Beyond transition: a comparison of the employment experiences of American and Canadian adults with LD

With the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States and the Canadian Chartre of Rights and Freedoms, there is a new work environment for individuals with learning disabilities (LD) in North America. This qualitative study sought to compare the employment experiences of 25 U.S. adults with LD and 24 Canadian adults with LD. Areas of comparison were job getting, experiences on the job, and job advancement. Remarkably, the U.S. and Canadian adults with LD had nearly the same employment experiences. In essence, each set of data mirrored the other despite marked differences in U.S. and Canadian federal disability legislation.     

There’s No Such Thing as a Scientific Controversy

We examine 81 rhetoric and technical communication studies of “scientific controversy.” Our praxiographic analysis reveals that “scientific controversy” is not one thing but three, each staged according to a radically different ontology; yet the literature continues to handle these ontologies the same and to privilege scientists’ demarcation claims in their analysis. We conclude the modifier scientific should be abandoned entirely in controversy studies and recommend an antilogical rather than dialectical approach to controversy.     

OUTLIERS,CHEESE, AND RHIZOMES: VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF LIMITATION

All research has limitations, for example, from paradigm, concept, theory, tradition, and discipline. In this article Lynda Stone describes three exemplars that are variations on limitation and are “extraordinary” in that they change what constitutes future research in each domain. Malcolm Gladwell's present day study of outliers makes a statistical term into a sociological concept. Carlo Ginzburg's study of a sixteenth‐century miller who challenges Church doctrine initiates the field of microhistory. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's philosophy of the rhizome offers a poststructuralist study of the doing of philosophy and the form of philosophical text. Although Gladwell's study is the only one specifically on the topic of outliers, the other two investigations are outliers as well. Overall the three studies demonstrate what can be revealed and learned when limitation is transgressed. This is an important lesson for educational research—wherein heretofore unimagined societal possibility and reform of education might result.     

A comparison of student profiles based upon composite scale scores of the WISC-R

The purpose of this study was to investigate the similarity in the pattern of strengths and weaknesses between those students evaluated and placed in special education programs and those students evaluated and not placed in special education programs. The two groups were compared on the basis of 18 composite scale scores obtained from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R). The sample consisted of 585 students in grades 1–6 located in eastern Kentucky schools. A test for parallelism of the two profiles was conducted with a multiple-profile analysis using a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The results revealed that the two profiles were parallel. The authors concluded that the two groups have a similar pattern of relative strengths and weaknesses.     

Jefferson,The Road to Glory: 1743 To 1776 by Marie Kimball. Coward-McCann,Inc. 335 p. $4.00

As state legislatures and noneducation agents become increasingly involved in regulating the preparation of teachers, the long-term consequences of the resulting policies—which prioritize economic efficiency over investments in the cultivation of a stable, professionalized workforce—are of concern. This article uses insights from political economy to examine the model of teacher preparation that derives from these sources, with particular attention devoted to Indiana's Rules for Educator Preparation and Accountability.     

INTERGENERATIONAL SHARING SEMINARS: THEIR IMPACT ON YOUNG ADULT COLLEGE STUDENTS AND SENIOR GUEST STUDENTS

A 3‐month intergenerational program was developed on the premise that it is important for young adults, who are in the formative period of career development and direction, to experience the benefits of positive interaction with older persons. Program evaluation findings showed that participation not only influenced the young adults’ interest in gerontology, but also increased their willingness to accept older persons on social and academic levels. Positive changes were documented for the Senior Guest students and included more favorable attitudes toward young adult family members as well as toward the younger generation of college students in general.     

Evaluating Intervention Effects in a Diagnostic Classification Model Framework

The evaluation of intervention effects is an important objective of educational research. One way to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention is to conduct an experiment that assigns individuals to control and treatment groups. In the context of pretest/posttest designed studies, this is referred to as a control‐group pretest/posttest design. The transition diagnostic classification model (TDCM) was recently developed to assess growth, defined as change in attribute mastery status over time, in a diagnostic classification model framework. The TDCM, however, does not model multiple groups, and therefore is not able to analyze data from a control‐group pretest/posttest designed experiment. In this study, we extend the TDCM to model multiple groups, thereby enabling the examination of group‐differential growth in attribute mastery and the evaluation of intervention effects. The utility of the multigroup TDCM is demonstrated in the evaluation of an innovative instructional method in mathematics education.