College Academic Assistance Programs and Practices

Most public institutions offer some form of academic assistance to help their students adjust to the demands of college level learning tasks. Because these academic assistance efforts vary considerably, ranging from an emphasis on functional reading to an emphasis on strategic learning, it is important to describe these programs and their instructional methodologies and to review the pertinent research supporting them. After examining four critical issues confronting all academic assistance programs, the authors examined the goals, assessment procedures, salient features, and program evaluation methods of four prevalent program models: learning to learn courses, supplemental instruction, required programs for underprepared students, and integrated reading/writing courses. They concluded by outlining suggestions for future research and by listing specific questions that college students need to ask about the programs at their institutions.     

Does linguistic comprehension support the decoding skills of struggling readers?

Abstract

This study investigated the contribution of linguistic comprehension to the decoding skills of struggling readers. Participants were 36 children aged between eight and 12 years, all below average in decoding but differing in linguistic comprehension. The children read passages from the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability and their first 25 miscues were categorised into syntactic, semantic, phonemic, and graphophonic similarity. Children were first grouped in terms of higher and lower linguistic comprehension levels. Analysis of miscues showed no differences between the groups in miscue similarity. They were then grouped according to pseudoword reading skill. There were significant differences between the groups for all miscue types except semantic similarity. An analysis of miscues using multiple regression showed that, after taking account of age, pseudoword reading was the best predictor of quality of miscues. In addition, linguistic comprehension contributed to syntactic similarity of miscues over and above decoding.     

Best Practice in Middle-School Science

Using socio-ecological theory, this study explores best practice (educational practices correlated with higher student performance) in middle-school science. Seven schools with consistently higher student performance were compared with three demographically similar, average-performing schools. Best practice included instructional approaches (relevance and engagement, inquiry, differentiated instruction, collaborative work, moderate amounts of homework, and integration of language literacy and science) and administrative practices (nurturing a climate of opportunity to succeed in science, offering professional development based on data and dialogue, engaging teachers in standards-based curriculum revision and alignment, and recruiting the right fit of teacher). It is argued that best practice entails multiple levels of teaching and administrative praxis that together form a school-wide socio-ecological system conducive to higher performance.     

Encouraging Prospective Teachers to Engage Friends and Family in Exploring Physical Phenomena

Involving people outside of a science course can foster learning for students enrolled in the course. Assignments involving friends and family provided such opportunities in an undergraduate physics course for prospective teachers. These assignments included reflecting upon prior experiences, interviewing friends and family members, engaging them in exploring physical phenomena, and teaching them with relevant websites. The six strands of science learning articulated in Learning Science in Informal Environments (National Research Council in Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2009) provided a framework for analyzing the prospective teachers’ responses. Through such assignments, the instructor created opportunities for the prospective teachers to use and build upon knowledge learned in class as well as to gain confidence and experience in facilitating the learning of others.     

The teaching practicum as a locus of multi-leveled,school-based transformation

The teaching practicum is often considered as a compulsory activity for enculturating new members into the teacher community by providing opportunities to experience teaching in action. However, the practicum is rarely conceptualized in terms of its transformative potential. In this study, we report the results of a two-year ethnography study of a teaching practicum in Brazil based on the {coteaching | cogenerative dialoguing} model. Our study shows that the practicum does not have to be a mere induction experience, but that it also may be the transformative locus for (a) the practicum participants (new teachers, school teachers, teacher educator, and students) and (b) school and university/school relationships, and (c) of the practicum activity itself. The results show the potential of the practicum to transform individual and collective agency. Implications are discussed for reorganizing the teaching practicum.     

Facilitating Collaboration and Research in Sex and Gender Differences and Women's Health: Year One Experiences

Librarians at the University of Florida Health Science Center Libraries partnered with faculty to promote awareness of and access to research on women's health and sex and gender resources in an outreach project funded by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women's Health. The project featured elements that facilitated cross-disciplinary collaboration (using CoLAB Planning Series®, or CoLABs), instruction to various groups (including faculty, undergraduate students, graduate students, and professional students), collection development, and information dissemination. Librarians leveraged existing partnerships with faculty and built new ones. Success in this project demonstrates that libraries can partner effectively with their faculty on emerging trends and new initiatives.     

Beyond Binaries and Condemnation: Opening New Theoretical Spaces in Jewish Television Studies

Abstract

The objective of this article is to critique the current literature on Jews and Jewishness in North American television. It is our contention that this work is problematic in a number of ways. First, it insists on a strict binary between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ television images, and ‘bad’ and ‘good’ audience responses to these images. Second, it assumes that a unified, ‘acceptable’ Jewish identity pre‐exists the production of these images, and that this identity merely needs to be incorporated into the television landscape to make its images ‘better’. Third, it assumes a direct and unproblematic relationship between what the viewers see on television and how they understand the world. In the second half of this essay we introduce scholarship in other areas of television and media studies, as well as in the emerging field of Jewish cultural studies, to point to the need to theorise a much more complex relationship between identity and spectatorship than is realised in much of the current literature on Jewishness and television. We argue that our relationship, as viewers, to television is inherently complex, contradictory, ambivalent, and shifting, and thus cannot be pinned down by rigid and hierarchical binary structures. Further, we argue that Jewishness cannot be reified as a single, visible, knowable identity, and that the ambivalent pleasures of viewers viewing Jewishness on television, including our own, must be accounted for rather than dismissed.     

Individualized sleep education improves subjective and objective sleep indices in elite cricket athletes: A pilot study

ABSTRACT

The aim of the current study was to evaluate the effect of personalized sleep hygiene education on sleep indices in elite athletes. Nine elite male cricket players performed 3 weeks of baseline sleep monitoring (PRE), followed by group and individualized sleep hygiene education and a further 3 weeks of sleep monitoring (POST). Subjective sleep questionnaires included the Athlete Sleep Behaviour Questionnaire (ASBQ), the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Objective sleep indices were monitored via wrist actigraphy. There were significant improvements (p < 0.05) in two of the sleep questionnaires (ESS and PSQI) and in sleep efficiency (+5%), sleep latency (?29 min) and sleep onset variance (?28 min) following the intervention, all associated with large or very large effect sizes (d= 1.38, ?0.85 and ?0.88, respectively). The current study reports that personalized sleep hygiene education using the ASBQ to target maladaptive sleep behaviours may be effective in acutely improving sleep indices in elite male athletes.