Immersion,Reflection, Failure: Teaching Graduate Students to Teach Writing Online

ABSTRACT

A common challenge facing those who prepare graduate students to teach writing online is the need to help those students connect online writing instruction (OWI) theory with their classroom practice. The authors present how graduate students are prepared to teach writing online at three universities and then synthesize those approaches to highlight three principles that can guide effective OWI preparation for graduate students in any program: immersion, reflection, and failure.     

Possible selves of older adults entering a life plan community

This study examined the possible selves, goals, and perceptions of “time left” of older adults soon after they entered a life plan community as independent living residents. There has been little research regarding the effect of this life transition on older adults’ self-concept, hopes, and fears. Eighteen residents participated in one-hour personal interviews about their reasons for moving, their possible selves, goals, and perception of time left. Time left was measured in two ways: residents were asked to estimate the number of years they had left and were also asked to mark, on a novel visual analogue measure, how “limited” or “expanded” their time left felt to them. Residents were found to have an average of 6.18 possible selves in total, with more hoped-for possible selves (m = 4.39) than feared possible selves (m = 1.78). The majority of the goals were maintenance goals, followed by self-improvement goals and then avoidance goals. Residents estimated that they would live for 11.64 more years, and the majority reported that this felt like “a lot of time.” Based on their responses to the novel visual analogue measure of time left, two-thirds of the participants reported that their time left felt “expanded” rather than “limited.” Consistent with predictions based on socioemotional selectivity theory, participants with longer subjective life expectancies reported more self-improvement goals and more hoped-for selves. Participants identified more possible selves than documented in previous studies, including almost twice as many hoped-for possible selves.     

Re-inhabiting place in contemporary rural communities: Moving toward a critical pedagogy of place

Heather Zimmerman and Jennifer Weible’s (Cult Stud Sci Educ, 2016) use of place-based pedagogy in high school science education honors their participants’ lived experiences and the rural communities from which they come. They raise an unresolved tension in their findings: Why did the youth in their study, who clearly learned a lot about the local watershed, not feel empowered or knowledgeable enough to propose collective, action-oriented strategies to address the poor quality of the water? We use this tension as a focus point of our response, drawing on one author’s (Huffling’s) biography and David Gruenewald’s (Educ Res 32:3–12, 2003. doi: 10.3102/0013189X032004003) critical pedagogy of place to re-imagine the curriculum that Zimmerman and Weible describe. We provide strategies that align with Gruenewald’s (2003) constructs of decolonization and reinhabitation that could promote youths’ collective empowerment.     

An account of practice: employing drawings and stories to enable reflective learning

Facilitating reflection for personal growth in a business context requires careful thought and planning. As a learning process, Business-Driven Action Learning (BDAL) has two points of focus. It aims to firstly identify and make recommendations regarding a business challenge, whist secondly facilitating potentially significant individual personal learning and growth. The research reported in this account of practice focused on personal learning by exploring the potential for individuals to experience transformative learning during a BDAL process. During the research I used a number of methods including hand-drawn images and in-depth interviews to enable the writing of interpretive stories. Findings revealed that participants found reflection during and after the BDAL beneficial. They gained insights into what they learnt, what changed since the BDAL experience and also what they still need to focus on. The findings have practical implications for the action learning facilitator of BDAL during management development programmes. One of the ways action learning facilitators can initiate the reflection process of new participants is to share the experience of previous participants. ‘Sandy’s interpretive story’, contained in this article, is such an example and includes hand-drawn images of her learning journey. I argue that the use of interpretative stories helps new participants understand programme challenges and stimulates their individual learning journey.     

Tracking and the effects of school‐related attitudes on the language achievement of boys and girls

In this study we examined whether the underachievement of boys in language at the end of secondary education is related to school‐related attitudes. Data were drawn from the LOSO project, a longitudinal research project in secondary education. The results showed that there were gender differences in language achievement in favour of girls in the lower tracks, but not in the highest track. The underachievement of boys was associated with boys’ less positive relationships with teachers, less positive well‐being at school and less positive attitude towards schoolwork. Furthermore, the results showed that—in the lower tracks—boys who were the least attentive in the classroom, the least interested in learning tasks and the least motivated towards learning tasks achieved better than expected. Post‐hoc analyses revealed that these are the more intelligent boys. Possible explanations of the demotivation of the more intelligent boys in the lower tracks are discussed.     

