Students as Partial Employees: A Metaphor for the Student-Institution Interaction

We propose a new metaphor for describing the interaction between students and their institutions of higher education, students as partial employees. Several current metaphors anchored in the quality movement are reviewed to provide a background for this new way of viewing today's college students. This article provides the readers with examples of the metaphor in use and describes why the partial employee transcends the academic and administrative structures of higher education.     

What Should Criminal Justice Interns Know? Comparing the Opinions of Student Interns and Criminal Justice Practitioners

We surveyed 118 criminal justice interns, asking them to assess the importance of various practical skills, professional skills, academic content knowledge, and knowledge of various current issues. We compared the results with those of 202 criminal justice practitioners. Student interns viewed almost every skill and knowledge area as important. Practitioners placed the greatest value on verbal communication skills, good work ethic, good work habits, and initiative. Regarding content knowledge, practitioners assigned the greatest importance to applied ethics. Racial issues as they apply to criminal justice and gender issues were viewed as most important in the current issues category. We examined the differences according to race, gender, and type of agency. We found significant differences between interns and practitioners in terms of the skills and knowledge deemed important, and significant differences between agency types. Significant differences existed based on racial and ethnic identity; differences based on gender were not significant.     

Responses of Physically Abused and Nonabused Children to Different Forms of Interadult Anger

Responses to various forms of interadult anger were examined in 2 groups of 6–11-year-olds: 44 low-SES children with a history of physical abuse and exposure to interspousal aggression, and 44 low-SES children exposed to interspousal aggression but with no history of physical abuse or other child maltreatment. Children were presented with videotaped segments of adults in angry and friendly interactions. Angry segments varied on ( a ) the type of anger expression (nonverbal, verbal, verbal-physical), and ( b ) whether anger was resolved. In general, physically abused children reported greater fear than nonabused children in response to all forms of interadult anger. Moreover, abused children appeared particularly sensitive to whether anger between adults was resolved. Findings are discussed with regard factors that may mediate relations between exposure to family violence and the development of psychopathology in children from highly aggressive home environments.     

经济为何成为印第安纳大选的关键

Evelyn Salyer is the kind of voter Republicans desperately need to hang onto this fall.     

Risk Assessment and Optimisation of Blast Mitigation Strategies for Design and Strengthening of Built Infrastructure

A probabilistic risk assessment procedure is developed which can predict risks of explosive blast damage to built infrastructure, and when combined with life-cycle cost analysis, the procedure can be used to optimise blast mitigation strategies. The paper focuses on window glazing since this is a load-capacity system which, when subjected to blast loading, has caused significant damage and injury to building occupants. Structural reliability techniques are used to derive blast reliability curves for annealed and toughened glazing subjected to explosive blast for a variety of threat scenarios. The probabilistic analyses include the uncertainties associated with blast modelling, glazing response and glazing failure criteria. Damage risks are calculated for an individual window and for windows in the facade of a multi-storey commercial building. The paper shows an illustrative example of how this information, when combined with risk-based decision-making criteria, can be used to optimise blast mitigation strategies.     

English language teachers becoming more efficacious through research engagement at their Turkish university

While it is generally recognized that teacher research can be a very beneficial form of continuing professional development (CPD), there is still relatively limited research available on the impact this activity has on teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, which are of interest to educational psychologists because, while being open to constant change, these beliefs influence the way in which knowledge is transformed into action. There is also a relative lack of available research into how teachers develop as researchers; the processes whereby they gain practical knowledge and more positive self-efficacy beliefs in planning, conducting, analysing, presenting and writing up research require further exploration. This qualitative multi-case study addresses these issues, exploring the development of three in-service teachers of English on a foundation programme at a Turkish university. Findings reveal that engaging in CPD which directly benefited their learners helped all three teachers develop positive teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and deeper practical knowledge in relation to the specific tasks that concerned them. Furthermore, from a starting point of having low self-efficacy beliefs in conducting practical research, which reflected their lack of prior knowledge in this area, they all became more efficacious as they gained research experience and developed practical knowledge of research. This study highlights the benefits, then, of helping teachers become more efficacious through CPD that engages them as knowledge-generators. Enthusiastic mentoring, autonomy support and the opportunity to present their research more widely all helped the teachers in this Turkish context to develop.     

