Real‐fiction versus historical reality: Rhetorical purification in “kent state”—the docudrama

This essay analyzes the ways in which Kent State, the made‐for‐TV docudrama, purified the image of William Knox Schroeder‐one of the four students killed on May 4, 1970, by Ohio National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. The author was a boyhood friend of Schroeder, his roommate at Kent State University at the time of his death, and an observer of many of the major events of the Kent State affair. This essay views the making of a docudrama as a complex problem to be solved and characterizes a docudramatist as a less‐than‐perfect decision maker. Also, this essay views Kent State as a real‐fiction through which the act of rhetorical purification was accomplished. The paper discusses the docudrama's efforts in this regard by analyzing important scenes in which inaccuracies are presented in order to achieve the purification of Schroeder's image.     

Quality Teaching and Learning in Australian and South African Universities: Comparing policies and practices

Over the last decade universities across the world have been grappling with quality and quality assurance issues. In several countries national policies on higher education quality assurance have been evolving, mostly with the purpose of putting external systems of quality assurance in place. In many instances, these policies and systems had less effect on the quality of teaching and learning than had been expected. This paper serves as a comparison of national quality policy developments in two countries, Australia and South Africa, and goes on to investigate the emerging tensions in quality policy processes in these countries. Whereas a number of similarities were discerned, differences were as evident, verifying the underlying assumption of the authors that notions of quality, and quality policies and their implementation are very much dependent on the particular localised contexts in which they exist.     

Brand image legacies of the 2010 FIFA World CupTM: a long-term assessment

Abstract

There has been limited research on brand legacies of the 2010 FIFA World Cup^TM; hence, this research examined brand image legacies of this tournament in the long run in South Africa in relation to determining the changes in international football tourists’ perceptions of South Africa as result of hosting this event. A quantitative methodology was employed to survey 391 international football tourists at fan parks and stadium precincts in five metropolitan cities in France during the 2016 UEFA European Championship, using a spatially based systematic sampling technique. The findings reveal statistically significant differences in most aspects between football tourists’ perceptions prior to, and six years after, the tournament. International football tourists’ perceptions changed positively six years after the event, including those features that were highlighted as major concerns prior to the tournament. The key findings of this study have a wider applicability to sport mega-events legacy research and body of knowledge.     

Processing errors in conditional and biconditional problem solving behavior

Students (N = 237) in each of grades 8, 10, 12, and 14 were randomly divided into three groups and administered either a 16-item multiple-choice test of conditional syllogisms, or a 16-item test of biconditional syllogisms, or a 32-item test with both conditional and biconditional syllogisms. Results provided within experiment and within-subjects comparison of responses on conditional and biconditional syllogisms. A comparison of response patterns on conditional items with responses on actual biconditional items provided a direct test of the previously hypothesized biconditional misinterpretation of conditional problems. These analyses confirmed the strong tendency of subjects (across grades) to interpret conditional syllogisms biconditionally. Surprisingly, performance on biconditional problems does not improve systematically with age; in fact, college sophomores perform only slightly better than eighth graders. With regard to conditional syllogisms, results confirmed previously described performance variations across forms of both major and second premises and also replicated an unusual reversed developmental trend on the problem which involves denying the consequent.