Speaking Like a State: Listening to Benjamin Franklin in Times of Terror

This essay reconstitutes Benjamin Franklin's characteristic political style as a particular inflection of liberal irony, arguing for a way of speaking today that checks arrogance with humility and attempting to unlock the psychosocial economy of political enjoyment implicit in this rhetoric. To do so, the essay traverses four bodies of discourse (including recent political thinking about civic character, Franklin's oratory in 1787 at the constitutional convention, passages from his letters, and an excerpt from his autobiography) in order to extract strategies for managing situations in which democracy becomes prone to the enjoyments of terror and tyranny.     

Between the Structural and the Personal: Situated Sense-Makings of “Race” This research was supported by a grant from the MOSAIC Multicultural Center at San Jose State University.

Using a critical intercultural communication perspective and cultural studies interviewing method, this study traces individuals’ subjective sense-makings of diversity through the trope of “race.” Such sense-makings represent the key (and taken-for-granted) locus of the structural and personal where social actors live out the constructions of diversity and race in deeply felt ways. Our study reveals how individuals articulate and understand race via raceless diversity encodings (whereby race is seemingly stripped of its power inequalities, and all racial/ethnic groups are made equal) and racial pivoting (whereby participants both discursively pull away from and move toward race to suit their individual experiences).     

Governing Sounds: Hate,Race, and Responsibility in Post-Apartheid Broadcasting

The bounds of permissible hate in post-apartheid broadcasting in South Africa have been shaped by the state's withdrawal from certain regulatory processes, as well as the emerging regulation by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA). The BCCSA—established, financed, and operated by South Africa's broadcasting industry—filled the regulatory void not just by governing post-apartheid hate; the BCCSA has sought to govern the racial constructs upon which hate depends. With the state's withdrawal, BCCSA officials have configured hate and race in neoliberal ways, shifting responsibility for post-apartheid hate away from apartheid's beneficiaries and toward those apartheid was intended to subjugate.     

Routinizing a New Technology in the Newsroom: Twitter as a News Source in Mainstream Media

This study examined how news organizations employed Twitter as a news source, based on information subsidy and gatekeeping perspectives. News content analysis from 7 major media entities in 2010–2011 demonstrated that journalists embraced Twitter as a new channel for information gathering. TV frequently cited Twitter as a sole or a primary source. However, despite active usage of Twitter overall, journalists in both TV and newspapers maintained conventional routines by relying primarily on Twitter accounts of official sources. The popularity of Twitter accounts, as indicated by the number of followers, did not contribute to attracting more attention from journalists.     

Removal of Gay‐Themed Materials from Public Libraries: Public Opinion Trends, 1973–2006

Gay images have slowly become integrated into mainstream cultural venues over the last forty years, including publishing. Studies show that gay‐themed materials in libraries are targets of censorship attempts. Are these attempts reflections of the opinions of the majority of the population or of a vocal minority? The information in this study contributes over thirty years of trend data on the general public's views of the censorship of gay‐themed materials in libraries. This information can be useful to library policy makers and those faced with materials challenges.     

Innovations in Measuring Rater Accuracy in Standard Setting: Assessing “Fit” to Item Characteristic Curves

Standard setting methods such as the Angoff method rely on judgments of item characteristics; item response theory empirically estimates item characteristics and displays them in item characteristic curves (ICCs). This study evaluated several indexes of rater fit to ICCs as a method for judging rater accuracy in their estimates of expected item performance for target groups of test-takers. Simulated data were used to compare adequately fitting ratings to poorly fitting ratings at various target competence levels in a simulated two stage standard setting study. The indexes were then applied to a set of real ratings on 66 items evaluated at 4 competence thresholds to demonstrate their relative usefulness for gaining insight into rater “fit.” Based on analysis of both the simulated and real data, it is recommended that fit indexes based on the absolute deviations of ratings from the ICCs be used, and those based on the standard errors of ratings should be avoided. Suggestions are provided for using these indexes in future research and practice.     

A Bootstrap Generalization of Modified Parallel Analysis for IRT Dimensionality Assessment

This article introduces a bootstrap generalization to the Modified Parallel Analysis (MPA) method of test dimensionality assessment using factor analysis. This methodology, based on the use of Marginal Maximum Likelihood nonlinear factor analysis, provides for the calculation of a test statistic based on a parametric bootstrap using the MPA methodology for generation of synthetic datasets. Performance of the bootstrap test was compared with the likelihood ratio difference test and the DIMTEST procedure using a Monte Carlo simulation. The bootstrap test was found to exhibit much better control of the Type I error rate than the likelihood ratio difference test, and comparable power to DIMTEST under most conditions. A major conclusion to be taken from this research is that under many real-world conditions, the bootstrap MPA test presents a useful alternative for practitioners using Marginal Maximum Likelihood factor analysis to test for multidimensional testing data.     

The Effects of Ignoring a Level in Multilevel Analysis

Ignoring a level can have a substantial impact on the conclusions of a multilevel analysis. For intercept-only models and for balanced data, we derive these effects analytically. For more complex random intercept models or for unbalanced data, a simulation study is performed. Most important effects concern estimates and corresponding standard errors of the variance parameters at adjacent levels and of the coefficients of the predictors at the ignored and bordering levels. Therefore, we conclude that if the researcher is interested in a specific level, she/he should account for both the upper and lower level. Conclusions are illustrated using empirical data from educational research.     

Using a Field Trip Inventory to Determine If Listening to Elementary School Students' Conversations,While on a Zoo Field Trip,Enhances Preservice Teachers' Abilities to Plan Zoo Field Trips

This study investigated whether listening to spontaneous conversations of elementary students and their teachers/chaperones, while they were visiting a zoo, affected preservice elementary teachers' conceptions about planning a field trip to the zoo. One hundred five preservice elementary teachers designed field trips prior to and after listening to students' conversations during a field trip to the zoo. In order to analyze the preservice teachers' field trip designs, we conducted a review of the literature on field trips to develop the field trip inventory (FTI). The FTI focussed on three major components of field trips: cognitive, procedural, and social. Cognitive components were subdivided into pre-visit, during-visit, and post-visit activities and problem-solving. Procedural components included information about the informal science education facility (the zoo) and the zoo staff and included advanced organizers. Social components on student groups, fun, control during the zoo visit, and control of student learning. The results of the investigation showed that (a) the dominant topic in conversations among elementary school groups at the zoo was management, (b) procedural components were mentioned least often, (c) preservice teachers described during-visit activities more often than any other characteristic central to field trip design, (d) seven of the nine characteristics listed in the FTI were noted more frequently in the preservice teachers' field trip designs after they listened to students' conversations at the zoo, and (e) preservice teachers thought that students were not learning and that planning was important.     

Children's conceptions of the earth,sun and moon

Understanding of the Earth/Sun/Moon system represents a major cultural nexus in the history of ideas as well as being an important conceptual area in junior science teaching. The situation is one in which the objects in question can be observed but do not lend themselves to hands‐on experience in the case of the Sun and Moon or to obvious meaningful experience of the system in the case of the Earth.

Children from 9 to 12 years of age were questioned using a clinical interview technique and stimulus materials, about the shape, size and motion of the Earth, Sun and Moon. A number of alternative views appear to be held. The use of a similar procedure with a group of children would seem to offer a powerful teaching methodology in which both teacher and students gain from the dialectic learning situation that is developed by this technique ‐ apart from providing insights concerning children's understanding.