The Influence of Television News Depictions of the Images of War on Viewers

Results of an experiment about the influence of network television news coverage of combat in Iraq on viewers indicated that, compared with a control condition which featured news stories about combat operations in Iraq described by news anchors, news reports also featuring footage of combat operations increased viewer involvement levels about the war and reduced viewer support for continued military presence in Iraq. Television news footage of combat operations also reduced viewers' pride in U.S. military presence but did not affect other emotions. However, regardless of how news stories were packaged, women experienced greater emotional response to network news stories about combat operations than men. The results also shed light on the potential of inoculation to deflect such influence.     

Adoption of New Movie Distribution Services on the Internet

Although the Internet features excess demand for media, especially movie downloads, the motion picture industry lacks sustainable business models for this market. An enriched form of the theory of planned behavior can identify drivers of consumer intentions to adopt a legal movie download service. Using a large data set, this study estimates structural equation model parameters. The magnitude of specific influences is subject to unobserved heterogeneity, according to a finite mixture approach with partial least squares estimation. Not only attitude, but also social influence, perceived technical feasibility, innovativeness, compatibility, and past behavior drive adoption decisions.     

SHORT REPORTS

This short report explores the quality of the care process for children with intellectual disabilities. A Delphi procedure was used to identify a set of indicators for the quality of the care process reflecting the perspectives of the care providers, the parents and the experts. The sample consisted of 59 individuals involved in different ways in the process of the caring for children with intellectual ­disabilities. The first round of the Delphi procedure resulted in 56 themes, distributed across four different phases of the care process. In the second round of the Delphi procedure, these themes were elaborated into 346 indicators that were, in turn, evaluated on their importance for the quality of the care process by the respondents. Finally, 328 indicators did meet the 85% criterion for consensus. Six themes proved to be relevant in all phases of care: transfer of information, report, consultation, attitude of care provider, respect and appointments. The operationalization of quality of care presented in this study points in the direction of actually measuring, monitoring and improving the quality of care for children with intellectual disabilities.     

Sustainable development as a driver for educational innovation in engineering school: the case of UniLaSalle

ABSTRACT

The potential relationships between innovation and sustainability processes, in engineering education, is neither obvious nor simple, especially when innovation, generally speaking, is promoted regardless of sustainability. We used UniLaSalle (In January 2016, the ‘Institut Polytechnique LaSalle Beauvais’, a French engineering school, merged with another higher education engineering school (ESITPA, Rouen). Both campuses (Beauvais and Rouen) have a common name: UniLaSalle (www.unilasalle.fr). As the interview began during 2015, this article only describes the situation of the Beauvais campus.) as a ‘living Lab’ to identify and analyse the reasons for the integration of innovation and Sustainable Development (SD) in training programmes. The aim is to explore, in a perception and reflective approach, how SD can be understood as a driver for specific innovation attitudes in higher education engineering school. This paper adopts an empirical approach based on a qualitative study, using NVivo 9 software to analyse non-numerical data. Our research suggests that SD can be a structural driver for innovation if it is integrated in a transdisciplinarity approach and not just as a discipline per se.     

Hydrodynamics and oxygen transfer in a novel extra-loop fluidized bed bioreactor

In this paper, the characteristics of fluid mixing time in a novel extra-loop fluidized bed were studied. The results showed that the mixing time was shortened with the increase of fluid velocity. All the discrete numbers of the reactor were above 0.2. The serial number n was 2.5 -3.0. It was judged accordingly that the reactor fluid state was continous stirred tank reactor （CSTR） mainly. When the inspiratory capacity increased the mixing time of the reactor was shortened. Thus the air input was beneficial for the fluid mixing. During the three phases mixing process, the mixing time of the reactor could be decreased by the n increase of carrier and air loading together, but the change was not significant. The parameters affecting the reactor fluid state were fluid velocity, inspiratory capacity and carrier. KLa could be increased with the air loading increase, and at the same gas/liquid ratio when the pressure drop was high, KL~ value was increased. The amount of carrier complex influence on KLa. As the carrier loading continued to increase, its value had been dropped but the changes was not significant, and optimization condition was found at above 800 1 000 g carrier loading （pouzzolane） or 600 g PVC. Under gas/liquid ratio of 0.8% -5.2%, KLa was （0.62-1.37）×10^-2· s^-1.     

Conceptions of first‐year university students of the constituents of matter and the notions of acids and bases

Preconceptions of first‐year university students of the constituents of matter and the notions of acids and bases were investigated on a total of 400 students. The procedure used consisted of free interviews, semi‐structured interviews and questionnaires.

It was found that the constituents of matter were well known to students, but that interactions between these constituents were either totally unknown or were the subject of severe misconceptions. The students’ knowledge tended to be qualitative and formal, with a worrying lack of connection with everyday life.     

Counseling With HEART: A Relationship Violence Prevention Program for College Students

Relationship violence is a salient concern on college campuses today, and psychoeducational groups may be an appropriate prevention format. This article describes a study measuring the impact of college student participation in the HEART (Help End Abusive Relationships Today) program, a series of group sessions designed to increase knowledge and awareness of relationship violence. Findings indicated significant changes for group participants postintervention. Implications and recommendations for college counselors are discussed.     

The contribution of PISA to the convergence of education policies in Europe

The international comparative studies on students’ outcomes have initiated analyses that have had a growing influence on national and sub‐national education policies in industrialised and developing countries. It is particularly the case of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which started in 2000 and has organised surveys every 3 years, so that the 2015 survey was the 6^th. Its influence has been particularly important for several reasons: 1) it assesses the basic competences in reading literacy, maths and science of 15 year‐olds students, i.e. around the end of compulsory education in many countries; 2) the assessment is based on a reliable methodology and the tests are completed by qualitative surveys and studies; 3) and the results lead to recommendations and are amplified by the media in most countries. However, it is not easy to evaluate the real impact of PISA because of the existence of other international studies such as IEA's TIMSS and, particularly in Europe, the influence of the recommendations and benchmarks of the EU that has been growing steadily in the last 25 years. Our analysis of the impact of PISA and EU policy focuses on the evolution of the education policy in France, but also studies its evolution in a few other European countries. Finally, we underline the limits of the influence of PISA and international standards in education towards a convergence of education systems because of the importance of their specific historic and cultural contexts.     

The nature of naive explanations of natural selection

Unlike some pivotal ideas in the history of science, the basic notion of natural selection is remarkably simple and so one might expect most students to easily grasp the basic principles of the Darwinian theory; yet many students nevertheless have difficulty understanding Darwinian evolution. We suggest that misconceptions about natural selection arise from mistaken categorization. Our thesis for explaining students’ failure to understand this concept or evolution in general is not that they necessarily fail to understand individual Darwinian principles; rather, they often fail to understand the ontological features of equilibration processes, of which evolution is one instance. They thus attribute the evolutionary process in general, and natural selection in particular, with event‐like properties. For example, naive students appear to focus on the idea of survival of the fittest, but embed this idea within an event ontology that involves actors struggling to overcome obstacles and achieve goals. Results showed that most naive subjects’ evolutionary explanations reflected an event ontology. Furthermore, event ontology attributes were positively correlated with non‐Darwinian explanations; by contrast, equilibration attributes, when present, were positively correlated with key Darwinian principles. These findings suggest that students would greatly benefit from science instruction that emphasized the underlying ontology of modern evolutionary theory.