Catholic women educators’ discourse and educational measurement in the early twentieth century in the United States

ABSTRACT

In the early twentieth century in the United States, Roman Catholic schools grew in number and became increasingly regulated by state departments of education. This led to the increased influence of public school reform movements in Catholic schools. Some Catholic educators questioned these movements, while others embraced them. Educational measurement strategies, such as IQ and standardised testing, gained support from women religious orders and congregations, who made up the majority of the Catholic teaching force. For pragmatic reasons, they saw some value in the promises of modern educational science for teaching and learning. This practice, however, put them at odds with some of the beliefs and values of their Church. This study demonstrates how Catholic sister teachers attempted to shape the debate on the introduction and use of reform strategies like IQ and standardised testing. It also examines how Catholic sister teachers made use of Catholic beliefs and values to make arguments in favour of IQ and standardised testing in Catholic schools. Using agreed upon Catholic religious tenets and working within their gendered reality, Catholic sister teachers demonstrated how they tried to convince their colleagues, male and female, to come to an understanding around the use of educational measurement.     

Understanding the Information Needs of Academic Scholars in Agricultural and Biological Sciences

This study investigates the information needs of faculty and graduate students in agricultural and biological sciences. Qualitative research methods, interviews and focus groups, were used to examine what types of information these scholars need for their research, teaching and learning, how they seek that information, and perceptions. The implications for library service are discussed.     

Discipline‐based academic development through a tripartite partnership

Abstract

This paper describes a discipline‐based academic development project based upon a tripartite relationship between departmental staff, work‐based practitioners and the central academic development unit which took place over one academic year within the Department of Physiotherapy, Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh. The purpose of the project was to discuss and debate the concept of the ‘reflective practitioner’, to develop strategies for enabling undergraduate students to be reflective, and to devise a framework for assessment of reflective practice in clinical work‐based learning. The outcomes of the project, most important of which was a change in the learning experience for students, demonstrate that academic development can be valuable and productive when undertaken as a partnership and placed in a disciplinary context. The authors identify key elements important to the success of the academic development process which should be applicable in similar situations and which could serve as guidelines for the planning and delivery of staff development through similar kinds of partnerships.     

Slow and fast adult readers in text comprehension

Reading speed is a component of reading ability tests designed to separate «good» and «poor» readers. The purpose of the two experiments reported in this paper were to study whether slow and fast adult readers differ in terms of the subprocesses involved in textual organization. For this, two variables were manipulated: title and type of text. Subjects were classified as slow and fast readers based on the median value of the distribution of reading times on a preliminary text. Data clearly show that reading speed is a reliable individual characteristic. In Experiment 1, the recall performance of slow and fast readers did not differ. No interaction between reading speed and the title and type of text variables were observed. In Experiment 2, these results were replicated and extended to a summary test. So, it appears that slow and fast readers do not process textual organization in a different way and show identical comprehension performances. Further research is necessary to identify those factors that characterize good comprehenders among slow and fast readers.     

Evaluating the effects of faculty development: theoretical framework and empirical implementation

ABSTRACT

This article implements a systemic framework to evaluate the long-term effects of a program characterized by a SoTL approach and a hybrid learning environment. The importance of the difference between the perception of long-term effects on individual professional development on the one hand and the development of collective practices on the other, is interpreted with reference to certain shortcomings of the faculty development program’s learning design and its non-alignment with institutional practices. Based on this in-depth research, concrete ways to take account of the complexity of faculty development programs are proposed, both for research into and development of such programs and their impact at individual and institutional levels.     

Making Space for Consuming Practices

This empirically driven paper is about workplace learning with specific focus on the ‘work’ of consuming practices. By consuming we refer to the eating, and the drinking, and (at times) to the smoking that workers, in most organisations, do on a daily basis. Indeed, it is the quotidian nature of consuming, coupled with its absence from workplace learning research that make them noteworthy practices to explore. In using the term practice we draw on the recent tranche of practice based theorisations: notably Schatzki (1996, Organization Studies, 26(3), 465-484, 2005, Organization Studies, 27(12), 1863-1873, 2006) and Gherardi (Human Relations, 54(1), 131-139, 2001, 2006, Learning Organization, 16(5), 352-359, 2009). The paper frames consuming practices as ‘dispersed’ (general) practices and, illustrated through empirical data from multiple projects, we progressively outline how these contribute to the learning of ‘integrative’ (specialized work) practices. Our overall aim is to (re)position consuming practices from prosaic, to having much relevance for research on workplace learning.