levels. However, there are distinct differences in the assessment and reporting of these levels of treatment integrity. Limitations and implications for consultation research and treatment integrity reporting are discussed.     

The Current State of Medical Education in Chinese Medical Schools

Today's doctor is as much a humanist as a scientist. Medical schools have responded to this change by introducing a variety of courses, most notably those concerning the humanities and ethics. Thus far, no one has examined the extent of use of these subjects in Chinese medical schools. The goal of this study is to determine how many and in what way Chinese medical schools use the humanities and ethics in training future physicians. We surveyed thirty-two Chinese medical schools covering each geographic region of China at the Twelfth Medical Education Conference for China Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan on a variety of topics related to the humanities and ethics. Thirty-one (96.9 percent) Chinese medical schools offer courses in the humanities, and all thirty-two (100.0 percent) Chinese medical schools surveyed offer courses on ethics. Of the thirty-one universities offering humanities courses, twenty-six (83.9 percent) have five or more humanities courses, and of the thirty-two universities offering ethics courses, twenty-six (81.3 percent) have five or more ethics courses. At ten (32.3 percent) universities, all humanities courses are compulsory, at one (3.2 percent) university, all humanities courses are elective, and eighteen (58.1 percent) universities have both compulsory and elective humanities courses. At eighteen (56.3 percent) universities, all medical ethics courses are compulsory, at one (3.1 percent) university all medical ethics courses are elective, and thirteen (40.6 percent) universities have both compulsory and elective medical ethics courses. Educators at Chinese medical schools have embraced the humanities and medical ethics as fundamental components of their curricula as well as for elective study.     

Predictors of Spelling Ability in Children With Down Syndrome

This study examined whether there are processing differences between children with Down syndrome (DS; n = 22; 7 years 8 months to 13 years 10 months) and typically developing children (TD; n = 22; 6 years 6 months to 10 years 10 months), matched for receptive vocabulary. The TD children performed better on tests of nonverbal intelligence (matrices), phonological awareness (sound deletion), and phonological short-term memory (digit span), as well as spelling accuracy (30 single words). Separate regression analyses revealed that nonverbal intelligence and phonological awareness were the best predictors of spelling accuracy for TD children, whereas receptive vocabulary and phonological short-term memory were the best predictors for children with DS. An examination of spelling errors suggested that although children with DS do use some phonological awareness during spelling, deficits in short-term memory appear to limit success. The implications of these results for intervention studies are briefly discussed.     

Investigating the use of student perception data for teacher reflection and classroom improvement

This article reports a study involving: (1) developing and validating a learning environment instrument, (2) investigating whether reflection on feedback generated using the instrument led to improvements in the learning environment and (3) examining how teachers used the feedback. For the new learning environment instrument, validity was supported for a sample of 10,345 secondary students over 3 years (2,042 students in 2008, 4,467 in 2009 and 3,836 in 2010). To investigate whether reflection on feedback from this instrument led to improvements in the learning environment, multivariate analysis of variance and effect sizes were used to examine pre–post differences. Statistically significant improvements in students’ views of the learning environment were found for 8 of the 11 scales. Finally, we examined how teachers used the student feedback. Of the 459 teachers, 45 focus teachers used the feedback as part of a formal action research approach involving entries in reflective journals, written reports, discussions and participation at a forum. These data were analysed to provide an overview of the ways in which the information was used, and to provide a more detailed account of the journey of one of the teachers.