Continuing education as a catalyst for inter-professional collaboration

Do nurses have access to the tools and resources they need for evidence-based practice? Are librarians prepared to work with nurses to provide access to appropriate resources and services, and teach the needed information literacy skills? The authors work with professional library and nursing organizations to present interdisciplinary continuing education to improve the information literacy of nurses and the ability of librarians to provide resources and services that meet nurses' information needs. This article reviews behavioral and practice changes reported by nurses and librarian participants in symposia on evidence-based nursing in March 2001 and May 2003.     

“Wildest dreams”: the racial aura of celebrity safari

This paper deploys theories of aura to explore the celebrity safari as a mode by which famous people authenticate Africa as a distant, timeless place for a global audience. Their safari depictions create an imagined mystical locale, an aura, that imbues cult value and maintains transnational racial divides. The celebritized racial aura constructs a nostalgic paradise that sits in contrast to the many narratives of misery and privation that celebrity representation also creates. Thus aura commodifies the continent as a kind of playground for the desires of Western publics.     

Meeting the Needs of Avid Book Readers: Access,Space, Concentration Support and Barrier Mitigation

Contemporary libraries perform multiple roles that greatly expand the scope of traditional service and resource provision. In order to determine how libraries can best meet the needs of avid book reading clientele, more needs to be known about their preferences of access and space, as well as barriers to their concentration and performance of sustained reading. Findings from the 2015 International Study of Avid Book Readers suggest that libraries should offer comfortable and quiet spaces conducive to reading for pleasure, that are responsive to the time, cost and concentration barriers that avid readers face, and not assume that avid readers will easily adapt to library environments with elevated noise levels.     

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning skill and concept acquisition: Testing a constructivist hypothesis

This study tested the constructivist hypothesis that the acquisition of domain-specific conceptual knowledge (declarative knowledge) requires use of general procedural knowledge. More specifically, it was hypothesized that use of a general pattern of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is necessary for the acquisition of novel domain-specific concepts. To test this hypothesis 314 high school biology and chemistry students were first tested to determine whether or not they were skilled in the use of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Based on this test, students were classified as reflective, transitional, or intuitive thinkers. All students were then presented with a series of four concept-acquisition tasks. It was predicted that reflective (hypothetico-deductive) thinkers would acquire the concepts while intuitive (empirico-inductive) thinkers would not. Transitional thinkers were expected to be partially successful. These predictions were confirmed as skill in hypothetico-deductive reasoning (developmental level), but not age, was highly correlated with performance on the concept acquisition tasks (X² = 71.14, p < 0.00001). This result was interpreted to be supportive of the constructivist hypothesis.     

The ‘Mother‐Tongue’ Issue in Britain: cultural diversity or control?

The relation between language policies, cultural pluralism and education in a multicultural society such as our own is extremely complex. A recent EEC Directive requires Member States to make available, to the children of migrant workers within the Community, teaching of the mother‐tongues of their families’ countries of origin. The history, scope and purposes of this Directive are discussed, and its significance for language policies in Britain is examined. The problems to which the Directive gives rise are, it is argued, not merely practical (especially financial) but also conceptual: so far there has been a notable lack of any real discussion of the meaning of the term ‘mother‐tongue’. Reservations are expressed about the way in which the Directive has so far been interpreted in Britain, and an alternative policy emphasis is suggested. Concluding observations concern the implications of this paper for the study of language and society generally.