An Integrative Approach to Portfolio Evaluation for Teacher Licensure

The purpose of our overall research agenda is to develop and evaluate a methodology for the assessment of teachers in which experienced teachers, serving as judges, engage in dialogue to integrate multiple sources of evidence about a candidate to reach a sound conclusion. The project that provides the venue for this research agenda is the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), which is developing a portfolio assessment system to assist participating states in making a decision about teacher licensure. To develop the theoretical foundation necessary to support and evaluate such dialogic and integrative assessment practices, we turn, in part, to the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, as a complement to psychometrics. In this article, we characterize and assess the processes in which judges, trying out an integrative approach to portfolio evaluation for the first time, engage as they collaboratively construct and document their conclusions, and we locate this work in the larger research agenda. The premise of this project, which is being carefully evaluated in the course of inquiry, is that these integrative practices cannot only lead to an epistemologically sound evaluation of teaching but also promote an ongoing professional dialogue of critical reflection on teaching practice.     

Instructional design approaches for improving a course in productivity and work measurement

This article explores the teaching styles of the professor, learning styles of the students, characteristics of the students, comparisons of Pearson's correlation coefficients between student grades earned in the course versus their cumulative grade point averages, and factors to consider for future Web‐enhanced courses. The objectives of the course were to develop students' understanding of productivity and work measurement. It also explored the ability to understand and apply systems thinking and innovative planning for the purpose of improving personal productivity, the productivity of other people, and the productivity of systems and organizations.     

A Drop in the Bucket: Randomized Controlled Trials Testing Reading and Math Interventions

The purpose of this study was to determine the proportion of empirical studies published in the last 5 years in a sample of special education peer‐reviewed journals that (1) assessed the effects of reading and math interventions with group designs and (2) used random assignment to treatment conditions to test those interventions. A hand search of articles from the Journal of Special Education, Exceptional Children, Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, the Journal of Learning Disabilities, and School Psychology Review yielded 806 relevant articles, of which 5.46 percent tested a reading or math intervention using a group design and 4.22 percent used random assignment. These findings indicate that randomized experimental designs, which offer the highest level of evidence of an intervention's efficacy, are underrepresented in the literature, at least in the area of reading and math interventions.     

Rats do show primacy and recency effects in memory for lists of spatial locations: A reply to Gaffan

It has been demonstrated that rats display both primacy and recency effects in list-learning experiments for both item- and order-recognition memory for spatial location information. Contrary to a suggestion made by Gaffan (1992) that previous demonstrations of primacy effects in rats are not valid due to statistical and methodological problems, we show that (1) it is not likely that our results are due to experimenter bias and/or nonindependence of trials, (2) primacy and recency effects are obtained whether or not one uses a training criterion, and (3) when many of the published reports from our laboratory are combined, the number of subjects and trials are sufficient to evaluate the validity of primacy and recency effects in list-learning experiments.     

世界上的新闻是什么样

祝建华 :本文采用跨文化比较以及兼用定性和定量方法来研究新闻传播学中最基本的理论问题 ,实为近年来少见的力作。陈力丹 :现任《传播学研究》杂志 (CommunicationResearch)两主编之一的休梅克 ,几年前访问过我国。她领导的研究小组最近对世界不同地区的 1 0个代表性国家 (包括中国 )的媒体进行了跨文化比较研究 ,从新闻理念入手 ,给人相当多的思考。本期发表的是她研究报告的一部分。