Academic graduate work in academic librarianship: Historicizing ACRL's terminal degree statement

Prior to ACRL's 1975 terminal degree statement, library literature dexterously debated the benefits that graduate study in academic disciplines brought to librarianship. Since the issuance of the statement this debate has faded. This article reassesses six decades of literature to indicate that the statement is historical and unsound.     

Program Assessments: Success Strategies for Three Canadian Teaching Centers

Program assessments are an essential part of the ongoing survival of teaching centers performed by faculty development personnel at institutions of higher education. Little research is available to guide developers in performing these assessments. In this article we describe assessments conducted at three Canadian universities and highlight the theoretical models used to guide the process. Reflections on the strengths and challenges are discussed for each program assessment for the purpose of assisting faculty developers in performing similar program assessments of their faculty development offices.

Taking leaps of faith: Evaluation criteria and resource commitments for early-stage inventions

Successfully developed academic inventions have the potential to spawn new technological domains, form the basis of thriving business ventures, and improve the well-being of society. However, evaluating whether an early-stage scientific invention truly has such potential is extremely difficult, and financially backing such inventions is highly risky. And yet, organizations and their evaluators still back some of these inventions with resources for further development. We investigate this puzzle to pinpoint how and why evaluators decide to offer resource commitments at early stages, despite the red flags raised using standard evaluation criteria. Many academic inventions need these initial resources to dispel concerns regarding their commercial feasibility, so evaluators need to take a leap of faith with their support to prematurely avoid eliminating high-potential opportunities. We tested our theory using text analysis on nearly 700 invention evaluation reports written by a university’s technology transfer experts. Our results revealed that evaluators backed inventions based on their feasibility (overcoming doubt and assessing maturity) and desirability (background familiarity and scientific complexity). Using the context of the research laboratory, our study insights can be applied to many management situations in which early-stage opportunities are assessed for resource commitments under high uncertainty.     

Infants of Depressed Mothers Exhibit Atypical Frontal Electrical Brain Activity during Interactions with Mother and with a Familiar, Nondepressed Adult

Previous studies have shown that infants of depressed mothers exhibit atypical frontal brain electrical activity when they are interacting with their mothers. Whereas typically developing infants exhibit greater left versus right frontal brain activity, infants of depressed mothers have been found to exhibit reduced relative left frontal activity. The left frontal brain region has been associated with the expression of positive emotions. In the present study, the question of whether the atypical pattern of brain activity found in infants of depressed mothers generalizes to situations not involving mother was addressed. Brain electrical activity was recorded from 13- to 15-month-old infants of depressed (N = 59) versus nondepressed (N = 40) mothers during a baseline condition, and during several social conditions that included a playful social interaction with a familiar experiments. Infants of depressed mothers exhibited reduced left relative to right frontal activity during the baseline condition, and during interactions with their mothers and with the familiar experimenter. The present results suggest that the atypical pattern of electrical brain activity found in infants of depressed mothers generalizes to a variety of situations, including positive interactions with nondepressed adults.     

Female Administrators: A Crack in the Glass Ceiling

This experimental study investigates the effects of gender of the evaluator, gender of the applicant, and gender of the reference source at the screening stage of the selection process. Specifically, male and female principals were asked to evaluate re´sume´s and reference letters of hypothetical male and female applicants for the focal position of assistant principal. In the context of selection of an assistant principal, the authors hypothesized that male principals would prefer male applicants and female principals would prefer female applicants. This hypothesis was based on the sex similarity-attraction paradigm. The sex similarity-attraction paradigm suggests that same-sex applicants will be regarded as more similar than opposite-sex applicants (Gallois, Callan & Palmer, 1992) and that applicants who are perceived as similar will be evaluated favorably (Cardy & Dobbins, 1986). Finally, although the authors anticipated that sex similarity-attraction would support an interaction effect between gender of applicant and gender of rater, as strengthened by gender of the reference letter source, the findings did not support this interaction. In fact, the main effect for gender of applicant indicates that hypothetical female administrator candidates are evaluated significantly higher than hypothetical male administrator candidates. This is contrary to about half of past selection research that suggested female applicants are given lower evaluations than male applicants. Thus, these results may be an indication that the evaluations of female applicants for administrative positions are improving to the extent that female applicants were more likely to be offered employment interviews than male applicants.     

Effects of teacher gender and principal gender on ratings of teacher performance

The Ohio State University     

An analysis of factors related to the attitudes of regular classroom teachers toward mainstreaming mildly handicapped children

A model of factors was developed in order to examine variables that might be associated with the attitudes of regular classroom teachers toward mainstreaming mildly handicapped children. Using multiple linear regression analyses, the following variables were found to be significant predictors of a positive attitude toward mainstreaming: team-teaching, years of teaching experience (negative correlation), course in diagnosing learning and behavior problems, availability of resource teacher, previous special education teaching experience, number of courses taken in special education, number of students in classroom (25–27), and inservice program experience related to exceptional children. An examination of these predictors suggests that they may be used to select those regular educators who are likely candidates for implementing mainstreaming programs and that school systems can inhance their mainstreaming efforts by arranging the integration settings to conform with these predictors of positive attitude.