“Because if we don’t talk about it,how are we going to prevent it?”: Lucidity,a narrative-based digital game about sexual violence

This paper describes the development and evaluation of an interactive, narrative-based, multimedia game to promote learning and communication about sexual violence and health topics. High school-aged participants created the game concept in a three-week workshop, after which assets were assembled and refined by a university-based game design lab. The outcome, Lucidity, was a multimedia game with a nonlinear narrative that led to two different outcomes based on player decisions. The narrative followed the life of one character, an African American woman named Zaria who remembers and grapples with a sexual assault from her past. The player discovers parts of the story by reading comics, watching videos, navigating interactive websites and playing short videogames. The final evaluation consisted of gameplay, a post-game focus group and follow-up interviews. Twenty-four young people participated in three focus group discussions (n = 9, n = 5, n = 10); 23 participated in the follow-up interviews. Salient themes identified in the focus group discussions included: overall approval of the game, the acquisition of new knowledge and minimal past exposure to conversations or education about sexual violence. At follow-up, almost all (n = 22) had initiated a conversation about sexual violence with a parent, peer and/or teacher. Lucidity succeeded in engaging young people and facilitating communication with adults and peers regarding sexual violence and other sexual health topics. Ultimately, a game-based intervention such as this represents a feasible approach for introducing issues of sexual violence, with potential for future implementation in educational settings.     

Students’ perceptions of vocabulary knowledge and learning in a middle school science classroom

This study investigated eighth-grade science students’ (13–14-year-olds) perceptions of their vocabulary knowledge, learning, and content achievement. Data sources included pre- and posttest of students’ perceptions of vocabulary knowledge, students’ perceptions of vocabulary and reading strategies surveys, and a content achievement test. Students’ perceptions of vocabulary knowledge were compared before and after instruction to see whether students believed they gained knowledge and the ability to explain categories of technical science terms. Students’ perceptions of vocabulary knowledge increased as a result of instruction. The participants had favorable views of the vocabulary and reading strategies implemented and believed the literacy approaches were important for their developing science knowledge. In addition, students’ content achievement was compared to a national data set. Students in this study outperformed a national data set on all content knowledge items assessed. Students’ perceptions of their knowledge and vocabulary and reading strategies were congruent with their content achievement. This study is one of the first to highlight the pivotal role students’ perception of vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary and reading strategies plays in science content learning.     

On the misinterpretation of histograms and box plots

Recent studies have shown that the interpretation of graphs is not always easy for students. In order to reason properly about distributions of data, however, one needs to be able to interpret graphical representations of these distributions correctly. In this study, we used Tversky’s principles for the design of graphs to explain how 125 first-year university students interpreted histograms and box plots. We systematically varied the representation that accompanied the tasks between students to identify how the design principles affected students’ reasoning. Many students displayed misinterpretations of histograms and box plots, despite the fact that they had the required knowledge and time to interpret the representations correctly. We argue that the combination of dual process theories and Tversky’s design principles provides a promising theoretical framework, which leads to various possibilities for future research.     

Academic Improvement Through Regular Assessment

Media reports are rife with claims that students in the United States are overtested and that they and their education are suffering as result. Here I argue the opposite—that students would benefit in numerous ways from more frequent assessment, especially of diagnostic testing. The regular assessment of students serves critical educational and life-learning functions. It focuses the efforts of educators and students on mastering important material. Testing provides educators with crucial intelligence about the needs and abilities of students and the performance of academic programs. Regular assessment provides students and parents with useful feedback regarding how well the student is building important skills and knowledge. It allows both parents and educators to identify motivational and learning problems with individual students at an early stage, when interventions have the greatest prospects for success. It is especially important in the areas of early reading acquisition and special education, supposedly “sensitive” areas where educators often eschew regular assessment. Finally, standardized testing provides students with an important skill—test-taking experience and facility—that will serve them well throughout their lives. A wealth of evidence confirms that testing alone boosts student achievement.     

A retrospective look at replacing face‐to‐face embryology instruction with online lectures in a human anatomy course

Embryology is integrated into the Clinically Oriented Anatomy course at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine. Before 2008, the same instructor presented embryology in 13 face‐to‐face lectures distributed by organ systems throughout the course. For the 2008 and 2009 offerings of the course, a hybrid embryology instruction model with four face‐to‐face classes that supplemented online recorded lectures was used. One instructor delivered the lectures face‐to‐face in 2007 and by online videos in 2008–2009, while a second instructor provided the supplemental face‐to‐face classes in 2008–2009. The same embryology learning objectives and selected examination questions were used for each of the three years. This allowed direct comparison of learning outcomes, as measured by examination performance, for students receiving only face‐to‐face embryology instruction versus the hybrid approach. Comparison of the face‐to‐face lectures to the hybrid approach showed no difference in overall class performance on embryology questions that were used all three years. Moreover, there was no differential effect of the delivery method on the examination scores for bottom quartile students. Students completed an end‐of‐course survey to assess their opinions. They rated the two forms of delivery similarly on a six‐point Likert scale and reported that face‐to‐face lectures have the advantage of allowing them to interact with the instructor, whereas online lectures could be paused, replayed, and viewed at any time. These experiences suggest the need for well‐designed prospective studies to determine whether online lectures can be used to enhance the efficacy of embryology instruction. Anat Sci Educ 7: 234–241. © 2013 American Association of Anatomists.     

