Closing the Gap: Fostering Successful Research‐Practice Partnerships in Counselor Education

Research‐practice partnerships offer counselor educators an opportunity to generate scholarship that can promote client welfare and create systemic change in practice and policy. The purpose of this article is to articulate strategies for building and sustaining research‐practice partnerships, as well as suggest methods for evaluating these partnerships.     

Examining the ethical environment in higher education

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) across the world have found themselves faced with new challenges on issues of ethics. Much of this has been centred on issues of assessment: plagiarism, buying essays, sharing/lending of previously passed work and the stealing of marked/returned work of others. Institutions still treat academic misconduct as largely a behavioural difficulty rather than an issue of ethics (or education), suggesting that academia places a far greater emphasis on combating new forms of dishonesty than it does on encouraging ethical habits and a healthy ethical environment. To date, the majority of research in this area has examined these forms of academic misconduct from the point of view of the student and/or the university, with the perspective of academics receiving very limited attention. Our hypothesis is that academics are perhaps best placed to provide the education needed to create and sustain an ethical environment, and we argue that being ‘ethically aware’ is a critical factor in the development of academic competence for all parties. This study adds to existing research in three ways: firstly, by highlighting the importance of an overall framework for an ethical environment within HEIs; secondly, by suggesting an ecological model of key parties (the university, students and academics) with responsibility for this environment in assessment; and thirdly, by including new evidence (generated by a survey of academics) to extend our understanding of their views on these issues.     

Next Steps for Mind,Brain, and Education: Strengthening Early‐Career Development

An increasing number of scholars are being trained in the field of mind, brain, and education (MBE), yet discussions of trainees' needs and how to meet them are rare. We, the inaugural International Mind, Brain, and Education Society (IMBES) Trainee Board, identify three broad needs of MBE trainees: guidance and support, greater access to and connections among the MBE community, and professional development. We report a first step to address these needs: a daylong trainee conference, which included sessions to foster connections among trainees, provide mentorship from MBE leaders, and provide knowledge and skill building for careers. Attendees' survey results suggest the conference successfully supported trainees' development. As substantial trainee needs remain, we offer specific ways that principal investigators, institutions, funding agencies, future IMBES trainee boards, and the MBE community can further address trainees' needs to support early‐career development and strengthen the MBE field generally.     

Social constructivism: Infusion into the multicultural science education research agenda

This article focuses on (a) theoretical underpinnings of social constructivism and multicultural education and (b) aspects of social constructivism that can provide frameworks for research in multicultural science education. According to the author, multicultural science education is “a field of inquiry with constructs, methodologies, and processes aimed at providing equitable opportunities for all students to learn quality science.” Multicultural science education research continues to be influenced by class, culture, disability, ethnicity, gender, and different lifestyles; however, another appropriate epistemology for this area of research is social constructivism. The essence of social constructivism and its implications for multicultural science education research includes an understanding of whatever realities might be constructed by individuals from various cultural groups and how these realities can be reconstituted, if necessary, to include a scientific reality. Hence, multicultural science education should be a field of study in which many science education researchers are generating new knowledge. The author strives to persuade other researchers to expand their research and teaching efforts into multicultural science education, a blending of social constructivism with multicultural science education. This blending is illustrated in the final section of this article. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.