One Goal,Two Institutions: How a Community College and 4-Year University Partner to Bridge Student College Readiness Gaps

ABSTRACT

Recent national attention on college completion poses unique challenges and opportunities for community colleges. Moving underprepared students through basic skills educational courses to degree attainment represents an ongoing challenge. With more than 60% of community college students enrolled in remedial education, 2-year institutions must explore innovative approaches aimed at underprepared student completion. One community college did just that and partnered with a 4-year institution to expand postsecondary pathway options for underprepared first-year students. By establishing the Tiger Gateway Program, these two institutions collaborated to address student college readiness gaps using a summer bridge model. Seventy-five percent of participants self-reported as Hispanic/Latino with the remaining 25% identifying as African American or Black. Outcomes indicate participants who completed the program, 23 of 26, made gains in intellectual, academic, and social development. Findings support scholarship attesting that highly structured, meaningful, well-defined collaboration particularly benefits students from low-socio-status and underserved populations.     

Educational Stratification and Students’ Social Bonding to School

This paper examines the polarization model from qualitative research in both Great Britain and the US, which claims that educational stratification practices polarize students into pro- and anti-school orientations. Because few researchers have adequately conceptualized school attitudes and behavior, social bonding theory (Hirschi, 1969) is used to provide a framework for examining the polarization hypothesis. Relying on High School and Beyond data from the US, an attempt is made to develop measures of respondents’ social bonding to school, including college expectations, absenteeism, disciplinary problems, and engagement. The polarization hypothesis is supported by these US data when examining educational stratification effects on the school bonding measures. Compared to academic-track students, general- and vocational-track students have Iowa college expectations, more disciplinary problems, and are less academically engaged, controlling for prior school orientations and for selection bias due to dropping out of school. For absenteeism, the general track has a significant positive effect, while vocational-track students do not differ from those in the academic track. In addition, students in the nonacademic tracks are more likely to drop out of school between the 10th and 12th grades compared to academic-track students.     

Folk theories of “inquiry:” How preservice teachers reproduce the discourse and practices of an atheoretical scientific method

Despite the ubiquity of the term “inquiry” in science education literature, little is known about how teachers conceptualize inquiry, how these conceptions are formed and reinforced, how they relate to work done by scientists, and if these ideas about inquiry are translated into classroom practice. This is a multicase study in which 14 preservice secondary science teachers developed their own empirical investigations—from formulating questions to defending results in front of peers. Findings indicate that participants shared a tacit framework of what it means to “do science” which shaped their investigations and influenced reflections on their inquiries. Some facets of the participants' shared model were congruent with authentic inquiry; however, the most consistent assumptions were misrepresentations of fundamental aspects of science: for example, that a hypothesis functions as a guess about an outcome, but is not necessarily part of a larger explanatory system; that background knowledge may be used to provide ideas about what to study, but this knowledge is not in the form of a theory or other model; and that theory is an optional tool one might use at the end of a study to help explain results. These ideas appear consistent with a “folk theory” of doing science that is promoted subtly, but pervasively, in textbooks, through the media, and by members of the science education community themselves. Finally, although all participants held degrees in science, the participants who eventually used inquiry in their own classrooms were those who had significant research experiences in careers or postsecondary study and greater science‐content background. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 481–512, 2004     

Students’ perspectives of early assessment tasks in their first-year at university

Assessment plays an important role in first-year students’ transition to university, influencing how they learn. Poorly designed assessment can be demotivating and may even cause students to withdraw from university. An early low-stakes assessment task is recommended in first year, to provide information to students and staff on student progress, provide students with a positive experience and help them prepare for future assessments. This paper reports on first-year students’ experiences of two different early assessment tasks for two disciplines, one using an online quiz and the other a ‘research challenge’ that served as a precursor to writing an essay. The paper also presents lecturers’ reflections on what they learned, what they would change and the implications for others planning early assessment tasks for first years. Finally, ideas for future research are provided.