Understanding others Kellyian theory,methodology and applicationComprendre les autres la théorie de Kelly: methodologie et applicationEntendimiemto de los otros la teoría de Kelly: metodología y applicación

This article discusses Kelly's theory of personal constructs and its Repertory grid technique as means of revealing the nature of cultural differences and similarities. It shows how Kelly's theory relates to cognitive theory, implicit personality theory and subjective culture theory. According to Kelly, people and groups are best understood in terms of the ways they anticipate events. People are all psychologists since they employ constructs. These bases of discrimination are bipolar in nature and open to revision. A group's culture is summarized by its members' shared superordinate constructs. Kelly's Commonality Corollary explains that members of a group are similar because they use the same constructs to order events. Kelly's Sociality Corollary states that, in order to enter into a relationship with others, people need first to subsume the others' personal constructs. His custom-built Repertory grid elicits constructs by having a person decide how in a matrix other people, for example, are similar and different. In the rated grid form, each person or element is rated from most to least on the positive pole of each construct. Either principal components or cluster analysis or multidimensional scaling can reveal the interviewed person's superordinate dimensions of appraisal. As an emic technique, the grid is contrasted with the semantic differential and other fixed-format tests. A review of the personal construct literature shows that many individuals and cultural groups have been explained in their own terms. In this research, difference is construed as interesting and others are understood by construing their construction processes as a first step towards approval.     

The relation between nonclassroom contact with faculty and students' perceptions of instructional quality

This study assessed the relationship between the frequency of college students' informal nonclassroom contact with faculty for each of six purposes and their generalized perceptions of instructional quality. Two factorially derived components of instructional quality (based on a 14-item instrument) were used as the dependent variables in two regressions on the six types of contact. The frequency of contacts for discussing intellectual or course-related matters and for discussing a campus issue or problem made statistically significant and unique contributions in predicting students' perceptions of instructor concern and ability.An earler version of this paper was presented to the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, Boston, April 1980.     

The role of gender constancy in early gender development

Kohlberg's (1966) hypothesis that the attainment of gender constancy motivates children to attend to gender norms was reevaluated by examining these links in relation to age. Ninety-four 3- to 7-year-old children were interviewed to assess whether and how constancy mediates age-related changes in gender-related beliefs. As expected, results indicated a general pattern of an increase in stereotype knowledge, the importance and positive evaluation of one's own gender category, and rigidity of beliefs between the ages of 3 and 5. Moreover, the stability phase, rather than full constancy, mediated some of these relations. After age 5, rigidity generally decreased with age, with relations primarily mediated by consistency.     

Club Identity/Class Identity: Negotiations of Popular Memory by Followers of the Australian Football League

A lot of the fun in contemporary sports talk relies on shared understandings about the culture of competitive sporting teams. The purpose of this paper is to explore how often humorous discourses are negotiated by sport fans as they narrate a sense of their own history and identity as followers of professional sports teams. This analysis draws on research conducted with followers of the Australian Football League (AFL), which included 21 life story interviews. As an oral historian, I was interested in how individuals negotiated popular ideas about Australian football in the ‘composition’ of their memories. This attention to the dynamic between the public and personal is described as a ‘popular memory approach’ to oral history. In this paper I explore the place of class in popular understandings about AFL club cultures. I argue that the role class plays in popular discourse around sporting club cultures is revealed more fully when we examine the ways in which individuals – in this case followers of AFL teams – make sense of it.     

Improving document clustering in a learned concept space

Most document clustering algorithms operate in a high dimensional bag-of-words space. The inherent presence of noise in such representation obviously degrades the performance of most of these approaches. In this paper we investigate an unsupervised dimensionality reduction technique for document clustering. This technique is based upon the assumption that terms co-occurring in the same context with the same frequencies are semantically related. On the basis of this assumption we first find term clusters using a classification version of the EM algorithm. Documents are then represented in the space of these term clusters and a multinomial mixture model (MM) is used to build document clusters. We empirically show on four document collections, Reuters-21578, Reuters RCV2-French, 20Newsgroups and WebKB, that this new text representation noticeably increases the performance of the MM model. By relating the proposed approach to the Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) model we further propose an extension of the latter in which an extra latent variable allows the model to co-cluster documents and terms simultaneously. We show on these four datasets that the proposed extended version of the PLSA model produces statistically significant improvements with respect to two clustering measures over all variants of the original PLSA and the MM models.