Improving Academic Program Assessment: A Mixed Methods Study

Starting with the premise that better assessment leads to more informed decisions about student learning, we investigated the factors that lead to assessment improvement. We used “meta-assessment” (i.e., evaluating the assessment process) to identify academic programs in which the assessment process had improved over a two-year period. The use of both quantitative and qualitative methods allowed us to understand the factors leading to assessment improvement better. Through these efforts, we discovered that a program’s assessment environment and use of resources were the predominant factors leading to improvement. One resource in particular, assessment consultation, was the most cited reason for improved assessment.     

Economic factors underlying telephone company efforts to enter home video distribution

This essay discusses telephone companies' potential to enter into home video distribution. The author argues that their search for new revenue streams are impelled by technological and economic factors that should not be ignored in policy debates.     

The Consequences of Verbal Aggression in the Workplace: An Application of the Investment Model

The purpose of the current study was to improve our theoretical and practical understanding by examining the influence of a supervisor's verbal aggression on his or her employees’ job satisfaction and commitment, accounting for investment size and the quality of alternatives. And to account for reasons why organizations fail to fully realize the benefits associated with employee retention. A structural equation model was developed to emulate the investment model to determine the veracity of the model in the work setting and to answer the question as to why employees remained in communicatively hostile work environments. The findings shed light on the dynamics that take place within a work environment in which employees are targets of verbal aggression by their supervisors. The findings also indicated that the data fit the structural equation model and confirmed the applicability of the investment model in the workplace.     

Differences in Child Care Quality for Children With and Without Disabilities

Research Findings: Federal, state, and local agencies legislate and support inclusive settings for the education of young children with disabilities. Recommended practices outline critical elements for meeting the educational and developmental needs of children with and without disabilities in inclusive settings, and minimal and essential quality characteristics have been articulated. Research has suggested that inclusive and non-inclusive settings may offer different levels of care as measured against best practices and essential quality characteristics. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine program quality in inclusive and non-inclusive preschool classrooms using observational, interview, and survey data. Results showed that inclusive classrooms earned higher scores on an observational measure of global quality and higher scores on an observational measure of language and literacy. Results also suggested that teachers with higher levels of education tend to have classrooms of higher quality. Practice or Policy: Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

Instructional Sensitivity of a State's Standards-Based Assessment

Abstract

The accuracy of achievement test score inferences largely depends on the sensitivity of scores to instruction focused on tested objectives. Sensitivity requirements are particularly challenging for standards-based assessments because a variety of plausible instructional differences across classrooms must be detected. For this study, we developed a new method for capturing the alignment between how teachers bring standards to life in their classrooms and how the standards are defined on a test. Teachers were asked to report the degree to which they emphasized the state's academic standards, and to describe how they taught certain objectives from the standards. Two curriculum experts judged the alignment between how teachers brought the objectives to life in their classrooms and how the objectives were operationalized on the state test. Emphasis alone did not account for achievement differences among classrooms. The best predictors of classroom achievement were the match between how the standards were taught and tested, and the interaction between emphasis and match, indicating that test scores were sensitive to instruction of the standards, but in a narrow sense.     

Reflecting Usability Engineering Goals in Interlibrary Loan User Interfaces

Many interlibrary loan services have an online Web presence, ranging from a page of policy information to an entire Web-based system dedicated to providing interlibrary loan services. This article summarizes key themes and works in user-centered design theory and suggests ways to apply usability engineering goals to designing interlibrary loan online interfaces.     

Voicing Terri Schiavo: Prosopopeic Citizenship in the Democratic Aporia between Sovereignty and Biopower

This essay examines the case of Terri Schiavo to develop a theory of prosopopeic democratic citizenship. Prosopopeia—the tropological attribution of voice—rhetorically sutures an aporia between sovereign and biopolitical modes of democratic governance. Citizens are split by the democratic rationality of self-governance: they act as sovereign subjects to govern themselves as biopolitical objects. However, that self-governing logic begins to falter when applied to live bodies that are not speaking subjects. By projecting a live body's self-determining capacity to speak in its own voice, prosopopeia rhetorically reconstitutes that citizen's capacity for self-representation, mediating the gap in the democratic order.     

Reflecting on Quiz Placement in Online Tutorials: Creating a More Active Learning Experience

As the number of online library tutorials increases, so does the need to create active learning experiences and options for self-assessment. This article looks at embedding short Flash quizzes into tutorials created with Camtasia as a way to address this need. It also attempts to determine how quiz placement affects desire to view online tutorials and information retention.     

Involving the Library and Campus Community in Institutional Repository Projects

College and university libraries invest a significant amount of funding and staff time in institutional repository projects with the goal of collecting, preserving, and disseminating the intellectual output of their communities. Institutional repositories are often built without an expressed need for such a service; for this reason, libraries must actively promote them, educate users, and liaise with faculty to ensure success. Technical services and public services librarians have equally important roles in instituting and ensuring the success of institutional repositories in their communities.     

Measuring Value in Open Access Repositories

Open access institutional repositories were created to promote access to information, encourage scholarly communication, and demonstrate institutional prestige. While these repositories have been widely adopted, the quality of their contents often fails to represent their institution's scholarly output. Moreover, current research uses measurements of quantity, not quality, to assess their value. In response, this article opens new areas of scholarly inquiry by assessing the quality of contents. This is accomplished through a cross-sectional study of repositories at American colleges and universities across the academic spectrum, using citation indexing to identify an institution's articles and authors of highest impact.