WorldCat Local and Information Literacy Instruction: An Exploration of Emerging Teaching Practice

Since the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) unveiled its WorldCat Local library catalog discovery layer in 2008, library instructors have debated how to incorporate this tool into their teaching. WorldCat Local's faceted searching brings both educational benefits and unexpected challenges to the classroom. Instructors frequently hold formal and informal discussions on such topics as which search features are most effective during teaching and which patron groups benefit most from this tool. The authors of this article surveyed instruction librarians at U.S. academic libraries that are using WorldCat Local in order to gather and organize this feedback. This article presents the findings of this survey.     

STUDENT TEACHERS’ REFLECTIONS AND COLLABORATIONS THROUGH ELECTRONIC MAIL DISCUSSIONS

Abstract

This qualitative study looked at how early childhood teachers talk about and interact with the most powerful children in their classrooms—the student leaders. Relying primarily on interviews with six teachers in early childhood classrooms (infants, toddlers, and preschoolers) within a University‐affiliated center, this paper reconsidered leadership qualities in young children from the teachers’ point of view, probing the often overlooked challenges and dilemmas that young leaders present in student‐student and student‐adult relationships. Findings showed that the teachers described children's leadership skills in positive ways in the abstract, but these theoretical beliefs were quickly challenged by the realities of the classroom. As a result, teachers faced the complex dilemma of supporting individual children's leadership strengths while nurturing their own visions of classroom community. Findings are discussed with reference to implications for practice, including implications for early childhood teacher education, and suggestions for further study.     

Ignoring the Past: Coverage of Slavery and Slave Patrols in Criminal Justice Texts

The authors reviewed 18 criminal justice and 13 policing texts published since 2000 to explore the amount of coverage these texts give to the relationship between slavery, slave patrols, and the early American criminal justice system. To provide a basis for comparison, 14 introductory texts published in the 1970s were also reviewed. We found coverage of topics related to slavery to be nearly nonexistent in the 1970s texts and to be perfunctory in the majority of the current texts. We argue that given slavery’s importance to American history, introduction to criminal justice and policing texts should be more comprehensive in their discussions regarding how this peculiar institution shaped American criminal justice and law enforcement.     

Toward a Framework for Using Student Mathematical Representations as Formative Assessments

This article explores how students' mathematical representations can be used as formative assessments. We introduce a framework for teaching and learning that integrates representations as instructional and assessment tools, and illustrate these uses of student representations with reference to a study conducted with 250 5th-grade students. This study focused on students' ability to recognize and use a variety of representations of the fraction concept. Finally, we discuss the implications of the framework for teacher knowledge and classroom practice.     

Setting up school partnerships: some insights from Birmingham's Collegiate Academies

This article explores the key issues or dilemmas secondary schools face when considering collaborating to form a school partnership, in particular a Collegiate Academy. The methodology is an evaluation based on interviews with 15 headteachers and other key staff from three Collegiate Academies in Birmingham during the autumn of 2005. Seven key issues are identified – size, coordination, focus, needs, success, funding and dissemination – that schools need to work through and resolve if their partnership is to be successful. An analysis of the interconnections among the seven issues shows three underlying themes: the first relates to the organisation of the Collegiate Academies; the second concerns the work of the collegiate-based Advanced Skills Teachers; and the third encompasses sustainability and securing the long-term future of the Collegiate Academies. School partnerships are increasingly seen by government as the key to school improvement and so the findings from this preliminary study have potential benefits, particularly in the initial phase of setting up such partnerships.     

Single-subject designs and action research in the K-12 setting

Inasmuch as educational research is concerned with individual student assessment and development, it is surprising that single-subject designs are not more readily utilized in classroom-based action research. The purpose of this article is to emphasize benefits of single-subject research in the K-12 setting, given that teachers teach and assess individual students, the availability of individual student data, the uniqueness of all students' needs, and the ease with which data can be summarized and analyzed. A basic framework for conducting single-subject research is provided with the use of examples and discussion.     

Assessing and Promoting Cultural Relativism in Students of Counseling

Multicultural counseling is often promoted as a core element in counselor development. As such, educational efforts aim to increase counselors’ cultural relativism, or their ability to recognize their own enculturation and to appreciate the value of other cultural norms. This mixed qualitative-quantitative study explored the relationship between counselor and human service professional trainees’ moral development levels and their cultural assumptions after they had experienced a course in cultural diversity. Four themes were noted: (i) reflexivity about culture, (ii) orientation toward activism and advocacy, (iii) differences in attitudes toward sexual orientation and religion, and (iv) increased alertness to culture. Implications for culturally alert practice are discussed.     

Evaluating the quality of interaction in asynchronous discussion forums in fully online courses

Fully online courses are becoming progressively more popular because of their “anytime anywhere” learning flexibility. One of the ways students interact with each other and with the instructors within fully online learning environments is via asynchronous discussion forums. However, student engagement in online discussion forums does not always take place automatically and there is a lack of clarity about the ideal role of the instructors in them. In this article, we report on our research on the quality of discussion in fully online courses through analysis of discussion forum activities. We have conducted our research on two large fully online subjects for computing students over two consecutive semesters and used a grounded theoretic approach for data analysis. Our results reveal what students and instructors consider as quality interaction in fully online courses. We also propose two frameworks based on our findings that can be used to ensure effective online interaction.