Talking to Ourselves: A Content Analysis of NPR's Use of Journalists as Sources

National Public Radio (NPR) has built its reputation on in-depth analysis and unbiased reporting of information based on questions its reporters ask, the ways reporters tell their stories, and NPR's use of journalists as sources within their stories. This article focuses on understanding how these journalist-sources are used and how this practice contributes to the larger issues of source credibility facing media today. A content analysis of NPR's All Things Considered programming from 1999 to 2009 shows that NPR journalists are used as sources more often in stories about philosophical topics and significantly less often in stories that contain more hard data.     

Toddlers Default to Canonical Surface‐to‐Meaning Mapping When Learning Verbs

Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28‐month‐olds' interpretation of right‐dislocated sentences (noun_i‐verb, noun_i) where the presence of clear, language‐specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers (N = 96) interpreted novel verbs embedded in these sentences as transitive, disregarding prosodic cues to dislocation (Experiment 1) but correctly interpreted right‐dislocated sentences containing well‐known verbs (Experiment 2). These results suggest that toddlers can integrate multiple cues in ideal conditions, but default to canonical surface‐to‐meaning mapping when extracting structural information about novel verbs in semantically impoverished conditions.     

The Cobbler's Children: Improving Performance Improvement at Amerigroup

A team of performance consultants at Amerigroup applied their chosen human performance technology (HPT) methodology, Six Boxes^® Performance Thinking, to define their own performance, identify improvement opportunities, and build performance infrastructure in the form of clearer expectations and regular feedback, better processes and tools, and more relevant consequences, all while developing their own skills and knowledge and conducting client projects using the methodology. This article summarizes the context, process, and accomplishments to date, along with the lessons learned from this ongoing effort.     

Accountability and accomplished teaching: Researching the chartered teacher programme in Scotland

The Scottish chartered teacher programme (2003–2011) is an important example of a national policy designed to support the development of ‘accomplished teaching’. This paper provides an account of the emergence of the programme before discussing how the impact of such a scheme might be assessed and thus rendered accountable. The difficulties of developing valid and reliable methodologies for ensuring accountability are explored, including an account of a pilot research project and an indication of what the international literature may reveal about such aspirations. The paper concludes with a summary of four major challenges facing researchers who wish to offer insights that are of use to policy-makers and practitioners.     

Complex positioning: teachers as agents of curricular and pedagogical reform

We analyse two narratives of teacher‐facilitator teams producing elementary science curricula and disseminating them to their peers. We draw on these stories to interpret how teacher‐facilitators position themselves with respect to other educators (e.g. peer teachers and development‐team members), to real and imagined students and parents, to knowing and learning science, and to pedagogical practices and texts. We read these acts of positioning relationally and responsively. Teacher‐facilitators position themselves and their work in highly complex ways to multiple political and social others. These multiple positions raise a range of anxieties and questions for the teacher‐facilitators and shape their curricular and leadership roles. Our purpose is, first, to tease out these complexities of positioning and subjectivity, and second, to consider how teachers construct their roles as pedagogical and curricular leaders among their peers. This analysis illuminates thinking about how reform is enacted in schools and how leadership roles are constructed.     

Language Patterns of Pre-School Children

The relationship between performance on concept attainment tasks and information processing tasks and performance on selected curricular achievement tests was examined through factor analytic procedures. Results indicated that information processing of exemplar information and concept attainment of exemplar information are highly related to curricular factors. Other specific information processing factors, namely science and spelling, were only moderately related to curricular achievement. From these relationships, it seems likely that there is a high relationship between exemplar information processing and concept attainment of exemplar information with curricular factors generally and that more liberal generalizations of research results from tightly controlled experimental settings to conventional learning situations seem justified.     

Foreign Communications

Sue Pyne's “Current British Research on Mass Media and Mass Communication: Register of Ongoing and Recently Completed Research” (Documentation Centre for Mass Communication Research, Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester, 104 Regent Rd., Leicester LE1 7LT, England---£2.00 in the UK and £2.50 outside, paper)

British broadcasting annual yearbooks (BBC and IBA)

David Ellis' Evolution of the Canadian Broadcasting System: Objectives and Realities, 1928-1968 (Canadian Government Printing Office, Mail Order Service, 270 Albert St., Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0S9 ---$3.90, paper)

John C. Merrill and Harold A. Fisher's The World's Great Dailies: Profiles of 50 Newspapers (New York: Hastings House, 1980---$18.50/9.50)

Australian media, eight recent items reviewed by Henry Mayer

Harold D. Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Hans Speier, eds. Propaganda and Communication in World History: Volume III, A Pluralizing World in Formation (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980---$25.00)     

Intergroup acceptance and perception of Israeli and Russian immigrant students

The study assessed intergroup acceptance and perception of native Israeli and Russian immigrant students. Fifth- (n = 1,438) and eighth- (n = 851) grade Israeli and Russian students from integrated classes completed a battery of questionnaires, including social acceptance, self-esteem, and an intergroup perception scale which assessed the traits ascribed to the typical Israeli and the typical Russian. A symmetrical pattern of intergroup relations was obtained with each group reporting a higher social acceptance for ingroup-than for outgroup members. In addition, higher self-esteem Israelis revealed a greater outgroup acceptance, whereas higher self-esteem Russians revealed a greater ingroup acceptance. Pertaining to intergroup perception, students of both origins ascribed higher sociability to the typical Israeli than to the typical Russian and better manners to the typical Russian than to the typical Israeli. Members of each group attributed higher scholastic ability to the typical figure of their ingroup vs. their outgroup. Present findings were compared with research addressing immigrants from Middle-Eastern and Western origins. These were discussed in the framework of Taylor and McKirnan's (1984) five-stage model of intergroup relations.