Technical Skills Required: How Technological Efficacy Influences Online Political Behavior

Rapid advances in technology have provided the potential to connect citizens to their surroundings in unprecedented ways. While many scholars examine different types of efficacy as a predictor of behavior (e.g., internal, external, and political), it is essential to examine how confident citizens feel in their ability to use the technology before understanding how they will use it politically. Research shows that perceived competence increases motivation, which is correlated with behavior. This study examined how traditional measures of efficacy and a new measure affect online political behaviors, concluding that technological efficacy is a reliable construct predicting online news use and expression.     

第二届中法面向21世纪先进材料研讨会

1 基本情况 第二届"中法面向21世纪先进材料研讨会"于1999年9月6-9日在法国特鲁瓦市成功举行,这是继1998年元月第一届会议(西安)后两国科技工作者的又一次聚会.会议由中国国家自然科学基金委员会和法国外交部、香槟地区政府和法砝通核技术研究中心联合资助.     

Effects of intertrial interval and exteroceptive feedback duration on discriminative avoidance acquisition in the gerbil

A series of studies of shuttlebox-avoidance learning in the gerbil evaluated the efficacy of an exteroceptive feedback stimulus (FS). Experiment 1 assessed the relative effectiveness of a FS at 30- and 90-sec intertriai intervals (ITIs), and found that the FS and warning signal termination contingencies were additive sources of avoidance reinforcement; i.e., they produced “supernormal acquisition” at the short ITI, but not at the 90-sec ITI. The effectiveness of a FS at the 30-sec ITI was further explored in Experiments 2 and 3, in which FS duration was varied in delayed and trace avoidance conditioning, respectively. In both studies, a FS facilitated acquisition but FS duration was not a critical determinant of performance. These results were interpreted in terms of an expectancy account of the informational value of a FS, and the problem of experimentally distinguishing between cognitive and inhibition-of-fear accounts of avoidance learning was discussed.     

Contextualising Vocational Knowledge: A Theoretical Framework and Illustrations From Culinary Education

The nature of knowledge in vocational education is often described in dichotomies such as theory versus practice or general versus specific. Although different scholars now acknowledge that vocational knowledge is more than putting bits of theoretical and practical knowledge together, it is still unclear how vocational knowledge should be theorised instead. In this article we theorise the idea of contextualising vocational knowledge to understand the nature of vocational knowledge and illustrate this process of contextualising with empirical examples from culinary education. We adopt an activity-theoretical focus on contextualising that involves both particularising and providing coherence. We posit a cognitive process of meaning making where meaning derives from seeing the relationships of parts to the whole. The aspects of the nature of coherence and the relation between concepts and actions seem rather underdeveloped in vocational education theory. To characterise this process at a micro-level, we enhance the activity-theory approach with an inferentialist one. Inferentialism offers a way to focus on reasons and inferential relations between concepts and actions that provides coherence in vocational knowledge. To characterise the broad spectrum of processes relevant for vocational knowledge, we propose the terms “conceptualising” and “concretising”. Conceptualising involves inferring what follows from understanding a concept in a particular situation in relation to the meaning of other concepts. Concretising involves inferring what follows from understanding an aspect of the occupational practice in which students are participating. We argue that this way of framing vocational knowledge helps to better understand its nature and development.     

Effects of Individualized Instruction on Control Expectancy: A Field Test

Abstract

This study was conducted in order to determine whether or not one semester of individualized instruction is enough time to create in students an increased sense of being able to control payoffs in life and to lead students to develop a more realistic appraisal of their ability to control payoffs in an academic environment. Paradoxically, the converse may occur. When first confronted with a success-oriented instructional process and opportunities for self-pacing, students with failure histories may become more external, anxious, or uncertain. In order to examine these notions, a sample of 126 educationally deficient students who were beginning their first semester of study in a community college were selected from 18 different sections of math, English, and history and tested twice—once at the beginning of the term and again late in the term just prior to finals.     

Journalism

George E. Stevens and John B. Webster's Law and the Student Press (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1973---price not given, paper)

Jerome L. Nelson's Libel. A Basic Program for Beginning Journalists (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1973---price not given, paper)

Art of the Printed Book: 1455-1955 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1973---$20.00/11.00)

Bruce Buschel, Albert Robbins, William Vitta, and Rod Nordland's The Watergate File (New York: Quick Fox Inc., 33 West 60th St., 1973---$3.95, paper)     

1, 2, 3, 4: Infusing Quantitative Literacy into Introductory Biology

Biology of the twenty-first century is an increasingly quantitative science. Undergraduate biology education therefore needs to provide opportunities for students to develop fluency in the tools and language of quantitative disciplines. Quantitative literacy (QL) is important for future scientists as well as for citizens, who need to interpret numeric information and data-based claims regarding nearly every aspect of daily life. To address the need for QL in biology education, we incorporated quantitative concepts throughout a semester-long introductory biology course at a large research university. Early in the course, we assessed the quantitative skills that students bring to the introductory biology classroom and found that students had difficulties in performing simple calculations, representing data graphically, and articulating data-driven arguments. In response to students'' learning needs, we infused the course with quantitative concepts aligned with the existing course content and learning objectives. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by significant improvement in the quality of students'' graphical representations of biological data. Infusing QL in introductory biology presents challenges. Our study, however, supports the conclusion that it is feasible in the context of an existing course, consistent with the goals of college biology education, and promotes students'' development of important quantitative skills.