Travels in extreme social mobility: how first-in-family students find their way into and through medical education

ABSTRACT

Higher education is understood as essential to enabling social mobility. Research and policy have centred on access to university, but recently attention has turned to the journey of social mobility itself – and its costs. Long-distance or ‘extreme’ social mobility journeys particularly require analysis. This paper examines journeys of first-in-family university students in the especially high-status degree of medicine, through interviews with 21 students at an Australian medical school. Three themes are discussed: (1) the roots of participants’ social mobility journeys; (2) how sociocultural difference is experienced and negotiated within medical school; and (3) how participants think about their professional identities and futures. Students described getting to medical school ‘the hard way’, and emphasised the different backgrounds and attitudes of themselves and their wealthier peers. Many felt like ‘imposters’, using self-deprecating language to highlight their lack of ‘fit’ in the privileged world of medicine. However, such language also reflected resistance to middle-class norms and served to create solidarity with community of origin, and, importantly, patients. Rather than narratives of loss, students’ stories reflect a tactical refinement of self and incorporation of certain middle-class attributes, alongside an appreciation of the worth their ‘difference’ brings to their new destination, the medical profession.     

Temporal Contingency as an Independent Component of Parenting Behavior

Several theoretical conceptions emphasize the importance of prompt responses to infant's signals in providing them with early causal experiences. The present paper examines if a maternal tendency toward prompt responses can be identified by distributional analyses of maternal response latencies and if this response tendency can be shown for different communicative channels (in verbal/vocal, nonverbal, intermodal communication). In addition, the paper focuses on the relation between the temporal contingency of maternal behavior and measures of maternal interactional quality. Interactional sequences of 54 mother and 3-month-old infant dyads were analyzed using microanalytical assessment techniques and ratings of interactional quality. Distributional analyses of maternal expressions during face-to-face encounters revealed that promptness of responses toward infant signals with a short latency is a typical response tendency in maternal behavior. There are, however, individual differences between mothers, indicating that this response tendency is expressed in different communicative channels by individual mothers. This is shown by low correlations between the contingency indices of different communicative channels. The relation between contingency and rated indicators of interactional quality turned out to be rather small, indicating that maternal contingency may be conceptualized to contribute an independent factor to the quality of maternal interactional behavior.     

Vital pathways for hospital librarians: present and future roles

Objectives:

The research objectives were to (1) describe the current and future roles of hospital librarians and the challenges they face and (2) find evidence supporting the hypothesis that librarians are essential to hospitals in achieving the organizations'' mission-critical goals.

Method:

The authors used results from a previous research study that identified the five organizational mission-critical goals important to hospital administrators and then searched the literature and solicited examples from hospital librarians to describe the librarian''s role in helping hospitals achieve these goals.

Results:

The literature supports the hypothesis that hospital librarians play important roles in the success of the hospital. Librarians support quality clinical care, efficient and effective hospital operations, continuing education for staff, research and innovation, and patient, family, and community health information needs.

Conclusion:

Hospital librarians fulfill many mission-critical roles in today''s hospital, providing the right information at the right time in a variety of ways to enhance hospital and medical staff effectiveness, optimize patient care, improve patient outcomes, and increase patient and family satisfaction with the hospital and its services. Because hospital librarians and their services provide an excellent return on investment for the hospital and help the hospital keep its competitive edge, hospital staff should have access to the services of a professional librarian.

Highlights

• A review of the literature supports the hypothesis that services of the professional librarian result in:
  • enhanced staff effectiveness,
  • optimized patient care,
  • improved patient outcomes, and
  • increased patient and family satisfaction with the hospital and its services.

Implications

• Because hospital librarians and their services provide an excellent return on investment for the hospital and help the hospital keep its competitive edge, hospital staff should have access to the services of a professional librarian.